The Official Fluid Blog

Finally! I just put up an updated version of the Fluid Tween Playground that plays nicely with AS 2. While we have been using the core tween code internally for several years, the playground was never upgraded. I had no idea people were still using the playground, but after upgrading our website we started getting a significant number of bounces for the tween library.

For those of you new to this library, Fluid has created a simple class ( fluid.util.Tweener.as ) that provides a straightforward method for designers and developers alike to use time-based animation in Flash. While there are a number of similar libraries out there, many of them involve more complex syntax, or add significant weight in file size. The Tweener class will add less than 2kb to your SWF size.

Example usage:

<snip>
import fluid.util.Tweener;
import com.robertpenner.easing.Quad;

// alpha down to 50% in 300 milliseconds
Tweener.timeTween( myMC, "_alpha", 50, 300, Quad.easeIn );
</snip>

Check it out here – http://www.fluid.com/experiments/tweenplayground .

Let us know what you think, and we would be happy to see what you create with it.

I decided to take a bit of time this morning and update to Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and took a look at the latest and greatest extensions. Here is my personal list of must-have extensions for both productivity and fun.

• Foxpose View all of your tabs in one window like in OSX Exposé. Fun!
• Web developer Toolbar The defacto standard plugin if you do any web development.
• IE Tab Open Internet Explorer within a Firefox tab. Very useful for cross-browser testing.
• Dictionary Tooltip Double-click a word to get a popup dictionary definition.
• Foxytunes Control your music apps via your browser toolbar.

Have fun!

As anyone with any programming experience can tell you, formatting and unformatting Date objects into human readable strings can be a repetitive and tedious task, as well as a perfect target for a utility class!

These utility classes exist in the core package of most programming languages, but alas, not Actionscript. Luckily, Matt Kruse at JavaScript Toolbox created a simplified Javascript library based on Java’s elegant SimpleDateFormat class. As Javascript and Actionscript are syntactically compatible, porting this to Actionscript was very straightforward. Check out SimpleDateFormatter, hosted on the osflash website.

For the past couple of months, I have been using the FAME ( Flashout, ASDT, Mtasc, and Eclipse) architecture for Flash development. Overall, its been a great experience, but like most open-source projects, documentation is often passed on in informal settings, like this weblog !

The following are a few of the most useful keyboard shortcut tips used in ASDT (Actionscript Development Tool) culled from the highly recommended OSFlash mailing list.

• F3: Open the declaration of an Actionscript element.
• CTRL-SPACE: Opens available code completion. Hit the UP arrow to see available template functions.
• (tmpl. name) CTRL-SPACE: Inserts template with for the given name.
• CTRL-SHIFT-G: Generate getters and setters. (yes!)
• CTRL-SHIFT-D: Duplicate line
• CTRL-SHIFT-S: Open super implementation of a method

Another useful tip: To see all keyboard shortcuts available in Eclipse, goto Preferences -> General - Keys.

Hope this speeds your development along. Thanks again to the ASDT team for their hard work and great tool !