Free Flash Analog Clock - WorldMap

Simple analog flash clock "worldmap", specially customized for this blog. Download swf (24 kb) from download section on sidebar, upload it and insert few lines of code to embed clock on your blog. Ask for help if you need it or if you are interested for custom analog clock version. Any designer may also contact me if interested for some sort of team work in making this flash widgets for wider audience. I'm open to suggestions.

Win $500 US Cold Hard Cash

New competition has started at FlashDen with deadline until April 3rd. How to enter? If you are still not author of FlashDen, you can join for free. Next, upload your coolest assets including videos, photographs, fonts or audio effect and wait for others to do the same. Top 20 files will be displayed in assets library and user will then vote for most useful one, coolest one or I’m-paid-to-vote-for-this one.

Besides first prize, three more will be given to those with most votes, $100 FlashDen voucher each. Maybe this is the opportunity to start with portfolio building. Competitions are always good way to make extra effort, at least better than deadlines, that’s for sure. That gives me an idea – maybe I should run some sort of competition right here on Flanture, why not? Prizes: ads spots and text links, worth $40 per month according to current page rank or free guest posts. Free banner for six month worth $240 - hey that sounds even better than FlashDen ! Hmmm… Nah, I doubt anyone would participate.

Flex Builder 3 | Developer Week

As for previous version, new Flex Builder 3 Professional is available for free if you are education customer, student or Faculty employee. You will need student ID showing your current enrollment, so prepare your documents for scanning and download flex builder 3. Enter your serial number to activate.

Adobe Developer Week 2008 from March 24 to 28 is another event you don’t want to miss. Choose among 20 live online sessions about Air, Flex, ColdFusion and more or choose all 20 if you like. All sessions will be recorder and posted online later. Awesome.

AS3.0 book and free source code

No doubt that ActionScript 3 is much harder to learn than previous versions of ActionScript. Reason is that new version is written from ground up and some might even say we can talk about NewActionScript 1.0 programming language ! Learning process may require more time but we can get pretty dissent help all around the Web. Some teachers have tried to zip their knowledge into a book and while many of them have failed few have succeed.

One of those success stories appeared recently at O’Really – Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner's Guide by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser. Both are teachers in New York’s School of Visual Arts. They started with experience that there isn’t satisfied ActionScript book for beginners and they asked their audience about most desired topics and approach. Result is 384 pages book with code and easy to understand illustrations about different concepts and problems in programming with AS3.0. Book consists of VI parts and 15 Chapters:

I Getting Started
II Graphics and Interaction
III Text
IV Sound and Video
V Input / Output
VI Programming Design and Resources

That’s not all. Companion website for this book at LearningAS3 provides additional material, resources links, training and complete book source code (17.7 MB) free to download. Don’t miss quizzes page where you can test your knowledge from the book and can be good preparation for Adobe Certification programs. I got 83% correct on Chapter 6 OOP quiz part.

Don’t be fooled that this book will not give you insight in complex concepts. You will need to fight against things like inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism in object oriented programming, against particle systems, 9-slice scaling and even communication between ActionScript Virtaul Machines.

Next logical step - new domain

Flanture blog is almost a year old now (11 month, to be precise). Back then I split my old blog in two, given them two different roles and time has shown this one is bigger success, according to traffic, page rank (7 vs 4) and number of regular readers (RSS subscription). No surprise since Blogger platform is mucho, mucho better choice than limited Blog.com service.

Next logical step for me was to get myself new domain and result is www.flanture.com ! It wasn’t quite intentional, but over the months I always presented myself as Flanture, my usernames on Kongregate, Forums and other places was Flanture and this practice have helped me to brand myself and my blog(s) easier. With 1000+ backlinks this blog has become something I never expected it will be, more than hobby, less then full time occupation. I even wonder sometimes what is my primary direction blogging or flash development!

New domain is set to redirect traffic to blogspot, for now. I’m thinking to change blog template in near future if I decide to allow more advertising space.

edit: few minutes ago I run into new cool ActionScript 3.0 book, something to post about next time.

Steve Jobs vs Flash

Few days ago Steve Jobs announced that iPhone and existing Adobe’s technologies are not good for each other. Flash performance on iPhone is too slow and Flash Lite is just not good enough. Later, iPhone SDK was announced revealing some answers to many questions.

Overall, users are willing to see Flash on iPhone just as much as on other mobile devices. It is estimated that over one billion devices will be Flash enabled in 2010, so why not iPhone?

Some speculations say that Adobe and Apple have unresolved disputes from past and some theories claims that situation is tightened because of positioning in future mobile industry. Insiders say that Flash is heavily tested on iPhone and it works just fine and that this is just business politics (read money).

Question is who is losing here? iPhone users without flash based RIA or flash developers? Apple or Adobe?

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Math2 ActionScript functions

Some math function are simple to write but often very useful in many situations. Here is part of flanture math2 actionscript library.

sum - sum of all numbers between l and h
prod - product of all numbers between l and h
sumAr - sum of all array elements

static function sumAr(a:Array):Number {
   var s:Number = 0;
   for(var i=0;i < a.length;i+=1){
      s=s+a[i];
   }
   return s;
}

prodAr - product of all array elements

static function prodAr(a:Array):Number {
   var p:Number = 1;
   for(var i=0;i < a.length;i+=1){
      p=p*a[i];
   }
   return p;
}

If any of array elements is zero, last function is zero, so:

prodArIZ - product of all array elements, zeros ignored

static function prodArIZ(a:Array):Number {
   var p:Number = 1;
   for(var i=0;i < a.length;i+=1){
      if(a[i]!=0){
         p=p*a[i];
      }
   }
   return p;
}

Homework for newbies: write function that returns all prime numbers between 1 and n?

Flash / Flex / AIR development jobs widget

Hundreds of ideas for new flash widgets are born here on Flanture every day, but implementation is a different story. Just few of those ideas are worth enough to be considered as a project. After our Free Flash Bookshelf Widget, new project is here: Flash Jobs Widget.

Actually, more precise title would be flash / flex / air development jobs widget, because we will not be limited to Flash only. Reasons for making this widget are multiple. Idea is to combine jobs postings and developers CVs in one single widget. Those of you who contacted me looking for Flash job, here is your chance. I will collect your resumes and you will get deserved exposure for free via widget when finished. I havened decided yet but probably I will limit number of resumes presented, so send your email as soon as possible.

Open your favorite email client, write down following informations and send it to:

flanture {at} gmail {dt} com

- your photo 75x75 (not required)
- full name (required)
- year of birth (not required)
- location (not required)
- skills |flash, flex, air, cf ...| (required)
- experience |portfolio url, short description|(required)
- contact|email, msn, twitter or whatever|(required)

Your informations will not be abused. I'm NOT sending you any email, so if you want to be notified when widget is ready, check back often here or even better subscribe via full RSS feed.

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