At the Adobe MAX Conference in San Francisco, Google have announced that in a joint collaboration with Adobe and a few third party developers that they will be launching a simplified solution for tracking Flash content for everyone, called Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash.

Over the last week or so I've been building my first project to make use of the AMFPHP alongside one of our server guys, have to say been pretty impressed with the ease at which it is to implement and the speed at which it runs. Couple of links -

Ajax and Flex Data Loading Benchmarks

Lee Brimlow has a couple of tutorials to get started over at GoToAndLearn

Few people have been mentioning Zend too - possibly about to be licensed by Adobe?

So today I started out on the build of our first client Air App. Here's some of the resources I found to be useful in getting started...

• 
  Adobe Air Team Blog
  
• 
  Adobe Devnet Quick Starts
  
• 
  Adobe Air Documentation
  
• 
  Adobe Samples with Source
  
• 
  10 common mistakes when building AIR applications
  
• 
  Nick Kuh
  
• 
  Adobe Devnet/ Air
  
• 
  Wikipedia
  
• 
  101 Adobe AIR Resources to Add to Your Toolbelt of Awesomeness
  
• 
  Refreshing Apps
  
• 
  Run at Startup
  

After seeing all the latest work from Eric Natzke and Flight404 at FOTB I've taken an interest in the powers of creating artwork through processing. Here's a interesting little article about it here

We've been going a little Air crazy in the studio recently after FOTB, here's a simple little app by Lee Brimlow allowing you to download flv source videos from YouTube - always handy for testing video libraries.

In order to use a font you have embedded into the library of your fla the easiest way to use the font I have found is:

var field:TextField = new TextField();
var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
var font:FontLinkage = new FontLinkage();
format.font = font.fontName;
   
field.embedFonts = true;  
field.defaultTextFormat = format;  
field.text = "Text";
addChild(field);

Where FontLinkage is the name you have set of the linkage identifier within the library.

This is a solution to an problem I ran into yesterday. I was storing an array of selected answers, when I ran into an issue where I wanted to add and remove the answers as the user selected/ deselected them. So ok, I could have run a loop through all of the answers to see if they were selected when the user submitted their answers but hey - this was my take on it - and something that has a wider use for future projects. You can download the example I've setup here.

You're probably aware of those nice reflections appearing in some of the latest websites, online ads, and even software. It's an effect common to "Web 2.0" designs, in which something like an album cover or video player appears to reflect some sort of virtual floor beneath it. This tutorial steps you through the creation of the Reflect class, a custom ActionScript 3.0 class that you can apply to reflections on movie clips (and use to modify them) in your Flash CS3 Professional projects.

AS3 to obtain flash vars

var flashVars:Object = LoaderInfo(this.root.loaderInfo).parameters;
trace(flashVars['variable name']);

Here's an example to test email addresses using regular expressions:

var pattern:RegExp = /^[a-zA-Z][\w\.-]*[a-zA-Z0-9]@[a-zA-Z0-9][\w\.-]*[a-zA-Z0-9]\.[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z\.]*[a-zA-Z]$/;

var goodEmail:String = "nick@thewhitewood.com";
var badEmail:String = "nick@thewhitewood";

trace(goodEmail, " is valid:", pattern.test(goodEmail));
trace(badEmail, " is valid:", pattern.test(badEmail));

Ran into an issue using multiple text links within an html field to call functions. Being that the textfield will only listen to the type of event - it is not possible to set different outcomes for different links as the eventListener is triggered by the listener set on the textfield. A little trick using the event.text function will allow you to see the name of the function being called.

A little tip

Paddy from work's been asked to give a talk at the next London Flash group meeting, subject of choice - PureMVC. Now, Paddy's been going on about this framework for a while now so should be good to hear his wise words. Register for the talk here.

AS2 and AS3 Tween class from Caurina.