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With this release FDT can easily switched to dark theme:Simply select the Dark theme and apply. The Dark theme is available since Eclipse 4.4 (Luna). Older versions of Eclipse (and FDT) does not support color themes of this form. The FDT views and editors will switch to their default dark color set: In case you […]
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We‘re happy to announce FDT Milestone 10! It‘s been 10 years since our first FDT release and a lot happened since last years Milestone 9. We went on to improve FDT and your IDE experience. Here is a list with our new key features: Ant Project Generator Dump launch configuration Library Project Template ActionScript refactorings […]
This new FDT release contains features to support a more fluent development of SWC libraries. The primary starting point to develop a library is the new Library Project Template for AIR or Web: This template creates an empty library project containing two source folders: All compilation units to include into the library should be placed […]
With this release the FDT Explorer can present projects in groups: Each Project Group is a set of workspace projects (i.e.: Working Set). Each project can be a member of one group and can not be shared among groups. Project Groups are logical structures shown inside FDT Explorer. Neither they represent nor they change the […]
FlashCamp St.Louis kicks-off September 3rd and Powerflasher is proud to be a sponsor.
The full-day unconference will feature Flash, ActionScript and Flex/AIR sessions from a number of top industry experts on the Adobe Flash Platform.
We recently caught up with David Ortinau, who will speak at Flash Camp St. Louis, and invited him for a chat about his upcoming session and convinced him to give our readers a sneak preview.
David Ortinau is a freelance web developer relying on the kindness of many friends to deliver his projects on time and with minimal blood-loss. He has been developing web applications for 15 yrs with internet startups, advertising agencies, and enterprise healthcare vendors. While the list of technologies he admits to knowing rapidly shrinks, he continues to work with Flash, .NET, Rails, and mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows).
FDT: Why did you chose the Managing and Using Assets topic?
David: It’s a common decision all developers need to make, and it’s something that should be of interest to both developers and designers. This is where the hand-off occurs with most assets, and interactivity has a significant impact on how those assets need to be provided and implemented. There are quite a few options and many developers I speak with only know and use 1 or 2.
FDT: Why should developers care about Managing and Using Assets in AS and Flex projects?
David: Filesize and performance are two good reasons. It all contributes to user experience. It’s not just a technical decision, but a creative decision that impacts pace and flow.
Developers often complain their designer counterparts vanish after the initial handoff. Often it’s because the designer’s ability to continue contributing to the project is hindered by the asset management strategy. If you use a strategy that allows the designer to continue accessing and manipulating files, then that’s a team win.
FDT: What will attendees see in your presentation that’s not shown in your sneak preview?
David: I’ll be featuring some real world scenarios from past projects. I’ll touch again on the screencast (not relive it) and discuss a variety of other options available such as bulk loaders, RSLs, and swfs with library loaders.
And for anyone that has never seen FDT in action, I’m gonna throw as much FDT-fu at them as I can. The first time anyone sees the code generation and templates at work in FDT, it’s absolutely mind blowing. I love tools that make me faster, better at getting to the end result.
FDT: Where can readers learn more about you?
David: You can find me on Twitter @davidortinau, and my blog.
FDT: Which technologies interest you most and why?
David: Mobile and touch, generally speaking, because of their growing ubiquity and capacity to change our lives; how we think and behave. These devices and experiences can be very persuasive and I’m intrigued by those possibilities. The whole human computer interaction field is fascinating.
FDT: Which sessions are you looking forward to seeing at Flash Camp STL?
David: It’s an amazing lineup this year; I could list all the speakers! I mean, look at this schedule.
Top to bottom there’s not a session I want to miss. I’m plan to geek out during sessions from Jeff Roberts on IoC concepts, and Ben Stucki with “The Art of Computer Science”. I always love a good usability discussion, which we’ll get with Danielle Cooley.
FDT: Any interesting side projects to promote?
David: Last year I launched White Paper Bible (whitepaperbible.org), which was my first big foray into Rails and iPhone development. It’s a personal, topical Bible tool.
My side projects this year have turned to business topics, which is embodied in 360Flex coming up Sept 19-22 in DC. I’m presenting 2 sessions that I’m very excited about: “How to Scale Your Freelance Business and Maximize Profit”, and “The Invaluable Freelance Flasher”. People can read more about that at my blog and 360flex.com.
Sneak Preview:
Use Flash Pro Assets in ActionScript and Flex Projects
Like what you see?
Do not miss David’s full session at Flash Camp St. Louis, September 3rd. In addition to great sessions, there will be plenty of giveaways (including FDT Pure licenses), swag, and lunch too!
Find David’s and other great screencasts on the Powerflasher FDT Screencast group on Vimeo.
Multiscreen gaming with the Flash Platform – Desktop, Web and Devices
As you might know by now, at Powerflasher, we like to play! Plus, we think Flash and Gaming are a good match !
We are very excited to host together with Adobe our first Flash On Games (FoG) meeting, scheduled the 7th of Sept 2010
This is a flash gaming group located and hosted in San Francisco, focused and aim to involve audience and speakers at the national level. All sessions will be broadcasted live and recorded. A link to the webcast will be sent in a follow up email once registered. I hope you can join us.
Register here flashongames.eventbrite.com
In our first meeting we’ll have the following two session:
1. Flash Sizing Zen: Android Devices
Getting Android to Respect Your Intent
by Allen Ellison Solutions Architect @ Adobe
When you bring Flash games and content to the multi-screen web using Flash Player 10.1, it can be a challenge to get your content to displayed consistently across devices as you intended; in terms of size, orientation, alignment, interactivity and full-screen behavior. This becomes even more complex when you start taking web tablets into consideration.
There are a number of obstacles to creating a consistent and usable experience including mobile content transcoders, mobile devices that behave in certain ways to make a web experience really intended for desktop systems accessible to mobile users, an inconsistent use of HTML tags and meta-tags across device families, and user-configurable browser or device settings.
So, in order to create an experience that scales gracefully between desktop browsers and mobile browsers, this session will walk you through the steps necessary to eliminate the various potential points of variation.
2. Particle Systems 101
by Alec McEachran, Senior Software Engineer @ Gaia Interactive
If you have ever wanted fire, waterfalls, clouds, snow or myriad other effects in your Flash games, then you have needed to create particle systems. There are loads of particle effect systems out there that might suit your needs, but if you want your games to remain fast, you have to roll your own.
In pure AS3, this session will look at one way to build a fast particle system from the ground up, and survey some of the techniques for moulding your particles into the effects you’re looking to achieve.
About Flash On Games (FoG)
FlashOnGames covers all aspects of a flash gaming development phases, design best practices and technical challenges. Covering the entire gaming lifecycle, from the initial concept game idea, the designer and developer workflows, testing aspects and customers feedback and delivery.
It explores the gaming ecosystem, social platforms, frameworks, distribution, marketplace for the multiscreen gaming.
Follow us on Twitter @FlashOnGames or visit our website flashongames.com
Cheers,
Compilation Improvements and new AS3 Formatter Compile your Flash/Flex/AIR projects way faster now and chain up launch configurations for complex build processes. The new AS3 Formatter gives you even more settings to configure your code style.
By using the Flex Compiler API instead of FCSH/MXMLC compile speed of both full and incremental build has increased tremendously.
By getting rid of FCSH memory consumption was also reduced dramatically especially in bigger projects with multiple modules.
The new tab “Launcher Chain” in the FDT launch configurations makes it possible to chain up launch configs of any type as well as ANT targets in any desired order. This makes it very easy to setup complex build processes.
Even more options in the AS3 Formatter settings to configure your code style.
Known Issues
Note:
Download
Additional improvements or bug fixes in M4: bugs.powerflasher.com
Fixed Bugs
[FDT-817] – Nesting try-catch blocks render false errors for the error instance
[FDT-825] – Back References has duplicate items in Profiler
[FDT-858] – missing error warning at missing space in code
[FDT-872] – Function file import statements do not get fixed during refactoring
[FDT-881] – Launch configuration for swc library doesn’t use -external-library-path
[FDT-918] – Vector class not imported when targeting Flash 10
[FDT-921] – Missing Autocomplection after newline seprated dot.
[FDT-928] – Exporting AIR release build uses wrong Flex SDK.
[FDT-933] – Highlighting matching bracket is flickering, when making a selection by cursor keys
[FDT-940] – Problem using post-compile Ant task inside an AS3 launch profile
[FDT-990] – Init outline throws error when closing editor
[FDT-1033] – FDT Library Launcher must remove -is compiler arg when using manifest.xml
[FDT-1042] – compilation flex sdk 4.1
[FDT-1065] – Nullpointer exception when choosing “auto addd RSLS on debug” during launch
[FDT-1069] – AIR Application release broken
[FDT-1072] – Create AIR Certificate has no function anymore
[FDT-1073] – Compiler Arguments auto add carriage returns inbetween arguments
[FDT-1077] – Launching with SDK > 3.5 invokes no viewer. Halts on fcsh complete.
[FDT-1079] – FDT does not compile, after Exception is thrown
[FDT-1086] – Exception while opening project – restart of eclipse needed
[FDT-1114] – Fix Shortcut for Rename refactoring
[FDT-1115] – Automaticly fix library path of old launchers
[FDT-1116] – Organize Import always adds blank line after last import
Improvement
[FDT-124] – Add “Check All” button in Formatter preferences
[FDT-879] – ANT task for FDT Profiler
[FDT-919] – Cannot add Linked Libraries via FDT Build Path Preferences
[FDT-988] – Icons for new features in FDT 4
[FDT-1081] – Tracing a variable by typing its name with or without “;”
[FDT-1118] – Build time infos should not be red
Known Issues
Working on these issues now check our bugs.powerflasher.com
Here a small recap of some of the awesome features we’ve added in FDT 4 so far:
In this Milestone 4 we have focused on increasing the compilation speed, improving memory consumption and enhancing the Formatter for AS3.
Join our next FDT 4 Milestone 4 live broadcast worldwide preview this Thursday, August 12th at 9:00 am PST (6:00 pm CEST)
During this live session, we will answer any questions you might have and show you some other new features that I won’t mention here to keep it as a nice surprise.
Follow this link for the Live Broadcast
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fdt4-m4-live-preview/v3
Please register here if you like to be reminded and add to your calendar
http://fdt4-preview-m4.eventbrite.com/
Recently a new community-project has been launched which combines most of the active FDT blogs like Aiden Tailor, Matan Uberstein, Marvin Blase, Francis Varga, Alan Klement and many others. WeLoveFDT fetches their feeds, filters them for FDT related articles and teasers them on www.welovefdt.com. This way it provides a continuously updated summary based on everything that deals with FDT in the blogosphere, so users can quickly access related news, poke around or search for a specific topic without having to fight with Google keywords.
The idea came up as more and more great articles about FDT were published and some days after people started asking where to find this and that again and who had written it – as they remembered the topic but not the blog itself. So Marvin Blase thought of how to summarize these articles without disregarding the blogs itself but to provide a self-refreshing, community based feed. With great help of Fabian Beiner this idea was quickly realised and a first version was able to launch. The idea behind this might be transferred to other topics as well – there already popped up a request for doing the same with Robotlegs or the like.
If you are blogging about FDT from time to time feel free to sign up at their “Take part” section to enlarge the pool of which articles are gathered. The more the better!
Kindisoft, makers of SecureSWF, the world’s most advanced code protection solution for Flash, announced integration of their code protection product SecureSWF with Powerflasher’s FDT product. Additionally, both Powerflasher and Kindisoft have agreed to a marketing and technology partnership.
“Working with Kindisoft seemed a natural fit”, remarked Powerflasher CEO Carlo Blatz, “ FDT, our eclipse based flash development IDE, is the preferred choice for professional Flash/Flex developers who seek more than Adobe Flash Builder provides. We’ve found that the same professional, expert Flash developers that use FDT also have a strong interest in protecting their Intellectual Property and optimizing their flash projects. We are excited at the prospect of extending this support to help agencies and advanced users completely protect their Adobe Flash and Flex designed assets.”
Ammar Mardawi, CEO of KindiSoft agrees, “We are really excited to work with Powerflasher to provide a fuller solution to expert Flash Developers. We’ve always had the highest respect for their products, as we feel the exclusive integration of SecureSWF within FDT really gives advanced flash and actionscript developers the best options for not only creating their projects, but also protecting their creations.”
Kindisoft is offering three versions of their code protection solution for Flash. Exclusively for FDT users we can offer all versions of Kindisoft secureSWF with a discount of 10%. Follow link below for more information about secureSWF.
