Flash designers show off your work

Another way to show off your work if you are Flash developer / designer is Carbonmade. This web service allows you to display your portfolio to potential clients and worldwide audience. Free plan gives you 5 projects and 35 images. Pro plan ($12 / month) brings you 50 projects, 500 images and 10 videos. You can even upload swfs with both free and pro plan which is really great.

Carbonmade is here for two and half years and since it managed to present 62.000 portfolios, 132 k projects, almost 1 million images and over 1.000 videos. Only Flash category has 1127 portfolio Right This Minute. Not bad. However, most portfolios have under 5 projects (free plan) which means good opportunities shouldn't be missed.

Great Carbonmade feature is that you can add Google Analytics code and track your portfolio traffic. Also, you will get "available for freelance" flag-like button beside your online portfolio listing. Don't get surprised if you get hired!

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Flex Delivers Video Microblogging App

You might have been in position to answer simple question "what are you doing" a few times? How about answering this question by recording a short 12 s video? This is exactly idea behind new video microblogging service 12seconds.tv.

Service is still in alpha, so few new features might lurking around the corner. For now, you are invited to record your video message via web cam, mobile phone or your washing machine if it supports this feature. You have an option to name your video, tag it, locate it and post it. You will also get a unique e-mail address to send video directly from your phone (or washing machine) and it will be published on your 12seconds page. You can also configure your Twitter account with it and service will twit for you any new uploaded message.

If you are familiar with my recent article about AIR based Twitter application TweetDeck and you are fan of same, you will love to read that this powerful Twitter desktop client will support 12Seconds service. And yes, like everything related to web video, this service is also Flex based app.



I have 10 invites for my precious readers, giving them away FIFO style :) Just leave a comment with your e-mail.

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AS3 code libraries list

I was just reading about degrafa framework and how it is really great when big boys support open source communities when run into this huge list of AS3 code libraries which includes:

- AS3 3D engines
- 3D Game Engines
- AS3 3D Physics (not phsics) engines
- AS3 Animation Tweening Kits
- AS3 2D Physics Engines
- AS3 Security
- AS3 Audio Libraries
- AS3 Particle Systems
- Loading Kits
- OOP Frameworks
- more APIs and Libraries

Extremely useful.
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Adobe Flex Themes Cool Awards Contest

Visual aspects of Flex and AIR applications are improving rapidly. New Gumbo FXG format will try to take the look-and-feel of Flex applications to the next level. For less patient ones here is very trivial example of FXG usage. Even if you don't understand German language, it is not likely you will not understand this simple tutorial.


However, if you think it's too early for Gumbo and Flex SDK nightly builds, take a look at "Skin to Win Challenge" contest at ScaleNine, sponsored by Adobe and EffectiveUI. You are required to create a custom theme, compatible with Flex 3. Prizes are cool, MacBook Air, Adobe CS3 Master Suite, Adobe Flex Builder 3 Pro, tickets to Adobe MAX.

Themes will be judged for visual design (50%), overall quality (25%), innovation and uniqueness (25%). Deadline is October 10th 2008.

Can you do better than Darkroom?

Gumbo, FXG example

While Gumbo is still in active development, Flex 3.1 should be out this month and Flex 3.2 is planned for fall 2008. Gumbo will introduce new language features and different set of components that will make some existing Flex 3 components absolute. FXG is new document format and compiler will treat this format as external asset. New tags in FXG and MXML 2009 will be < Private >, < Library >, < Declarations >, < Definition >, < DesignLayer > and < Reparent >.

Instead of current http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml namespace, Gumbo will introduce new language namespace http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009, but Gumbo will also recognize old namespace too. Some older tags like Binding, Script, Style and others will loose mx: prefix. But, built-in types like Array, Number etc will also loose it’s prefix.

Full details on MXML 2009 and FXG, but also if you wish to see it, here is example : Skinning a button in Flex 4 using FXG.

AIR based Twitter application TweetDeck

Yes, Twitter is that boring web service that keeps asking you same question over and over again, but somehow many find it very handy. I’m no different and if you want to see my twits, you can do it here: Flanture.

There are tons of Twitter clients, good ones, but this new one is special in many ways. I’m talking about TweetDeck. It’s written in Adobe AIR, which is one of the reasons I’m writing about it. Still in deep beta, current version is v0.16.1 means that you can expect bugs and reduced functionality, but don’t let this turn you away. New updates are regular and improvements are really great. I think that it’s only a question of time when this client will become the must-have tool.

TweetDeck introduces columns. You can have up to 10 columns opened at one time, but you can also choose more standard view with only one column. REPLIES and DIRECT are columns with familiar functions. New column is GROUP. With this column, you can group some of the followers and you can name that group appropriately eg: office, real friend, pot. buyers, clients etc. Figure it out for yourself. Another new column that appeared with last update is TWTSCOOP, which brings you something like tag cloud in blogs but including buzz terms in Twitter world.

Last one and my favorite is SEARCH column. This one allows you to filter all global (all twitts) or local (of people you follow) based on search term. Not a revolutionary concept, but extremely useful when you can have few search columns inside single application. Consequences of this are very powerful. Imagine yourself watching trends in real time! Well, now you have the tool to do just that! Just for fun you can try few searches: web2.0, help needed, new book, etc. Cool, right?

To be honest, I was little scared when I saw that monolith black full screen of TweetDeck and right that minute I wished for second monitor. However, next version will include skins and int character support. There is more to this app, but I will mention just another cool feature. TweetDeck works both online and offline. App uses database to store messages when Twitter is down (no more whale image) and updates itself when available. Oh, yeah, just one more. It uses several short URL web services: bit.ly, eweri, is.gd, lin.cr, snipurl and tinyurl for now and have TwitPic integration. I could go on with features, but it’s only v0.16.1. Great job, Iain.