Browser Power and Multilingual Flash Apps

My utahian neighbor, Robert Taylor, recently spoke at Flash Forward Austin 2006 on two subjects: Browser Power for Flash and Multilingual Flash Applications. Along with recently revamping his website flashextensions.com , he has posted his session notes and examples. Great stuff here, he talked about how to get flash searchable by search engines, how to architect flash apps to support multiple languages and handle right-to-left languages, how to use the browser’s history, bookmarking, and several other browser capabilities.

I wasn't able to attend FF this year. My company will only cover one conference trip a year and I used that up on FITC in Toronto. From what I've read about the sessions Robert gave, I think I might have picked the wrong conference to attend. Oh well, there's always next year!

VoIP coming to Flash Player

I'm sure everyone has heard by now, the rumor is that VoIP is coming to the Flash Player. Om Malik over at GigaOm talks about what we know so far and the challenges that Adode has to overcome to get it working. Check it out.

Optimizing your Flex apps

David George, from the Flex team at Adobe, gave a presentation on how to improve performance of Flex applications called Tips and Tricks for Delivering More Responsive Flex Applications. He shared great tips on how to increase framerate, parse large amounts of data into the UI, optimize application initialization, and many more ways to make your Flex apps run faster. Check it out.

Physics engines in AS3

Just wanted to point out some physics engines under development in Actionscript 3. André Michelle, Fisix Engine, and Moto Flash Physics Engine. Can't wait to see the finished results, great works guys.

Yahoo! Maps in Flex 2 / AS3

Currently, the Yahoo! Maps Flash API is only supported in Flash 8 / AS2. Getting it to work in Flex 2 / Flash 9 / AS3 is nothing new. The current work-around is to publish the API in Flash 8, then load it into Flex and talk to the loaded SWF through the local connection. Why? Well, because Flash 9 uses the new, built-from-the-ground up, ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), and the loaded Flash 8 SWF uses the old version of the AVM, they can not talk to or access each other directly.

So, until Yahoo! updates the API, here is an example of how to get it to work in Flex 2 / AS3. And as always, right-click to view/download the source.

Also, I wanted to mention that John over at www.programmableweb.com has a great list of Web 2.0 APIs with descriptions, links, and licensing information for each one. Check it out.

** NOTE: I just noticed that if you right-click on the map and select "View Source" nothing happens. This appears to be a bug and/or wonderful feature of loading Flash 8 SWFs into Flash 9. If you right-click on the Flex portion of the example it will work.

Uploading Files with Flex and PHP

Dustin and I have had the chance to do some Flex applications for our employer over the last few months, and we thought it would be helpful to share some of the things we've learned.
One of the things that we needed to accomplish in both our Flex applications was the ability for the user to upload files to the server. Of course, Flex by itself can't upload and post files to a server without the help of a server-side script. We used PHP.
Check out a quickly-developed Flex application that manages multiple file uploads and processes them through a PHP file (right-click in the application to view the source). Or, you can check out an explanation and strategy we used for the PHP.