I stumbled on Flash SEO tool — an SEO tool for Flash sites that helps get your Flash site crawled by web spiders. The project will soon be available for download on Google Code http://code.google.com/p/flashseotool/. Current features: HTML menus and submenus for web spiders Title, meta, keywords and description Friendly URLs Simple, automatic updates straight from your AS3 code Features coming later: Generating a Google sitemap Deep linking integration support Integration with Delicious, Twitter and friends Generating RSS

Bookmarking an AS3 library: xrope by eidiot (http://eidiot.github.com/xrope/zh.html) — a simple layout library for native AS3 display objects. Features Works with native AS3 display objects, with ...

Ever since news of HTML5 got out, the new waves have been pushing the old ones forward, and more and more people have started paying attention to HTML5. From last September until now, I’ve read quite a few articles arguing that Flash will be replaced by HTML5. Recently I came across another one, “With HTML5, How Much Farther Can Flash Go?”, and it struck a nerve: http://blog.csdn.net/cping1982/archive/2010/02/23/5321010.aspx Thanks to the author Pengling Sanqian for sharing these valuable thoughts — the article is well reasoned and well supported. Having read it, I’d like to add a few personal points. 1. Times Have Changed — Flash Won’t Necessarily Repeat Applet’s FateWhether Flash lives or dies depends on many factors, and there’s no need to compare it to Applet. The historical context and user demands have all changed, so the old lessons no longer apply. True, Flash’s shortcomings have always been there (not long ago, even the iPad — touted as offering the “best web experience” — stubbornly refused to install Flash because of performance issues, leaving many web pages unable to display fully). But whether a product is good or bad is only part of the odds of winning; operations, promotion, and user demand matter just as much. A bad product doesn’t necessarily fail to make money, and a good product doesn’t necessarily make money either — there’s a certain fate in it all, and whoever wins the hearts of users wins the world.

Color composition: Suppose alpha, red, green, blue are all numbers between 0 and 255: color32 = alpha << 24 red << 16 green << 8 blue; Color extraction: alpha = color32 ...

Recently I was working on Flash and needed a calendar control, but Flash’s built-in component library doesn’t include a DateChooser for AS3, and searching around turned up nothing ready-made either, so I wrote one myself for AS3. (The rendered UI is based on com.thomas.DatePicker.DatePicker.) Sharing it with anyone else who needs one for Flash development.

A puzzle game made by Tomorrow Angel Studio together with Little Sky for Ciwong Technology (www.ciwong.com). The UI and animations were done by Little Sky of Tomorrow Angel Studio; I wrote the program and the website integration. 1. Counting Blocks The shape in the Flash movie is built from several small blocks. Use your spatial imagination — count how many small blocks the shape is made of in total. Left-click the number buttons “1~9” to enter your answer; if you get it right, you earn the corresponding score. Demo link http://www.mousebomb.org/portfolio_demo/jiyi_mofang/mofang.html Screenshots

Spotted this article translated by auzn over on Tiandihui — Eaze, the newest member of the easing family. Reportedly more efficient than TweenLite and packed with features. Bookmarked. Eaze was designed to: Make tweening in Flash lightweight, eye-catching, and easy to use, Introduce the smartest syntax and event system, Deliver the best performance balance, Use as few classes as possible, with no dependencies. The result is a maximally optimized, compact little library (~4Kb for the raw engine + ~9Kb with all plugins included) with jQuery-like syntax.

Yesterday I ran into a memory leak. After digging all the way down, I found it was caused by the bitmap captured for the reflection in an external .swf that had been loaded not being cleared. My guess is that although loader.unloadAndStop() closes the stream, it doesn’t release the BitmapData created inside the loaded program. Keep this in mind: aside from purely media-playback objects, if the external program you load has listeners, callbacks, or has created BitmapData, then that external program needs to clean up after itself before it’s unloaded. Otherwise, no matter how much you gc, it’ll still be eating memory.

On the 4th of this month, gskinner.com released version 2 of GTween. This version is more compact (3.5k) than the previous one, runs more efficiently, and introduces a new plugin model for greater ...

Flash SwitcherLets Firefox switch between different versions of the Flashplayer plugin, for compatibility debugging. This extension allows you to easily switch from one flash player plugin version to another, or also to remove or save the currently installed plugin (maybe for testing the express install). Once installed you will find the “flash switcher” icon in the Firefox statusbar at bottom right (and also in the Tools Firefox menu). Click on it and a list of available options will appear.