The CE4100 will be available at speeds of up to 1.2 GHz, and will feature hardware-based decoding capabilities that can handle two 1080p video streams simultaneously, along with high-definition audio and 3D graphics. The system supports hardware-based decoding for MEG4, and integrated NAND flash controller, support for DDR2 and DDR3 memory, support for SATA-300 and USB 2.0, and 512K of L2 cache. The chip will support Flash Player 10, along with standards like OpenFGL ES 2.0 for developing media-intensive 3D applications; Adobe expects Flash 10 to be available for Sodaville devices in mid-2010.

You can get all of such opensource APIs at one one place: http://actionscriptapis.com/

Nice to see all the API's at one place. Check them out...

Noupe has collaged such useful and mostly used tasks in Flash.

These tutorials include Controlling Timeline using Actionscript 3, Creating custom cursor, Customizing Context Menu, Some Papervision3D Tutorials etc...

Just check them out, I am sure they will be useful...

To make things simple for Flash beginners, HYPE Framework is introduced.

"HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program."

Inorder to start with it, you just need to know basic programming concepts like loops, variables, conditional and functions etc.

Here is just a quick demo of HYPE:

Installation

The source for this Framework is available at http://hype.joshuadavis.com/.

Just download the source and install the 'HYPE.mxp' using CS4 Extension Manager. You just need Flash Professionla CS4 on order to make this work for you.

Once installed you can import all the classes as mentioned in Demo video above and use them.

Sound Analyzer

There is a class SoundAnalyzer with which we can create some outstanding Sound Visualizations in no time and that too in a very less code.

Here is a quick demo of SoundAnalyzer Class:

You can get lots of examples for all the classes of this Framework at http://hype.joshuadavis.com/.

I was amazed by the output its producing with a very less amount of code. You too try this out. I am sure you would love it....

Source Files for the menu's can be downloaded from link: Rapishare

Check these cool Flash Menus...

I really wanted to know how Flash Video has evolved over time. What made web users to shift towards Flash video from existing players like Quicktime, Windows Media and Real players? These were some questions which were lingering my mind for sometime.

I found an interesting article about this topic written by Tom Green. It throughs light on all he factors which made different players like Quicktime, Windows Media and Real to lose ground on Web.

Not only that it talks about history of Flash Video, how the FLV format evolved.

Check it out at http://www.digital-web.com/articles/the_rise_of_flash_video_part_1/.

To make these components look even nicer according to your needs and theme, you can skin and style these components.

Skinning is basically changing the look of the component. From Flash CS3, its became even easier to change the skins of the components.

For example, we will skin Combobox to check how to skin it.

Normally a combox looks something like this:

Skinning this component means we are changing the look at different states of this component. We are going to modify the component skin at different states.

To view the states, just double click the component on Stage in Flash Authoring environment. You will see different states and how the component looks in those states.

The states above are the default states of ComboBox Component. To skin this component as per your needs, just go inside all these states by double-clicking that state and change the color and shape of the objects.

For example, if you want to change the look of 'Up Skin', just double click that state and go inside that state until you reach the shape. Modify the shape, fill color etc of that shape to reflect that change to that state of that component.

Inorder to change the skin, i have done some changes to the UI of the skins like 'Up Skin', 'Over Skin', 'Down Skin' etc as follows:

With these changes, the component will look something like this:

This is a very basic technique of skinning the components. You can still change all the remaining states of the component to change its look completely. Its not only that you can change the color theme of component, but we can modify the shapes and icons of a component as well using this method.

Its all upto user on how he wishes to show up his Flash  Components.

Try it out on all the remaining components...

 We can also skin the components dynamically, which i will talk about in my next post...

You can see the some of the applications and gams that were demoed in MAX 09 that were created using prerelease version of Flash Professional CS5 at Adobe Labs.

InsideRIA has posted a nice article about the best practices, new IPhone specific feature APIs which need to be taken care while developing applications using Flash CS5.

Check these resources and start developing applications for IPhone using Flash...

Adobe Labs Ideas has launched this to allow Adobe Flash Catalyst users to vote on feature requests and share new ideas with the development team and user community. If you have an idea for how the Flash Catalyst beta can be better, you can goahead and submit your idea here.

In this post, we are going to talk about using cacheAsBitmap feature effectively while creating content for Set-top boxes.

FlashLite for Digital Home basically has a capability of Hardware Rendering, wherein the hardware has can render the Bitmaps avoiding the software(FlashLite) to take this burden. This results in increase in performance while rendering on set-top box.

Inorder to make make any vector on Stage to bitmap, we can use cacheAsBitmap property of that movieClip.

MovieClip.cacheAsBitmap = true;

Once this property is set to true, that movieClip will be converted to bitmap. So, while rendering it, hardware can take care of rendering this bitmap.

Applicable

This property is only applicable to MovieClips. Its not applicable to Buttons.

Enabling cacheAsBitmap

We can enable cacheAsBitmap either through actionscript or from Flash Authoring.

As explained above, using actionscript you can set the value of this property to true. By default, it will be false.

MovieClip.cacheAsBitmap = true;

In Flash Authoring, there will be a checkbox 'cache as bitmap' under Display panel of Properties menu.

opaqueBackground

In order to see a good improvement in the performance of your content on set-top box, you can use property of MovieClip opaqueBackground along with cacheAsBitmap.

In case of any non-rectangular movieclips, say a cirle, if you see the bounding box of that movieclip (which is a square), there are some parts which are transparent other than the circular fill. Rendering this transparent regions will be a bit overhead to FlashLite. The opaqueBackground property will fill these transparent areas of the movieclip with a specific color.

MovieClip.opaqueBackground = 0 //Fills the transparent regions with BLACK color

In your content, if your stage color is black, assigning the opaquBackground to black wont change its appearence. Using this we are removing the trasparent regions of the movieclip.

This will be in handy, while assigning the same color of your stage as opaqueBackground  for all non-rectangular movieClips. This wont change the appearance of the movieClips either. Further you can see the improvement in performance.

Things to do:

• Use cacheAsBitmap on movieClips which have a very large vector data.
• Use this for text, as text will have a very large transparent areas.
• Can apply to the content which translates across the stage w/o any change in its content
• Apply on a content which scales w/o change in its content

Things to avoid:

• Try to avoid using many bitmaps in your app, as it will increase the size of your app.
• Try to avoid larger bitmaps, as they occupy more memory.
• It will be an over-head if you use a very large number of bitmaps. This might result in higher memory consumption.
• Donot use on rotating MovieClips.
• Applying cacheAsBitmap on video.

Hope you find this useful...