AIR, Flex / Flash, FMS, PushButton, Game… Developer
Flex
Flex SDK 4.5 doesn’t keep Embed Metadata
May 18th
Hey everyone,
I’ve run into a bug with the released version of the Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK. The 4.5 version of the SDK does not respect keeping [Embed] metadata in your SWF. This is problematic because we use this metadata extensively in PushButton Engine.
Take the following example into account:
TestMetadata.as
package { import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.utils.describeType; public class TestMetadata extends Sprite { public function TestMetadata() { var typeInfo:XML = describeType(TestClassWithEmbed); trace(typeInfo); } } }
TestClassWithEmbed.as
package { public class TestClassWithEmbed { [Embed(source="assets/flip.png", mimeType="image/png" )] public var Flip:Class; [SomeMeta(source="assets/flip.png", mimeType="image/png")] public var Test:Class; } }
In version 4.1 of the Adobe Flex SDK, we get the following back from describeType.
<variable name="Test" type="Class"> <metadata name="SomeMeta"> <arg key="source" value="assets/flip.png"/> <arg key="mimeType" value="image/png"/> </metadata> <metadata name="__go_to_definition_help"> <arg key="file" value="/projects/zaalabs/workspace/TestMetadata/src/TestClassWithEmbed.as"/> <arg key="pos" value="243"/> </metadata> </variable> <variable name="Flip" type="Class"> <metadata name="Embed"> <arg key="source" value="assets/flip.png"/> <arg key="mimeType" value="image/png"/> </metadata> <metadata name="__go_to_definition_help"> <arg key="file" value="/projects/zaalabs/workspace/TestMetadata/src/TestClassWithEmbed.as"/> <arg key="pos" value="136"/> </metadata> </variable>
However, in version 4.5 of the Adobe Flex SDK, you can see the Embed metadata is being omitted. Same exact code, same compiler arguments, nothing has changed except the SDK.
<variable name="Test" type="Class"> <metadata name="SomeMeta"> <arg key="source" value="assets/flip.png"/> <arg key="mimeType" value="image/png"/> </metadata> <metadata name="__go_to_definition_help"> <arg key="pos" value="243"/> </metadata> </variable> <variable name="Flip" type="Class"> <metadata name="__go_to_definition_help"> <arg key="pos" value="136"/> </metadata> </variable>
As you can see, the Embed metadata is being stripped out, even though I explicitly set “–keep-as3-metadata+=Embed,SomeMeta” in the compiler. Since I don’t believe that the Adobe Flash Player team would break describeType in a minor release, I’m led to believe that this is a bug that was introduced in the 4.5 version of mxmlc in the Flex SDK.
Rant
:: UPDATE ::
This seems to have been an isolated incident on this specific day, bugs.adobe.com has worked well for me many times since then.
————————————————————————–
So I tried to do the “correct” thing and file this as a bug on bugs.adobe.com. And would happily do so if the site worked. In fact, in the time I’ve been waiting for bug.adobe.com to load and let me login… not only did I write the test case, but I wrote this entire blog post as well.
[UPDATE]
I was finally able to file the bug, I think… it won’t pull it up. SDK-30485.
10 minutes to diagnose the issue…
15 minutes to blog about it…
45 minutes… and counting to file a bug through the proper channels.
Tip of the Day – Populate Version Number from an AIR Descriptor File in ANT
Apr 19th
So I’ve seen this question pop up a few times.
Can I grab a version number from the app-descriptor via ant and add that to the AIR filename? Anyone know?
This is a pretty straight forward thing to do using Ant-Contrib tasks, that are publicly available.
You can download the example files –> here.
Let’s take a quick look at the ANT script.
<project name="PopulateVersion" default="populateVersion" basedir="."> <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties"> <classpath> <pathelement location="./ant-contrib.jar"/> </classpath> </taskdef> <property name="app.descriptor" value="air-app.xml" /> <target name="populateVersion"> <echo message="Parsing application.version from ${app.descriptor}"/> <xmlproperty file="${app.descriptor}" prefix="airApp.appdescriptor"/> <propertycopy property="versionNumber" from="airApp.appdescriptor.application.versionNumber" override="true" /> <echo message="Parsed application version: ${versionNumber}"/> <propertyregex property="fileVersionNumber" input="${versionNumber}" regexp="\." replace="_" casesensitive="false" /> <echo>Version Number: ${versionNumber}</echo> <echo>File Version Number: ${fileVersionNumber}</echo> </target> </project>
As you can see it’s very straight forward to parse the version number out of the Application Descriptor. The only other thing we do is us RegEx to change the periods in the version number to underscores to make for more friendly file names.
Using the same concept it is very easy to also populate a Version file that gets compiled into your application which can include build numbers, or other interesting things… but we’ll save that for another day.
RIARadio, GangstaCast, TheFlexShow and Tech News Today…
Jul 21st
Recently I’ve had the opportunity to participate in a few podcasts, and they all seem to have come out this week. Check them out:
GangstaCast Episode 1: Celebrity Stalker Edition
Also, I was thrilled to find out that I was mentioned on TWiT.tv’s Tech News Today for an article I wrote regarding tracking celebrities by scraping exif data from photos uploaded to TwitPic, yfrog, TweetPhoto and TwitGoo. The part when they talk about the article is about 15 minutes into the episode.
Tech News Today 34: Take Off Your Pants, America
So all in all, it’s been a very interesting week.
Tip of the Day – Building AIR 2 applications with Flash Builder 4
Jun 12th
:: Update ::
This process has gotten much easier, you can now use software update to get AIR 2 as well as Flash Player 10.1 in Flash Builder… check out this post.
Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 were released on June 10th, 2010. It’s an exciting time. This weekend I decided to do some development on AIR 2 to try out some of the new features.
On the Adobe AIR Team blog’s post they mention that the free standalone download of the AIR 2 SDK will be available on Tuesday, June 15th… but I wanted to play with the SDK today.
So I went over to the Adobe AIR labs page and downloaded the AIR 2 Release Candidate SDK which is –> here.
You can download the released SDK from –> here
After downloading the Adobe AIR 2 SDK, I followed the directions on the release notes which explained how to overlay the AIR 2 SDK with my current version of Flex 4.
I’m on a mac, here are the commands I used in Terminal:
cd /Applications/Adobe\ Flash\ Builder\ 4/sdks/ ls cp -r 4.0.0 4.0.0AIR2 ls cp ~/Downloads/air2_rc1_sdk_mac_051110.tbz2 4.0.0AIR2 cd 4.0.0AIR2 tar jxvf air2_rc1_sdk_mac_051110.tbz2
I then added a new SDK to the installed SDK’s inside of Flash Builder:
Now, I already had an Adobe AIR application project set up, and I switched over to the new SDK the I installed:
However, when I tried to run my AIR application, I ran into this error:
VerifyError: Error #1014: Class IIMEClient could not be found. at flash.display::MovieClip/nextFrame() at mx.managers::SystemManager/deferredNextFrame()[E:\dev\4.0.0\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\managers\SystemManager.as:267] at mx.managers::SystemManager/preloader_preloaderDocFrameReadyHandler()[E:\dev\4.0.0\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\managers\SystemManager.as:2460] at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction() at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent() at mx.preloaders::Preloader/timerHandler()[E:\dev\4.0.0\frameworks\projects\framework\src\mx\preloaders\Preloader.as:488] at flash.utils::Timer/_timerDispatch() at flash.utils::Timer/tick()
After doing a bit of research I found out that my Adobe AIR project’s application descriptor file wasn’t using the correct namespace for the AIR 2.0 SDK. According to the Adobe AIR 2 Release Notes:
You must update your application descriptor file to the 2.0 namespace in order to access the new AIR 2 APIs and behavior. If your application does not require the new AIR 2 APIs and behavior, you are not required to update the namespace from 1.x based namespace. To update the namespace, change the xmlns attribute in your application descriptor to: http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/2.0
Sure enough, I hadn’t changed my namespace from AIR 1.5.3 to AIR 2.
I made the change in the descriptor file, and now everything works perfectly.
Load 40 image formats into Flash. Oh, and it’s open source.
Apr 20th
For for those who don’t know, I’m one of two people behind ZaaLabs (the other being Aaron Boushley). Today we released ZaaIL, an Adobe Alchemy port of DevIL an open source C image library.
Built in image support of Adobe Flash Player limits you to 3 image formats: gif, jpg and png. While this has worked well for many, many years… I recently have needed to expand the types of formats that I could use in Flash Player. I should also note that you can absolutely add support for these formats directly in ActionScript using ByteArray. For example Mike Chambers blogged about an AS3 BMP parser.
I was originally looking for support for TGA, BMP and PSD, when my friend Ben pointed me to DevIL and challenged me to port it using Alchemy.
Porting C code using Alchemy is not a very straight forward process, but between Aaron and I… and with help from Ben Garney and Branden Hall… worked our way through it. We plan on a series of blog posts discussing the process of using Alchemy in detail. Hopefully we can garner enough interest in the community around Alchemy to get Adobe to continue work on it.
ZaaIL is being released as open source software (MIT if you’re interested). We will post it all on GitHub when we get the chance.
[sidenote]
I have been asked by a few people if I think Adobe should expand from their three image formats and use something like DevIL in Flash Player… I don’t think they should. Adobe has given us the tools to create really cool things such as ZaaIL. I’d rather the Flash Player team focus on things I find way more important… such as 3D support, mobile performance, hardware accelerated graphics, etc…
[/sidenote]
ZaaIL allows developers to now to load more that 40 different image types… go ahead give it a try, I particularly like using a PSD file or cover art embedded into an MP3 (View source is enabled):
More information can be found over at ZaaLabs.
Speaking at 360|Flex San Jose 2010
Jan 25th
So if you haven’t seen my fun badge there on the right side of my blog… —>
I will be speaking at 360|Flex San Jose.
If you haven’t attended a 360|Flex conference before, you really should. In my opinion, 360|Flex is the best conference out there for Flex developers. It’s put on by developers for developers.
It is a very focused conference, where you can really get into the nitty gritty of Flex and geek out with other members of the community. Plus the food isn’t half bad.
When are you speaking?
I’ll be speaking on Wednesday, March 10th (my birthday) from 1:00 pm – 2:20 pm.
What will you be speaking about?
Session Title: Flexible Games… game development with stuff you already know.
Session Level: Intermediate
Description: I don’t know about you… but as an enterprise software developer, sometimes I need to take a break from the corporate world and want to develop something fun. In this session Nate Beck will take you through the basics of game development using the Flex SDK you know and love.
Nate will walk you through setting up your development environment, the basics of game development, using the open source PushButton game engine and building a functioning game.
What will Doug McCune do for revenge?
For those of you who weren’t at 360|Flex in Indianapolis, there was an incident… You can read about it in my Punking Doug McCune post.
Since the incident, Doug has vowed to get payback. And if you don’t know Doug, he is a scary creative guy. So we’ll have to see what he comes up with. Find out, along with me at my session.
Alright I’m convinced, where do I sign up?
Either click here or click the 360|Flex San Jose badge on the top right of my blog.
More information about travel and the conference in general can be found on the 360|Flex Website.
