Author Archives: Joseph Labrecque

Adobe Flash Professional CS6: New Features Workshop

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Happy to announce that in light of the Adobe Creative Suite 6 announce; my newest video course with video2brain has now been published!

Adobe Flash Professional CS6: New Features Workshop

Learn What’s New and How It Affects You

In this course, Flash authority Joseph Labrecque looks at the new features available in Flash Professional CS6 and shows you how to incorporate them into your workflow. You’ll learn about the awesome new mobile simulator and new export options like sprite sheets and PNG sequences, as well as less obvious additions like advanced debugging and publish options. You’ll also see what features have been removed and how that affects what you do in Flash Professional.

In this workshop you’ll learn all about the new and upgraded features in Adobe Flash Professional CS6. The contents of this course include:

Introducing Flash Professional CS6
This chapter introduces Flash Professional CS6 and provides a quick overview of the new features we’ll cover in this course.

Exporting Assets
This chapter will look into some of the exciting new export options that are included in Flash Professional CS6.

Mobile Content Simulator
This chapter provides a detailed examination of the new Mobile Content Simulator. This exciting new tool greatly speeds up the testing of mobile-specific APIs using enhanced simulation.

Debugging
This chapter explores some of the debugging enhancements included in Flash Professional CS6.

Publishing Options
This chapter will examine enhancements to the various publishing options that are now available. We’ll also examine new functionality such as captive runtime support and ANE integration.

Additional Considerations
This chapter wraps up the course with some thoughts on the future of Flash Professional and the platform in general.

If you are looking for something more comprehensive: I have a Adobe Flash Professional CS6: Learn by Video: Core Training in Rich Media Communication course that will be released soon as well.

North American Flash Community Tour: Denver

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I am quite fortunate to live in Denver, Colorado. Why? Because my city was on the list of stops for the North American Flash Community Tour which is presently ongoing. For the Denver stop; both Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow provided us with a good, honest, down-to-earth discussion of recent changed in the Flash platform, the impact of these changes upon the community, new runtimes capabilities in gaming and beyond, and some long-term insight into the future of the platform and what Adobe is doing to prepare Flash for the next decade.

Some of the highlights for me included an updated demonstration of Monocle – a powerful new SWF profiler that seems to offer just about any information one would need when profiling Flash applications. Also of note was a demonstration of ActionScript Workers – finally we are about to have concurrency in ActionScript!

Interested in watching the whole thing yourselves? It was actually recorded by a number of community members and can be viewed via the following:

Related to all of this; now that Flash Player 10.2 and AIR 3.2 have been released, both Flash Player 11.3 and AIR 3.3 betas are now out at Adobe Labs. Lots of good stuff:

  • Full screen keyboard input
  • Frame label events
  • MouseEvent.RELEASE_OUTSIDE
  • ApplicationDomain.getQualifiedDefinitionNames()
  • Drivers gating hardware acceleration relaxed to 2006
  • New driverInfo details
  • Low latency audio support for streaming audio through NetStream
  • BitmapData.drawWithQuality
  • BitmapData.encode()
  • Protected Mode for Firefox
  • Flash Player background updates
  • Low latency audio support
  • Texture Streaming for Stage3D
  • USB debugging for AIR iOS
  • Enhanced Background behavior for AIR iOS
  • Stylus support for Android 4.0
  • Simulator Support (Mac)
  • Aspect Ratio Enhancements
  • Improved Mac App Store Support

Want more insight? Thibault Imbert has even deeper information on these goodies over at ByteArray.org.

Be sure to have a look at the Flash Runtimes Whitepaper if you haven’t already – it contains a ton of great information and will be updated as things are added in the future.

Lastly, I want to make it clear that (IMO) Flash is not “dead” in any way from where I am standing. I was pretty beaten down by the debacle in November and going into this year – honestly didn’t expect to be doing much Flash work at all. Turns out that pretty much all I am doing is related to Flash apart from my work with Adobe Edge.

I have 3.5 contracts with publishers for Flash content – the majority of that work is actually complete on my side of things. I’ll be talking more about these projects very shortly. In my day-to-day job at the university, I’ve being doing all sorts of crazy stuff with Flash, Flex, and AIR and have had plenty of client work in this area as well. In fact, I’ve had to turn potential clients away numerous times and most all of this is Flash related!

Maybe mine is a unique case – but with my own experiences over the past few months along with chatter from others working in the industry, coupled with some really (I mean really) positive internal messaging I’ve heard from Adobe, and topped off with events like this recent one with Mike and Lee… no denying it. Flash LIVES!

360|Flex Session Peek

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I’m presenting at 360|Flex in Denver this month – talking BlazeDS with Flex and Java! I’m putting the finishing touches on my slides right now and am including a preview below!

Leveraging BlazeDS, Java, and Flex: Dynamic Data Transfer

Flex developers have it easy when using ColdFusion to transfer data over the Action Message Format (AMF) transfer protocol because these services are built into the core ColdFusion server. What if you aren’t using ColdFusion though? Can you get the same benefits of AMF when using Java? Yes – by employing the open source Adobe BlazeDS project!

This talk will include an overview of these technologies, how to configure them to work together, and provide examples of data transfer across systems through a variety of ActionScript/Flex code examples. Additionally we’ll examine a use-case for BlazeDS, Java Spring, and Flex in higher-education to aid in the gathering of a variety of media types to perform assessment activities across departments through a unique system of binary and textual submissions by responder groups within certain participating programs.

So that’s my session, but there are a ton of other great speakers and topics being presented. A bunch of people from Adobe, Appcelerator, and Sencha are going to be there too. Nightly parties and extended training sessions on Sunday. All good stuff!

Check out the schedule!

Have a chance to chat with all the great speakers, sponsors, and attendees!

And don’t forget to REGISTER! It has sold out in the past!