Topic: Writing

AIR 1.5 encrypted SQLite database — how to use it, best practices, and new projects

Posted November 18, 2008 1:30 am
Filed under: AIR, Articles by Paul, Life at Adobe, Projects, Tutorials, Writing, local SQL database

Over a year ago I described a potential area of concern for using a SQLite database with an AIR application — because all apps use the same database engine, any AIR app can read any other app’s database (as long as it can find the database file).
As you may have heard among all the news […]

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(or, “why I haven’t written anything new here in a looong time”)

Like so many people, my work goes in cycles (from “busy” to “crazy” to “desperate crunch”). If you’re someone who follows this site (if in fact there is anybody who does), you may have figured out that any time I go for a long time without posting, it means I’m near the end of a project (and consequently, that new documentation is coming soon).

Well, that time has arrived. With the public announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, we’re doing something different in terms of the schedule for releasing documentation. This time the documentation has been released ahead of time, before the product actually ships. (Primarily for the sake of search engine indexing — but hey, let’s not complain.)

Of course, a draft version of the Flash Player 10 language reference has been around for a while now, but if you haven’t had a chance to take a look (or if you want to know how things turned out in their final form), you can now view the final Flash CS4 (including ActionScript for Flash Player 10) documentation. Also, this includes several significant additions to the content in Programming ActionScript 3.0, so if you prefer to learn by reading about a topic rather than by piecing things together from the reference, then you’ll find this content useful.

Here are a few top-level links to get you started:

Just for fun, here is the new content that I wrote:

Vector class (strongly-typed arrays):
- Vector class in Programming ActionScript 3.0 (new content is interspersed with the previous content on the Array class)
- Vector class reference
Pixel Bender (“custom filters” — although it’s a lot more than filters)
- Working with Pixel Bender shaders (in Programming ActionScript 3.0) - plus other sections that are linked to from there, about using a shader as a drawing fill, a filter, a blend mode, etc.
- Shader class reference
- ShaderJob class reference
- ShaderParameter and ShaderInput class references
- ShaderFilter class
- plus new content in the DisplayObject class, the BlendMode class, the Graphics class, etc.

And here are some of the other new topics that I think are the most interesting:

So, what’s next for me? (Thanks for asking!) Since finishing the final versions of the Flash CS4 documentation, I’ve been working on some “quick start” articles around the new features. Those articles will appear in the Flash developer center soon — probably when Flash CS4 actually ships. (I’ve done one on the Vector class and one on the new FileReference functionality for accessing local files without a server round trip. Other colleagues have done cool things with dynamically generating audio and Pixel Bender — so I think it’ll definitely be worth a look.) Along with that, I’m working on new features for the next version of Adobe AIR. I also have a few side projects that I’ve been trying to make progress on as I can sneak in a minute here and there.

Lee Brimelow has just pointed out that the Flash Player 10 documentation is available for download on Adobe Labs. I’m excited that this is public, so I can start talking about it more — I’ve been working on the documentation for several months now =)

On a personal note, the screenshot that Lee posted for the Vector class documentation was written by me. So that was fun to see =)

AIR beta 3 and local SQL database changes

Posted December 18, 2007 12:55 pm
Filed under: AIR, Articles by Paul, Flex, Opinions, Writing, local SQL database

Note: Sorry for the delay on this article. I composed this article a couple of weeks ago, and then I got busy with work and holidays and I forgot and didn’t publish it until now =(
If you’ve been following my posts on AIR and the SQL database functionality, you may have noticed a trend: every […]

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New Adobe Dev Center articles (Flash deep-linking and Flash CS3 DataGrid)

Posted November 13, 2007 11:14 am
Filed under: AS3, ActionScript, Articles by Paul, Flash, Tutorials, Writing

Several months ago I was asked to re-purpose two of my previous articles from this site for publication on the Adobe Developer Center (now renamed as the “Adobe Developer Connection”). The first one was published in September 2007, and the second was just published yesterday. So in a way this is sort of a revisiting […]

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Why doesn’t Adobe’s AIR dev guide mention SQLite? A response to Tim Anderson

Posted June 19, 2007 11:11 pm
Filed under: AIR, Articles by Paul, Opinions, Writing, local SQL database

Yesterday Tim Anderson asked a question: “Why doesn’t Adobe’s AIR dev guide mention SQLite?” As the author of the “Working with local SQL databases” chapter in the AIR Developers Guide that Tim refers to, as well as the related sections of the AIR language reference, I guess I know better than most people the answer […]

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AIR, local SQL databases, and my role

Posted June 11, 2007 5:37 pm
Filed under: AIR, AS3, ActionScript, Articles by Paul, SQL, Writing, local SQL database

As everyone knows, today Adobe released a public beta of AIR (formerly “Apollo”). As you likely know, since it was announced last week, one of the big new features in this release is an integrated database engine that allows AIR applications to create and use local SQL databases. I’m really excited about this, both because it’s really awesome to be able to access a database directly from ActionScript, and (on a personal level) because it means I can finally talk about what I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. Yes, in fact, my latest assignment at Adobe primarily involves working on the AIR local SQL database functionality.

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Book Review: ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook

Posted April 3, 2007 1:30 pm
Filed under: AS3, ActionScript, Articles by Paul, Book reviews, Opinions, Writing

With the release of Flex 2 and ActionScript 3.0, I started to watch for new books coming out. Admittedly the numbers have been smaller than I expected, but the first book to hit the shelves — one I’ve been anticipating with enthusiasm — is the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook by Joey Lott, Darron Schall, and Keith […]

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Flash 8 Advanced: Another sample chapter (Video)

Posted October 30, 2006 4:40 pm
Filed under: ActionScript, Articles by Paul, Flash, Tutorials, Writing

I just discovered that another sample chapter of my book, this time the chapter on Flash Video, has been made available by the publisher.
The book is “Macromedia Flash 8 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide” (Peachpit Press), by Russell Chun and me.
The chapter is chapter 2, “Working with Video.” It covers converting video to FLV format (in […]

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Flash 8 Advanced: sample chapter on Adobe design center

Posted August 3, 2006 11:38 am
Filed under: ActionScript, Articles by Paul, Flash, Writing

In case you’re curious about scripting sound in Flash 8 ActionScript, or you just want to see a sample of a Flash book, Adobe recently posted a sample chapter (well, actually half a chapter) from my book “Macromedia Flash 8 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide” in their site’s design center.
The chapter that was chosen (I’m not […]

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