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Adobe has just released version one of the desktop application runtime, AIR. Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Flash, and Flex technologies to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop.

This is truly a monumental moment in the evolution of Flash. We’ve seen it grow from a modest animation player, to the enabler for rich website experiences, to the champion of web video and now to the darling of the Desktop.

Flash has always been an huge creative medium and now it’s gone and “super-sized” its abilities. There has never been a better time to be involved with Flash. Welcome to Desktop 2.0!

Adobe AIR Website
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

AIR FAQ
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/faq/

I’d like to thank everyone who was able to attend this months meet. I think we managed to double our attendance from the previous month to over 30 people! We’re all thrilled that San Flashcisco has become a big success after only it’s second meet, so thank you all again!

Check out photos from the event and view defails about the March meet here.

Luke Bayes, co-founder of AsUnit, shall be giving a presentation tonight to the San Flashcisco user group about his new project, Sprouts!

Sprouts is an open-source, cross-platform project generation and configuration tool for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3, Adobe AIR and Flex projects.

Lukes presentation will introduce you to this project and show how it may help you and your team be more productive.

Sprouts has the following features:
* Provides easily customized and shared project and code generators that get you up and running instantly and keeps you and your team moving quickly.
* Installs any publicly available ActionScript library directly into your project by name and version (including Adobe corelib, AsUnit, PureMVC, Cairngorm and many more).
* Instantly install and configure all of the tools you need to get started with ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 or Flex development on Windows, OS X and Linux (including the Flex SDK, MTASC, SWFMill, and the Adobe Flash Player).
* Provides simple, intuitive automated build tasks to help you build your project anytime from any computer and integrate your project with existing continuous integration tools.

Read more and RSVP

One of the things I’m looking forward to in Flash Player 10 is support for custom bitmap filters created using Hydra. If you’re not up to speed with Hydra, then all you need to know is that it’s a language that lets you define a custom filter to apply to display list objects in Flash much like the filters you see into todays Flash Player. Great huh? Well it gets even better. The new hydra filters are able to produce their results by utilizing the users graphics card, thus taking a huge amount of stress off the CPU and thus upping overall performance immensely.

Hydra is by no means is breaking news in the Flash world but, I just want to share two thoughts on why I’m excited. It’s able to produce some truly awesome bitmap filters. Your imagination (and coding skill) is your only limitation, but for me, the number one reason why Hydra will kick ass is faster alpha tweening! Alpha adjustment is probably the simplest bitmap filter in existence and the one that’s most commonly used in Flash projects today. This alone is enough reason to be excited about Hydra.

My second reason is to do with 3D rendering using bitmap filters. A few months ago I came across a blog post by Paul Ortchanian. In this post he had jumped on to the “me too” Flash cover-flow band wagon but, Paul’s approach is quite different to many clones before it. Instead of relying on a Papervision type 3D engine or applying simple matrix skews, Paul has gone down another route.

Paul decided on using a built in bitmap filter that is currently available in todays Flash Player called, Displacement Map Filter, to skew and size his album art. His online example looks to animate very smoothly and this is without the use of Hydra and the graphics card. Now, just imagine this cover-flow example utilizing a Hydra filter and I think you’ll understand Hydra’s 3D possibilities. Just think what Papervision3D would be like running on the GPU! It’s all very possible, especially now that PV3D-2 has a plugable rendering engine.

Flash Player 10 can’t come soon enough!

A couple of weeks ago I created a small video demo of a project of mine code named “Anchor Sprite”. It is a small ActionScript 3 library to manage layout and constraints of display objects within a pure AS3 project.

View Original Post

The original post received no comments so I assumed no body is interested or the video wasn’t working or people just didn’t get it. So I want to now implicitly ask if anyone would like me to release this library?

This past week, to the annoyance of my wife, I’ve been working evenings after work to create a new website for the San Francisco Flash User Group from the ground up.  And today I’m pleased to announce the launch of the live “beta” version of the site.

Visit the new SanFlashcisco.com

The main objective for the next San Flashcisco meeting was to have the ability for users to create a profile on the site and be able to RSVP for the upcoming events.  And now I’m happy to announce we have those features on the site.

The site also offers threaded commenting on articles, events and on member profiles.

The next wave of features shall include:

• Flash/ActionScript Job Postings
• Flash Blog RSS Aggregator
• Article / Tutorial / Blog posting by Users
• Richer User Profiles (picture, contact information, skills, desired skills, recommendations, social graphing tools, etc)
• Promotion of 3rd party events taking place in SF

If you have any technical difficulties using the site, please let me know as I’ve only been able to test on OS X thus far. Also, if you have any feature suggestions I’d love to hear them.