chuckboc's blog

Flash’s ubiquity is in its presence on the vast majority of PC desktops, laptops and netbooks. It is also in a surprising, and growing, percentage of mobile devices. Software developers who want to tap this rapidly expanding market face many challenges that have not existed in the PC world for quite some time. This book is virtually encyclopedic in its review of the pitfalls and dangers for mobile development and how they can be avoided, even for the iPhone.

Adobe’s ActionScript 3 has many things in common with regular compiled languages, with a specialized focus on the Flash player and engine. Here’s a good desk reference to avoid drowning in the online help that often times is a hindrance for here and now how to use it information. 'ActionScript 3.0 Bible', by Roger Braunstein, Mims Wright and Joshua Noble, Wiley ISBN 9780470135600, available to Amazon.

If digital image manipulation is like painting, then this book is like listening to a painter describe a desired artistic effect, using Actionscript as a set of brushes, the classes as a palette, and Flash as the canvas.

More a creative workbook than a by the numbers tools tutorial, the many examples can be studied on their own, after a basic review of the drawing APIs. The author makes life easier by opening up some libraries after some additional preliminary background is covered.

Collaborative applications lend themselves to RIA designs. Adobe Connect Pro can be extended, skinned and rebranded by using its Web API directly. Here’s an ActionScript3 implementation that handles the full API, complete with SWC file, documentation, a Flex demo project and access to a test database, downloadable at no charge from http://www.futurewaredc.com/FutureWareAdobeConnectWebAPI.html . Adobe Connect managed in a Flash/Flex application can easily piggyback on the opportunities created by Cisco’s recent Tandberg acquisition.

Chuck Brooks
FutureWare SCG

'Foundation ActionScript 3.0 for Flash and Flex', by Darren Richardson with Paul Milbourne, by Apress (Springer), also available at Amazon. ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-1918-7.

'Papervision3D Essentials', by Paul Tondeur and Jeff Winder, from
Packt Publishing, ISBN 9781847195722. Also availble from Amazon,
probably should have been titled The Missing Manual if that hadn't
already been taken. Interesting that it took two Dutchmen to come up
with a book published in England, indicative PPV3D's international
activity.

Jeff's blog is at www.jeffwinder.nl ; Paul's blog is at www.paultondeur.com

Here's my Amazon review.

chuckb

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The Beginning Of Making Sense Of It All