Johannes Luderschmidt’s Blog

Recently, I made my first steps in Adobe Air 2. As Air 2 is still in Beta version (currently in Beta 2, which was released on February 2, 2010) there still could be some problems when working with it.

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Recently I had the problem that my Flex code, which used the ResourceManager, would not find the resource bundle, which contained all resources for my application. However, the application compiled but it would always crash whenever the first time a resource should be loaded. I checked my compiler arguments a 1000 times but everything was correct and did work well in another Flex application. The problem was that my resource bundle was not present in the ResourceManager, it just did not load it.
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I am going to present a few projects on my blog in which I collaborated in one or the other way. The project UNFOCUS – FOCUS is a multi-touch and TUI project that makes use of our fiducialtuioas3 classes.

What is UNFOCUS – FOCUS about?
How can we know what we do not see?
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fiducialtuioas3 now supports pure TUIO messages via TCP.

The bridge TUIO → Flosc → Flash is now being replaced by the bridge TUIO → udp-tcp-bridge → Flash. The latter method renders the transformation of TUIO messages to a proprietary XML dialect obsolete. That speeds up the connection of the TUIO producer (e.g. Touchlib, CCV or Touché) to the Flash application itself (e.g. Vispol, Volvelles) and thus reduces lag.

Hopefully, TUIO producers will support the output of TUIO via TCP natively soon (as far as I know at least Touché does). However, you are on the safe side if you use memo’s cross platform, open source, C++ UDP TCP bridge.

The TCP tuio AS3 classes have been downloaded and adapted for the additional support of fiducials from Touchgateway.

So you can download fiducialtuioas3 in both flavors (via Flosc and via pure TCP TUIO) from the fiducialtuioas3 google code repoitory (on the right).

In the nuigroup there are a threads about fiducialtuioas3 here and here.

In this post I’ll show how to load a file with a file chooser dialog from your local HD into an Internet Flash application in your browser. In another post I’ve explained how to save a file to HD from Flash.

With a little workaround it is possible to load files into Flash in a way that it feels just as if you would do it with a common application: You are being asked with a standard system file dialog, which file you want to load in your application.

However, at first you have to park (i.e. upload) your file on a server in order to make it “publicly” available for your Flash app:

Figure 1: Howto save and load text files with AS3

I have been looking around for Actionscript 3 libraries for the retrieval of data via the very nice Twitter API. Basically, TwitterScript seems to be a good choice for a Twitter Flash library as it wraps Twitter query URLs and packs the XML results automatically in arrays.

However, as so often with Actionscript libraries there is NO documentation pertaining TwitterScript available on its Google code page, there is no example included in the source code and the source code is not commented. What could be so difficult about providing a little piece of code like this:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" 
      addedToStage="init()">
  <mx:Script>
    <![CDATA[
      import twitter.api.data.TwitterStatus;
      import twitter.api.events.TwitterEvent;
      import twitter.api.TwitterSearch;
        import twitter.api.Twitter;
 
      private static const TWITTER_USER:String = "stephenfry";
 
      private var _twitter:Twitter;
      private var _twitterSearch:TwitterSearch;
 
      private function init():void{
        _twitter = new Twitter();
        _twitterSearch = new TwitterSearch();
 
        _twitter.loadUserTimeline(TWITTER_USER);
        _twitter.addEventListener(TwitterEvent.ON_USER_TIMELINE_RESULT, 
            userTimelineResult);
 
        _twitterSearch.addKeyword("ipad");
        _twitter.addEventListener(TwitterEvent.ON_SEARCH, onSearchResult, 
            false,0,true);
        _twitter.search(_twitterSearch);
      }
 
      private function userTimelineResult(e:TwitterEvent):void {
        var twitterStatus:TwitterStatus;
        for (var i in e.data) {
          twitterStatus = e.data[i]
          trace("user tweets",twitterStatus.text)
        }
      }
 
      private function onSearchResult(event : TwitterEvent) : void{
        var twitterStatus : TwitterStatus;
        for (var i : int = 0; i < event.data.length; i++){
          twitterStatus = event.data[i];
          trace("search result:",twitterStatus.text);
        }
      }
    ]]>
  </mx:Script>
</mx:Application>

This example originates to Trevor Boyle’s blog. Improved by Kimi.

In his Bachelor thesis Frederic Frieß enhanced the original Touchlib TUIO AS3 classes with support for fiducials (or to speak in TUIO terms with support for /tuio/2dobj messages).

Thus, the Touchlib’s TUIO classes can simply be replaced with Frederic’s classes and everything should still work as before. However, there is one slight change in the package structure: the TUIO classes are now lying inside the package tuio and not in the package flash.events.

I have made Frederic’s Tuio Fiducial AS3 classes available on Google code in a project called fiducialtuioas3.

If you want to use reacTIVision fiducials in Flash, Flex or Adobe Air you are heartily invited to use these classes in your private and professional project.

Examples of what has been done so far with those classes:
Tangible Vispol
Pf Design Media Installation

If you have a nice project with fiducialtuioas3 it would be great if you shared a link with us via mail or in the comments.

Great article from Ben Longoria about how to get smooth image scaling in Flex.

This is something so simple but it took me hours to figure it out (actually I do not know why): I wanted to remove the status bar from my Adobe Air application window. I use Flex Builder to develop my Air application.

I wanted to remove the status bar in the bottom of the window because it is useless and it looks bad in fullscreen mode.

As standard MXML element Flex Builder uses the mx:WindowedApplication. You just have to add a simple
showStatusBar="false"
and you get rid of that stupid status bar.

[Update 8. April 2009]
Setting
showStatusBar="false"
just causes the status bar to not being displayed. However, it is still there but not visible.

Thus, I added
windowComplete="removeStatusBar(event);"
in the title tag of WindowedApplication and implemented removeStatusBar(event) as following:

private function removeStatusBar(event:AIREvent):void{
removeChild(statusBar);
}

Recently, I needed an image reflection effect in Flex. This would not be complicated to achieve for a Loader image object in Flash Actionscript 3 but the more for Flex as everything needs to be a bit more complicated in Flex when it comes to customizing.

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