If you are unaware of what DropBox is, I’d suggest having a quick look at their overview video.  I have found it to be an excellent service and highly recommend it!

If anyone wants an invite- I have a few left so just leave a comment below!

The VMC works very closely with those of us on the DU VAGA development team and most of the feedback we receive about the application originates with users from this area.  This week, Leslie writes about two pretty large additions to the application environment; the inclusion of PicLens on digital object search results,  and a standalone application that I’ve been heavily involved in this summer called the DU VAGA Projection System.

What may be of interest to most of my readers is that the DU VAGA Projection System [VPS] is written using Flex and ActionScript 3 for deployment via Adobe AIR.  Though it is not the first application from the university built for the AIR runtime (see the Fridlyand Kiosk software), it is certainly the most complex.

The software takes advantage of a few AIR-specific capabilities including the ability to integrate with the operating system in terms of hardware discovery (and the flexibility to adapt to various configurations), the power to read and write files to a local hard drive, and extensive use of windowing technology.  This application also makes heavy use of Coldfusion 8 and Flash Media Server 3.

I may be writing more on this software and other efforts at the university in the near future.  In fact, many of my recent posts were born directly from work on this specific project.

Visit Unmasked.

There are a number of steps to take when preparing your app for this sort of thing. This example was adapted from a much larger application and there may also be some imports and properties that are not necessary for our narrow purpose here. I’m sure my method is not the only one and I’m not saying it’s perfect either! Taking the following steps should produce a similar result though:

1) Edit your application descriptor file to set the initial main application window x and y positions off screen.

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<!-- The window's initial x position. Optional. -->
<x>-1000</x>
<!-- The window's initial y position. Optional. -->
<y>-1000</y>

2) I have also set an applicationComplete event within the WindowedApplication node.

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<mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:custom="components.*" 
	layout="absolute" horizontalScrollPolicy="off" verticalScrollPolicy="off" 
	showFlexChrome="true" applicationComplete="{init()}" currentState="SplashState">

3) The init function reads as follow:

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private function init():void {
	mainWindow = this.stage.nativeWindow;
 
	var splashWindowinitOptions:NativeWindowInitOptions = new NativeWindowInitOptions();
	splashWindowinitOptions.transparent = true;
	splashWindowinitOptions.systemChrome = NativeWindowSystemChrome.NONE;
	splashWindowinitOptions.type = NativeWindowType.UTILITY;
 
	splashWindow = new NativeWindow(splashWindowinitOptions);
	splashWindow.title = "Splash Example";
 
	appSplash = new SplashScreen();
	hiddenCanvas.addChild(appSplash);
	hiddenCanvas.removeChild(appSplash);
 
	splashWindow.stage.scaleMode = 'noScale';
	splashWindow.stage.align = 'topLeft';
	splashWindow.stage.addChild(appSplash);
	splashWindow.x = Screen.mainScreen.visibleBounds.width/2 - 300;
	splashWindow.y = Screen.mainScreen.visibleBounds.height/2 - 200;
	splashWindow.width = 600;
	splashWindow.height = 400;
	splashWindow.activate();
 
	mainWindow.visible = false;
 
	splashTimer = new Timer(1000, 2);
	splashTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, removeSplash);
	splashTimer.start();
 
	this.removeEventListener(FlexEvent.APPLICATION_COMPLETE, init);
}

The NativeWindowInitOptions are hugely important as they will render the window chromeless and transparent.

“SplashScreen” is a custom component which simply holds material for display- such as an image or text or whatever you want users to see as a visible splash screen.

Since I am using the ActionScript NativeWindow class here and not the Flex Window component, we must add the display object first to a hidden element in our Flex application. It’s weird but is something you must do if you want your splash screen to be visible when doing it this way.

We then activate our splash window and make the main app window invisible. In the case of this example, I have a timer that runs to determine when to remove the splash screen and bring up the main app window. In most cases, this would instead be reliant on some background process such as a data load.

4) Next comes the function that fires when we want to remove the splash screen and start using our app.

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private function removeSplash(e:TimerEvent):void {
	mainWindow.x = Screen.mainScreen.visibleBounds.width/2 - mainWindow.width/2;
	mainWindow.y = Screen.mainScreen.visibleBounds.height/2 - mainWindow.height/2;
 
	mainWindow.visible = true;
	mainWindow.activate();
 
	splashWindow.stage.removeChild(appSplash);
	splashWindow.close();
	splashWindow = null;
 
	currentState = "LoadedState";
	splashTimer.stop();
	splashTimer.removeEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, removeSplash);
	splashTimer = null;
}

So, we reset reposition the main window onto the screen, render it visible again, and activate it. This will cause it to spring to life and now the app is running for our user. We then perform some cleanup routines on the splash screen and timer objects so they will not linger in memory any longer.

There we have it! I’ve made the source available as a Flex Project Archive.

With FMS3, there is Client.videoSampleAccess: a property of the Flash Media Server 3 that allows direct access to raw stream data for video use (”audioSampleAccess” for audio).  This can be used for things like producing visual audio spectrums or grabbing a still from a video stream.  It is applied within the onConnect method of the Application server class as demonstrated here:

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appClient.audioSampleAccess = "/";
appClient.videoSampleAccess = "/";

In the above example, the “/” signifies that any streams within the application directory are allowed to be sampled in this way.  You can also specify a semicolon-delimited list of folder names instead if you need to be picky.

Something I came across today and the whole point of this post: even when you have Client.videoSampleAccess set up properly on Flash Media Server, you will still receive a security sandbox violation error #2123 if the stream data is not available.  This can easily happen if you have a timer invoking BitmapData.draw every few milliseconds on loading content.

One way to get around this is using NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS making sure it reports “NetStream.Buffer.Full” before attempting to access the stream data.  Depending on what you are doing, you can oftentimes check the object recieving the stream data to be sure it is accessible first.  this all seems really obvious now, but threw me for a bit of a loop, initially.

Special thanks to Jesse Sola of Numina for hooking me up with this great location.

As a side note; “Prison” can also be purchased at iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby and many others…

I’ve had the feature disabled for a few months now, but with the release of AIR 1.1 and the Flex 3.0.2 SDK, I decided to try and enable it again.  Unfortuanately, this has had no affect on this particular issue- so it must be more FB-related than SDK-related.

If anyone has any insight on this issue- I’m all ears.

Apparently, the mx.core.Window class was added in AIR 1.0 to resolve this problem.  The Window class is a sort of UIComponent wrapper for a NativeWindow.  This allows you to add other components directly to the Window through addChild().  Though in my particular situation, it simply caused more issues as the Window component class seems to inherit the properties of your initial application window somewhat- therefore, if you are trying to generate chromeless, transparent windows in a standard application interface… you can’t.

In the end, I find flash.display.NativeWindow a lot more flexible than mx.core.Window… and it is most likely a bit lighter in terms of the codebase as well.  The Window class may be a good option in some situations, and it’s really good to know that it exists.  You can never have too many options!

So… just a quick notification that the site will be updated soon with the expectation of regular, informative, and hopefully interesting commentary and useful information.

I’d recommend anyone having weird issues with FMS2 to upgrade as soon as you possibly can. It only takes about 15 minutes and will preserve all your current applications. I did need to update some of my client SWFs- but only because of how much more accurate this new version is.

While I had to continually monitor FMS2 for various problems, this new server has been nothing but stable, fast, and just a great performer all-around! I am honestly so pleased with the results that I want to give a general ‘thanks’ to the team involved in this latest release. You have taken a load off my shoulders!

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import flash.net.NetConnection;
import flash.net.ObjectEncoding;
NetConnection.defaultObjectEncoding = flash.net.ObjectEncoding.AMF0;

The error “Unknown object type tag (17)” was being generated by CF8 as I attempted to pass an Object in AS3 over remoting to CF8 interpreted as a Structure. Apparently, there is also the need to wrap any such Object within a container Object for it to be properly read by the CFC:

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var wrapper:Object = new Object();
wrapper.submissionObject = submissionObject;
submissionResponder = new Responder(onSubmissionResult, onSubmissionError);
testConnection.call("some.cfc.Test", submissionResponder, wrapper);

The CFC function expects a Structure named “submissionObject” in this case.

I hope this is helpful for someone- I had a hell of a time digging up this information.