• Premium feature royalty kicks in only if you use hardware accelerated Stage 3D and Domain Memory features together
• The royalty is not applicable if you use just one of these features
• The royalty does not apply to mobile or AIR deployed apps
• Domain Memory is used for high performance cross compilation and execution of C++ code libraries
• Domain Memory is a way of porting premium high end console games to the web
• Although Adobe will have audit rights over revenue, this will be a self-reporting system

As a flash developer this will not affect me because I don’t work for a big game development house on 3D console games. Full stop.

It is very cool to see Adobe getting serious about gaming however. I think there are dramatic shifts going on in gaming right now and the Flash platform offers a reach across platforms, OSs, screens and devices that is unrivalled. For example, lots of game developers are looking to leverage AIR on desktop to get games on Steam. Exciting times to be a developer.

In a current project I had to simulate the effect of levelling a tripod with three knobs. The user’s goal is simply to get the bubble into the middle. To solve this I decided on using the circumcenter (red dot) of the triangle created by the value of each knob. Below is an example with the geometry still overlaid. Also useful in this project is the code I use for the interactive knob rotation. You can find the source to this code here.

Flash-based example of using a circumcenter calculation.

There is plenty of activity going on in the Apache Flex incubation and one current initiative is the development of a new logo. In true open source fashion, there is a contest going on (yesterday was the last day for submissions) and soon there will be a vote. You can see all the submissions here.

Above is my submission. I had a lot of fun thinking about what I wanted to say in a logo. My initial goal was to create a logo that, in terms of visual impact, would hold its own with the HTML5 shield if they were both to appear in a document. That’s important visually and symbolically. The idea that a sword complements a shield just naturally flowed from that. I don’t see this as a “versus” approach. A sword and a shield work together. This design is brash and whimsical.

I remember the HTML5 shield getting a lot of criticism when introduced, yet look how well it works. It was 30 feet high on the screen at the Max keynote and looked amazing. Imagine this logo beside it.

I believe FB-PHP is designed to install and run beside your existing Flash Builder install. At this time I’m still not sure. The installer refused to complete the process because of a “beta version” of Flash Builder already installed. I uninstalled Flash Builder and ran the installer again which completed the process successfully. When I ran FB-PHP it complained about a conflict with my current CS5 license and requested that I deactivate and enter a compatible license key.

I found out from Adobe that there is indeed a conflict with the CS5.5 licensing scheme which is a bug. Their instuctions are to (temporarily) deactivate CS5.5. Launch and activate FB-PHP with a S/N you can get from here: https://freeriatools.adobe.com/fbphptrial/ and then reactivate CS5.5. See this technote for more information.

First of all there is OSMF 1.6 which was release a couple weeks ago. As far as iOS is concerned, the most important feature here is the seamless support of StageVideo. This enables close-to-metal high-performance hardware-decoded hardware-rendered video. Within the context of an AIR application there are a couple boilerplate items, in addition to using OSMF ver1.6 to playback your video, that you need to add to your AS3 or Flex project in order to enable this performance.

1. add this compiler argument to ensure it targets Flash Player 11:

   -swf-version=13

2. set the rendermode item in the app descriptor file to “gpu” or “direct”

   <renderMode>gpu</renderMode >

Secondly, and it’s a biggie, is that you need to point to a streaming service using the recently released FMS 4.5. It is the support for Apple’s HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) support that is required. (By the way, the “Live”, as in rhyming with “hive”, refers to VOD as well as Live. I like to think of it as that which rhymes with “give” and I am less confused). And since you have access to the latest greatest FMS technology you may as well use a manifest file and several versions of the video encoded at different bit rates to take advantage of the dynamic-mutlibitrate-switching support made possible by various parts of this technology stack. OSMF makes this easy by accepting a URL pointing to the manifest file and everything is taken care of.

The final ingredient is AIR 3. FMS 4.5 can be used to stream video directly to iOS using mobile safari which is a great solution, but the user is presented with the default iOS video player. Perhaps you want to provide a customized video experience and an app made with AIR is just what you need. AIR version 3 to be more precise. With the Flash api at your disposal, so much is possible. AIR 3, released this week, is the final enabling piece of the puzzle in achieving in-app video nirvana on an iPad. Use AS3-only or Flex Mobile projects with Flash Builder to build an awesome and unique video service, and AIR 3 to package it up and sell it on the app-store.

I was really happy to see that merely swapping out the OSMF.swc library and recompiling was all I needed to do. No errors. This alone made the work around incorporating OSMF worth it. The only consequence of this update is the minimum Flash Player version required is now 10.1.

One item I finally figured out was how to determine total bitrate during video playback. NetStream has a NetStreamInfo property (called info) which contains all sorts of juicy info, but OSMF does not have any public API for getting access to the NetStream instance. With a lot of googling I found that the not-documented MediaTraitType.LOAD trait has a reference to the NetStream object and can be accessed this way:

var mediaLoadTrait:Object = mediaPlayer.media.getTrait(MediaTraitType.LOAD);
var netStreamInfo:NetStreamInfo = mediaLoadTrait.netStream.info;

NetStreamInfo has a property of playbackBytesPerSecond which is what I needed. We use this information for monitoring quality of service. Note that this is bytes per second and most people talk about bitrate as kilobits per second. According to google you need to multiply this number by 0.0078125 to determine the kbps bitrate.

It’s not so simple though. A hyperlink touch fails to load the local page since the StageWebView tries to go out to the web to load the URL supplied by the anchor tag. I found the solution was to hijack the page load on the LocationChangeEvent.LOCATION_CHANGING event and replace it with content loaded from the local html file using an URLLoader. You can see my code example here: http://github.com/randytroppmann/StageWebView—linking-local-files/blob/master/src/GreyRectangleStageWebViewBug.as.

Join Adobe and Sony for a webinar to learn about the exciting opportunities to bring innovative apps to Sony Tablet devices, including the just announced Adobe® AIR®App Challenge, Sponsored by Sony www.airappchallenge.com. Adobe and Sony are challenging developers, agencies, and content creators to build breakthrough apps for the upcoming “Sony Tablet” devices using Adobe AIR 3 and Adobe® Flash® tools for a chance to win $200,000 in total cash prizes, premium promotion on Sony Tablet devices, conference passes and paid travel to Adobe MAX, and more prizes. In the webinar you’ll learn about the unique features of the Sony Tablet S1 and Sony Tablet S2, as well as how you can be one of the first to gain prerelease access to the tablets, the latest version of Adobe AIR runtime and tools and other benefits. Encourage your peers to attend the webinar and enter the Challenge – you or someone you know can be one of the first selected as a Finalist by submitting an app or app project now!

Join us on Wednesday July 20, 2011 at 11:00AM – 12:00PM PDT or 7:00PM – 8:00PM PDT

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=1851799&loc=en_us