Recently I wondered how I can get rid of that “View Source” entry in the context menu of Adobe Air as I wanted to add my own context menu there.

It turned out that I had to remove all the source folder entries in the project’s run configuration (see in the image above).

As I work with Flex Builder 3 I downloaded and configured Air 2 with Flex SDK 3.4 accordingly to Adobe’s manual and everything worked and compiled nicely as well on Mac OS X as on Windows XP (yes, I tried both).

I tried to use UDP datagram sockets within my app (in order to get a direct TUIO connection via OSC/UDP), which are supported by Adobe Air beginning with Air 2. However, whenever I tried to start my compiled Air app in Flex Builder with the adl from Adobe Air 2 I got this error message:
VerifyError: Error #1014: Class flash.net::DatagramSocket could not be found. (with the additional stack trace).

I got rid of that message under Windows XP by following the hint by Adobe that the namespace in the app descriptor from Air has to be changed to Adobe Air 2 beta 2′s:

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<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/2.0beta2">

Now, my UDP datagram sockets work nicely under Windows XP. However, if I configure everthing accordingly under Mac OS X matters get worse. The app crashes and I get a native error stacktrace from the adl player.

In my opinion the implementation of the adl under Mac OS X is buggy, which is quite normal for a beta release. Thus, I filed an error message at Adobe’s website.

However, if you try to do the same and you get things working on Mac OS X it would be nice if you dropped me a comment.

By the way: I tried to use the new Touch functionality in Adobe Air 2 under Windows 7 with a HP Touchsmart and it works quite well (except there are no gestures supported as Windows 7 proposes them). Maybe, I find the time to write a follow-up article on this…

Update: It seems like the problem is not connected with Mac OS X but with my version of Flex Builder 3. I moved ahead to Flash Builder 4 beta 2 and now all the Adobe Air 2 beta 2 functionality works.

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.

My application did not have any UI elements just a visualization UIComponent that I wrote myself. Thus, I did not load any resources from my MXML. A some point I added a UI element (a Button) and tried to load a resource directly from that Button in order to see if it worked there:

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<mx:Button label="@Resource(bundle='myResources', key='OBJECT')" />

And it worked fine in that Button and suddenly in the whole application as well. So it seemed to me that Flex refused to load the resource bundle if it was not referenced from the MXML. As I did not want to use an UI element in my application I looked for a workaround and stumbled upon this:

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<mx:Metadata>
        [ResourceBundle("myResources")]
</mx:Metadata>

This piece of MXML code just needs to be added in the top of your Application or WindowedApplication in order to trigger the loading of the resource bundle.

What is UNFOCUS – FOCUS about?
How can we know what we do not see?

UNFOCUS – FOCUS is an interactive exhibition concept that tackles the filtering of media content. The focus of the work is a multi-touch table, which allows for the intuitive exploration of digital data with multi-touch.
Country specific picture worlds are being compared via Google search results. Known and unknown can be seen within different results. Multiple users can discuss possible reasons for this by exchanging their knowledge.

UNFOCUS – FOCUS is a multi-media multi-touch and fiducial application based on Flash. It has been created at the University of Cooperative Education Ravensburg as a Bachelor thesis’ work by Johannes Scherg and Farina Krause.

How has UNFOCUS – FOCUS been implemented?

Hardware components:

• Hitachi CP-X5 Projector with B&W Anti Infrarot Lowpass filter
• Sony PS3 Eye Webcam
• DI-Setup with 8x 45 850nm IR LEDs
• Gerriets Optitrans back-projection foil

Software components:

• tBeta 1.1
• reacTIVision 1.4
• SplitCam
• Adobe Flash

Flash frameworks:

• FiducialTUIOAS3
• Touchlib AS3-Klassen
• AS3CoreLib
• CustomEvent

A short video of UNFOCUS – FOCUS:

UNFOCUS FOCUS – Appetizer from Johannes Scherg on Vimeo.

Some more pictures:

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.

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.

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);
}

However, there is great reflection class and component available by Ben Stucki that produce an image reflection for standard flex components (and actually keep them up to date by using an enter frame method).

Anyway, there will be two different aspects regarding a Flex Image object if I want to apply this reflection to it:

• The reflection can only be generated as soon as the whole image content has been completely loaded inside of the Image object.
• The reflection stays the same all of the time. Thus, there is no need for an enter frame method.

Actually, I came across this blog entry about the creation of an Image reflection in Flex but there are important parts of the code missing, this works only for one image at a time and the example is not working.

So I wrote a Flex component ImageWithReflection that automatically produces the image reflection. Here is the source code and an swf in a zipped Flex Builder project.

Please remember that Ben Stucki put his code under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License and I do so as well for my part. The images in that example are under a non-commercial Creative Commons licence. So be warned not to reuse them for commercial projects.

Cheers.

As some code is missing in Kevin’s tutorial, here is the code of two Adobe Air thumbnail generation applications.