Sönke Rohde » OSFlash

Flex UG Hamburg with FC64 – Notes

Sönke — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:34:54 +0000

On Friday we had our Flex Usergroup Hamburg meeting in our Adobe office. Our speaker Claus Wahlers gave us a look behind the scenes aka source of FC64 which he developed together with Darron Schall. Claus started with some “basics” about how the C64 works to get an idea about what has to be emulated. After that he showed us parts of the code and explained the architecture behind which is divided into the CPU, MemoryManager and the Renderer which besides trillion other things does the final setPixel32.

All in all rocket science and Claus could only explain the tip of the iceberg but we got an impression what it means to build an emulator. Further he mentioned that Ralph Hauwert (one of the guys behind Papervision3D) is currently working on a Flash Player 10 version. This should open new opportunities since the new Vector class (typed Arrays) should be a big performance boost and the new sound features could open the door for sound emulation of the SID chip. For more infos and the source check the OSFlash FC64 site.

Our next usergroup meeting will already be in two weeks. David Sowerby from Straker Interactive will show us ZoomFlex which claims to fasten up Flex development and generates code which is based on Cairngorm and the Universal Mind Cairngorm extension. Check the german FlexUG Hamburg blog for more details.

Zeroi Update

Sönke — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 16:56:08 +0000

The Zeroi repository has been moved to Google Code and Jens Krause has extended it with XTrace Support. Check his tutorial and thanks for contributing!

Flex/AS3 Logging with SOS

Sönke — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 15:37:15 +0000

I build two little classes to support logging from Flex/AS3 to SOS.

The logger implements the mx.logging.ILogger interface but not the rest of the mx.logging framework as I liked to keep things in the first way.
Check the example here (right click for source). If you want to test logging directly from a website you have to start a local webserver and put a crossdomain.xml in the root. For further details read here.
Check the source directly here.

“Flex/AS3 Logging with SOS” is open source and licensed under LGPL.

Fuse – Open Source AS2 animation/filter class library

Sönke — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 16:18:26 +0000

Last week Fuse was released open source.

Fuse is an ActionScript 2 animation & filter management tool.

It is a classlibrary which support various kinds of animation and filters by code. I have tried it out and can say it works like a charm. What I am missing are strongly typed callbacks and strongly typed property lists but the 2.0 sounds not far away.

Fuse OSFlash site

I don’t had a look at the details but Fuse seems to be very leightweight and is easy to use. An alternative would be the AnimationPackage which has a bigger footprint and perhaps more possibilities.

haXe 1.05 released with Flash 9 support

Sönke — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 11:04:48 +0000

Nicolas Cannasse released a new version of haXe and now the announced Flash 9 support is integrated.

haXe is a new programming language which can be used on the serverside with an Apache module and on the client side as the output can be JavaScript/AJAX, Flash 6,7,8 and now also Flash 9. For more detailed information check the introduction.

A haXe tutorial for Flash 9 is already online.

haXe on digg.com

There is also SWHX to build crossplatform haXe desktop applications with e.g. Flash as the frontend. In one word haXe tries to solve all problems with one language. From my point of view it currently only lacks of a productive IDE to program haXe but this will only be a matter of time. Currently a project called HXDT, a plugin for Eclipse, has already been started but the last update was in December 2005 and Flashdevelop also provides a haXe-plugin.

haXe 1.05 released with Flash 9 support

Sönke — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 22:59:59 +0000

Nicolas Cannasse released a new version of haXe and now the announced Flash 9 support is integrated.

A haXe tutorial for Flash 9 is already online.

haXe on digg.com

Zeroi – MTASC logging adapter system

Sönke — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 12:55:08 +0000

I am proud to announce that Zeroi is now open source and available on OSFlash.org.

Ralf Bokelberg did the coreengine programming and I added the ability to define a logconfig xml file to filter logs of classes or packages to a specified loglevel.

The main idea of Zeroi is to be able to use any logging system (like SOS, XRay, Luminic Box, …) in your MTASC project, without having to change the code of your app. In fact your code doesn’t even need to know about Zeroi. Inside your app you only use trace statements. The traces are forwarded to the logging system of your choice.
That’s what the name Zeroi is standing for: Zero Impact.

Check the wiki entry on OSFlash for further information.

In a short word when you use the code trace(“e this is an error”); this log is captured by your favorite logging tool like and marked as an error log.

The prefix “e” is interpreted as a loglevel which are d for DEBUG, i for INFO, w for WARNING, e for ERROR and t for TEMP which is supported by SOS, the logging tool of my choice.

SWFObject Flash detection

Sönke — Wed, 10 May 2006 08:12:29 +0000

SWFObject is a Javscript based Flash detection script and I have used SWFObject formerly known as FlashObject for about two month and it works great.
If you are looking for a very good Flash detection check the devnet article by Geoff Stearns, the author of SWFObject or visit his blog.

Article: Open Source and the Flash Platform: What Should Adobe Do Next?

Sönke — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:30:45 +0000

Nice article about Adobe, Open Source and OSFlash: http://it.sys-con.com/read/166087.htm

MTASC 1.11 and haXe

Sönke — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 13:58:07 +0000

Nicolas Cannasse released MTASC 1.11 which he called a stable release.
This stable was very important for Nicolas because he wants to concentrate his power in his new invented language called haXe.
MTASC will get no AS3 support but haXe will. But that’s not all. With haXe you are able to program in one language but deploy on multiple platforms.

Basicly, what haXe can do is :

create Flash SWF files using Flash APIs for Players 6,7,8 and soon 8.5.

generate Javascript code using Browser DHTML API, so you can create AJAX web applications.

generate Neko sourcecode that can be used on the Server side or in standalone executable.

There is already an HXDT Eclipse plugin which is in an early state now but surely will grow very fast.
Talking about AS3 get excited about the Actionscript 3.0 book of Collin Moock which was announced shortly.