yes folks, Steve Jobs is not the Flash killer everyone thought he was, in fact Flash outlived Steve and outlived all other presumed Flash killers starting from Live motion and Live motion 2 and other similar self-claiming flash killers and not probably ending with JQuery or html5.

The biggest damage anyone has ever done to Flash came from Adobe itself, Adobe is killing flash by killing its reputation in the eyes of Flash most dedicated lovers:the flash community of developers.

- Here’s a couple of things to try, visit theflashblog.com what to do you see? Well you see this in the address bar http://www.leebrimelow.com/
Now why would Lee dump such a nice name as theflashblog while he’s a so called Flash Evangelist? The answer is obvious…

- Visit activeden what do you see? Unity 3D stuff alongside with Flash stuff which are btw not as merchantable as before.
How’s that I hear you say? Well let me give you the timeline of this programmed-flash-death:

Adobe acquired Macromedia while flash was in early stages of version 9, later on called Flash CS3 since it was incorporated in the so called Adobe Creative suit. ActionScript 3 was introduced in Flash 9 and it still is the latest version of ActionScript many years after its conception so basically ActionScript 3 is Macromedia’s last gigantic step in developing and pushing the flash platform forward.

The help files and documentation in Flash 9 were excellent, nicely integrated with the product and well written for beginners and pros alike.
Where are the documentation for Flash CS5.5 now? well its an Air application now called the Adobe Community Help and what a failure it is, I can’t even start telling you how much I hate it, and for a very good reason: it doesn’t work! it always nags for updates, never give you relevant search results not to mention the times it just refuses to launch or ask you to quit to perform an Air runtime update.

The stability and backward compatibility of the IDE was excellent too, I never had any unexpected crash while working with Flash 9 as opposed to tens of them every month while working with Flash CS5.5 which is the latest version of Flash at this time. Try saving a complex Flash CS5.5 as Flash CS4 file for a change and see the crap you get!

Then came Flex and then Flash builder but that’s a totally different story, the damage Flex and Flash builder made to the community is that it alienated the majority of Flash users and made them feel inferior in terms of data driven applications and connectors and all the cool stuff only available through Flash Builder, why would Adobe do such a thing and introduce fragmentation into the toolset of flash coders? Well mostly because they want to feed on Flash’s reputation by selling as many Flash related product as they can! Isn’t that what they did to Photoshop with the so called Lightroom that could be easily made as a feature or plugin to PS?

Flash used to have a very good reputation of being a cross-OS and cross browser platform, not very much now as Adobe announced that Linux will not get the much anticipated stage3D hardware acceleration everyone else get to experience and play with.

But nothing hurt Flash more than this last step, its repurposing into a gaming platform instead of RIA:

Adobe figured out that “the future of flash is 3D gaming and 3D gaming only” so that’s where Adobe is throwing the money and resources, a good example is the obvious re-purposing of Flash by having people like Lee Brimelow sent to the gaming land to advertise flash there, the message is clear : “the money lays there waiting for you Flash developers to develop your killer flash game and have it sold on the app store and Android Marketplace!” and “Flash is sexy because you can make games with it and have them running on iOS and Android”

well I am not into making games or playing games so what’s in it for me as a flash developer for the last 12 years or so? Well the answer is simple: nothing! Go learn Javascript and jQuery or CSS3 if you want to do the usual stuff of building web apps with transitions and smooth animations, Flash is not for that anymore!

So here’s what I did to resolve the issue:

- Ensure that the mySQL tables where the text is stored are using the utf8_general_ci Collation.

- Set $gateway->setCharsetHandler( “none”, “ISO-8859-1″, “ISO-8859-1″ ) in the gateway.php file (in case you’re wondering, yes you should simply NOT use iconv or utf_decoder or mbstring or the like, just disable the setCharsetHandler conversion by using “none” as the conversion method).

- in your php service file, say it’s called permissions.php, use the following :

$rsConnectionID=mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
mysql_set_charset("utf8", $rsConnectionID);

Be sure to have these set before running your query or passing the results to flash.

This should resolve all the issues you’re having, of course you should not use the following actionScript : system.useCodepage = true; as this will tell the flash player not to use utf 8 as default encoding and will surely get you into troubles.

A side effect of adobe’s announcement that flash CS5 will export to iPhone and iPod touch was encouraging thousands of flash developers to buy an iPhone or iPod touch to have the appropriate hardware to test and develop Flash-based ipa, at least that’s what I did…Now Apple should be grateful to this “free Marketing favor” Adobe inadvertently offered to say the least…

I already have a windows mobile powered HTC touch diamond phone and I invested in buying a 3rd generation 32 GB iPod touch for that purpose, if Apple continues its tight policy about 3rd party-built ipa, then I will either have to invest in an Android or just keep my ipas for myself! I might even have to jailbreak the iPod to be able to use my own built applications on my device! please correct me if I am wrong (should the device be jailbroken to install my own self-built ipas without having to kiss Mr Jobs ‘hand’ to get approval?)

After months of work, we are glad to announce the immediate availability of the actionscript3 flash shopping cart.
Packed with lots of features (video support, multiple payment processors and gateways, supporting paypal, 2checkout and authorize.net) this new cart is probably the most flexible yet lightweight cart available today.

This actionScript3 shopping cart takes advantage of the rendering engine of flash player 9 and up, its performance exceeds actionscript2 carts by far and you can be sure your customers will receive first class user experience using our cart.

With a filesize less than 150 Kb, you will be amazed of the number of features this cart brings to your online store.

You can have several categories of goods sold through the cart, tangible and intangible (clothing, software, video lectures etc…). The cart supports all video and image formats supported by the flash player.

The cart comes in two flavors, an XML driven version and a mySQL+php adminPanel powered version; both flavors are ready to go products with no learning curves.\r\n

The XML driven version can run on any server, there are no special requirements, no database installation or server side scripting needed whatsoever.

The mySQL adminPanel powered version uses a mySQL database to store the details about the products and a php backend to manage the database through a very user friendly interface that makes sense!

Just fill in the details of each product, upload the images and you are ready to sell online.

Additional gateways and payment processors can also be incorporated into the cart upon request.

The actionscript3 flash shopping cart can be connected to an optional automatic delivery system (sold separately) which is extremely useful for digital goods; buyers can immediately download the digital product they bought without intervention by the merchant.

We offer two licensing schemes for maximum flexibility, a designer version and a developer version.

The designer package of the actionScript3 shopping cart does not include source code.

So what if you want to customize the look of the cart? Well it is easier than doing it yourself, you can simply send us a psd or a draft of your design and we can do that for you and send you the finished, ready to deploy, swf file.

A single license (works on one domain) costs 150 USD for the XML driven version and 250 USD for the adminPanel version.

The developer package allows you to do practically anything with the cart since full commented source code is included. The licensing scheme of the developer package is more flexible than the designer package since you can use the cart on an unlimited number of domains without restrictions.

The look and feel of the cart is easily customizable if you have the developer version, all you need is flash CS3 or higher and some basic flash knowledge.

The XML version of the developer package costs 1000 USD while the adminPanel powered version costs 1500 USD.

We offer free installation and technical support with every sale (applies for both the designer and developer versions).

We’re also capable of adding custom features, integrating the cart with existing flash sites, and translating the interface to different languages (additional fee, depends on complexity of the task).

Here’s the demo of the AS3 flash shopping cart, This version supports using videos as description of an item as well as a large picture or even an swf file.
the demo connects to paypal as payment gateway yet the retail version supports 2checkout and authorize.net as well. 

I can now say with confidence, Adobe is following a pattern with every new release of Flash since CS3, the documentations are getting crappier with every release, not a good strategy if they want people to actually learn flash and if they want to expand the use of flash as a platform.

CS4 brought yet another disappointment to me and millions of RTF users, the “ligature” support is buried deep inside some user unfriendly classes and there is no simple way to access this essential feature for the average user by simply setting a property for a static or dynamic text field, way to go Adobe, really smart!\r\n

So was Flash CS4 really released or is this just another pre-release alpha quality software? The latter seems more probable.

3D is also a much awaited feature yet papervision3D and alternative3D as well as other packages have much more than what adobe has to offer and are open source which make me wonder why adobe has not simply acquired and integrated one of these packages…

Again I feel that adobe is slowly but steadily removing the carpet from under the feet of AS2 developers, as I speculated, there’s no access to these goodies from within AVM1 i.e. AS2 is retiring in the eyes of the flash team and unless someone comes with some ingenious way to keep AS2 “hip and cool”, all of us AS2 guys will have to make the switch into the bitter AS3 beast with its unfriendly compiler that keeps yelling at you even you write one line of straight forward code…

One depressing find out is that RTL is not supported in static text fields, only in dynamic and input text fields with exotic ligature turned on.

Again, flash does not have an onMouseStill event so I had to do it this way:


this.onMouseMove=function(){
clearTimeout(toInt);
fadeControlsIn();
toInt=setTimeout(fadeOut,3000);

}


A similar approach can be applied to keypresses.

Hope this helps.

There are many other features added like CPU surfacing and GPU compositing as well as enhanced drawing API and native 3D support yet the RTL support is something we’ve been waiting for long time, finally it has arrived! Thx Adobe, let’s hope it works as advertisied.