Its very rarely I do any animations and especially animations that need to sync with a sound. The other day I had a small job that required this.

I set my framerate and then import sound onto the timeline and set it’s Sync property to ‘Stream’. Once the animation was complete and I tested the movie the sound quality was absolutely aweful. It just wasn’t useable at all. The problem here was that is was just a voice over. The rest of the voices overs have been added directly to a director file and they are crystal clear, so I couldn’t just have a major drop in quality on this small flash animation. I tried lots of different compression settings but none of them produced a sound that was usable (i presume if your sound is music, then the quality difference wouldn’t be so noticable).
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Join us again for two sessions this month:

Mike Jones (FlashGen) will be doing his first presentation for us titled ‘Developing Flash 8 Components’. If you want to understand how to alter, extend or create your own components this is the session to find out.

I will then be presenting a session titled ‘A Round Trip with FileReference’, showing you the code behind using the Flash Player as an image editor.

We also have goodies from Friends of Ed and Full As A Goog.

For more information and to register, please see the Event Entry in the calendar.

I’ve been avoiding getting listed on aggregators for a while for no particular reason although I’ve been moaned at to submit my blog often enough. I just sometimes wonder whether my blog is worthwhile listing and pushing under peoples noses.

Anyway since meeting up with Geoff at webDU I decided it couldn’t do no harm so here’s a lil hello to get my first post out of the way.

And thanks to Full As A Goog for having me on board.

This is far from ideal but after chatting with Ted this is all we could come up with.

Again because in AS 3.0 all constructors have to be public, it is not possible to create a class that can only be extended without a bit of extra work. If I create a class that should only be extended, then I want it to throw and error if it has been used incorrectly.

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With As 3.0 conforming to ECMA there you can no longer have private constructors which makes creating strict singletons a little bit more tricky. If I write a singleton, I want it written in a way that only a single instance can be created and if someone makes a mistake and tries to create an instance without using getInstance() an error will be thrown. This is a little workaround me and Rich came up with.

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It seems that AS 3.0 will no longer support ‘arguments.caller’ and arguments now only has two properties ‘callee’ and ‘length’.

Removed. You can achieve the same functionality by passing arguments.callee from the “caller” function as an argument to the “callee” function. See the Examples section of arguments.callee for an example.

I found ‘caller’ a whole lot more useful than ‘callee’ and although the above is a solution there is no direct replacement for retrieving a reference to the method that invoked the current method. I believe it just isn’t possible anymore due to function not being reference based anymore, they always have a scope.

Digit have been around for almost 10 years now and are one of the bigger interactive agencies in London with offices also in New York.

Here’s their new site.

Yesterday Robin Hilliard of RocketBoots announced the RocketBoots Rest of World Flex Developer Space Race! and I’m honoured to have been asked to be one of the judges.

The competition is open to any human over 18 years old who doesn’t qualify for the Adobe Flex Developer Derby (you aint in the US or Canada, or you are in Quebec). Both competitions are along the same lines (build a badass Flex 2.0 app). Better get in there quick as the first 25 entries get a Flex 2 Visual reference poster too.

More info

Some of you may think I spend my life working with FileReference as I go on about it so much. I’ve gone on about how extremely easy to use it is, until today.

If you want to make up little Apps, FileReference it is perfect for the job and you wouldn’t run into this problem (in fact you’d probably think the way I would like to see it implemented would make things a lot more awkward for you), but if you were to build anything bigger seperating out your view components, model, controller and RPC etc you will run into a problem.

The FileReference object mixes user interaction (FileReference.browse() FileReference.download()) with RPC (FileReference.upload()) which really complicates things.
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We had a great attendance at last nights user group and one lucky winner walked away with a copy of Adobe Video Bundle.

Emmanuel and Aral both did great presentations, most of which i caught on video and can be viewed here. Unfortunately Aral’s presentation is cut short because there was just too much to fit on my SD card.

Not sure how long they will last due to bandwidth, but i thought i’d give it a go.