So What is it about?
The book does a few things. First, about a third of the book introduces you to some open source tools for doing flash development. Things like FlashDevelop, MTASC, SwfMill, ANT, and ASDT. It’ll show you how to create an AS2 and an AS3 based flash application using completely free and open software. This goes all the way from installing the tools, creating a sample app, writing up some unit tests for it, and then to publishing it to the web. Along the way it’ll give you a brief introduction to each tool, explain what it does, and then give a quick example of how to use it. (That’s the 5 chapters I wrote)
The remaining 2/3 of the book dedicates a chapter to various open source projects going into a little more detail about them. There’s a chapter on Papervision 3D, SWX, FUSE/Go, HAXE, AMFPHP, two for Red5 and a couple more.
This was a lot of fun to work on, and my only regret is not getting to know the other authors better.
If you’re looking for a place to buy it, check out Bookpool. I worked for them for a year and they’re really stellar guys. They offer good prices, but more importantly; as long as the book is in stock, they do their damndest to get it on a truck the day you order it. (Of course, you’re at the mercy of the publisher if it’s out of stock)
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The XRayViewer has been broken for quite some time. I had originally done it with an AIR beta, and that has since stopped working. So there’s now a newly compiled version just waiting for you to grab.
What is the XRayViewer?
So you may be asking yourself What exactly is the XRayViewer?
All this little app does is host the XRay connector and let you load a local swf. Then it displays the swf with some simple controls to play/stop/advance/back. The big benefit is you can then use XRay (By John Grden + Others) to inspect the swf without changing any code around.
There’s three new (very minor) features in this version:
- There’s a button to launch the XRay interface in your default browser.
- The path to the loaded swf is displayed in the top toolbar. (You can copy & paste that into Xray so you don’t have to navigate as far into the hierarchy)
- New logo / icons
Now Open Source!
The entire project is now licensed under the MIT license. If you install the application and then right click on it you can “View Source” to get the source code for it.
]]>There’s now a download page with a slightly updated version. Any future releases will be there.
]]>1) Open up the Flash IDE and explore it
2) Add an instance of it to my project, and then use XRay to explore it.
Now, I have a third option. I can open it up in the XRayViewer AIR application I just put together and then use XRay to look through it.
All this little app does is host the XRay connector and let you load a local swf (File->Open). Then it displays the swf with some simple controls to play/stop/advance/back.
But the real power is you can go off to the XRay interface and look through that loaded swf!
http://www.rogue-development.com/logViewer.xml
But much more interestingly, I made the changes in direct response for my desire to improve the logging facilities in XRay.
In case you’ve never heard of it before, XRay is the best tool for debugging Flash applications out there. It’s written by a guy named John Grden that I’ve had the opportunity to work with for the past year or so. Last week I told him about LogViewer and he added it in to XRay. But it just didn’t feel right. It looked clunky and there was some functionality that should be there but was missing. So for the past couple days I’ve been hacking apart LogViewer, adding in a few features, and making it look a little prettier. Here are the results…
As you can see, the search functionality remains, but with a find-previous option listed.
Two new features include the ability to filter based on a text string, and the ability to highlight lines that contain a text string. Both very useful when you have an application spewing large amounts of logging information at you.
With any Luck, we can get these changes wrapped up over the next week to a release-quality state and post it for all to use.
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