Notes from Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0

I would like to thank Colin for allowing me to publish my own notes that I had jotted down while studying his (essential) book aptly titled Essential ActionScript 3.0.

In my opinion it is the best book currently available to learn Object Oriented Programming using Actionscript 3.0. The following three categories of readers can benefit from the book

• those who are new to OOP and AS 3.0 ( they will find it most useful).
• those wishing to upgrade from AS 2.0 to AS 3.0 will need this book to understand concepts like e4x, display architecture, Flash player security and events and event handling etc.
• C# or C++ or java developers wishing to use AS 3.0 in their Flex projects won’t find such in depth knowledge and coverage of AS3.0 in any other book.

The importance of AS 3.0 has increased in these days due to quick adoption of Flex and to use Flex to its fullest extent one must know AS 3.0 inside out . When it comes to ActionScript, nobody teaches you the better than Colin Moock.

I, like countless others have learnt a lot about ActionScript and Flash just by reading his books. I hope he continues to write more about ActionScript, a popular language destined to become.

Will Adobe let us create a screen capture application in AIR ?

Currently it is not posssible to create a screen capture application using AS 3.0 and AIR Beta 1.

I built a demo screen capture application to test the fact.

Here is the screenshot of the application:

Image created and saved by the application:

Here is the code of the application I built to test the fact.

FLV Player in AIR Beta using Flex 3

Sorry for being away for a while.

It is a simple example to play .flv files from the local system. Earlier in my Jukebox tutorials I had used a fileOpen component. As the component is no more available for download, I thought of showing this alternative way to access files from local system rather than rewriting the juke box tutorials again.

I hope readers would be ablw to use this concept while building their own mp3 players.

In case there is a problem, just send me a mail (no spam, please) .

Java 5.0 Vs ActionScript 3.0

Imtiyaz.m.s has compiled a comparison between Java 5.0 and ActionScript 3.0 in his blog. Here is the link http://msimtiyaz.wordpress.com/flex/java-and-actionscript/

And don’t forget to view the comments here http://msimtiyaz.wordpress.com/2007/08/05/mfug-2/

Update

Detailed comparison can be found in the book Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java .

This book is written by Yakov Fain, Dr. Victor Rasputnis, Anatole Tartakovsky.
 

Taking Flickrin from Apollo to AIR

Title: Repackaging Flickrin to run in AIR

Author: Ashwinee Dash

Description: Flickrin 2.0 is a real world application for searching photos online using Flickr API. Users can save the selected images from the search result.In this article we learn to upgrade this Apollo application to run in the newly upgraded environment named Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

Copyright: 2007, www.ashwineedash.com

Link to final application : Flickrin 2.0

Requirements :

a) Adobe Flex Builder 3 Beta

b) AIR Beta Runtime

c) Flickr API Key

d) Flickrin ver 2.0(source files)

e) AS3 corelib

Assumptions if any:

a) You have downloaded and installed Flex Builder 3 Beta.

b) You have already gone through Flickrin ver 1.0 and 2.0 tutorials.