Is there a list of reserved FlashVars names? - apache-flex

Currently I work on localization for a Flex application. From an article I know that you can control the localization with the following FlashVars:
resourceModuleURLs
localeChain
Are there any other FlashVars reserved by Adobe that a Flash/Flex Developer should know about?

I recently was playing with ContextMenuItem and found a list of words that cannot be used for a caption or label in a ContextMenuItem. Not sure if it helps.
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Also a hack was suggested here, although I never tried it personally.

This article has a fairly easy tutorial. The conversation in the comments will cover a few best practices for you as well.
Here is an adobe livedoc on runtime localization that you may not have seen yet either.
This final link provides an update on the changes in the localization API made in Flex 3 and documents the deprecated and new classes/methods, etc. (a list with examples is at the bottom of the document).
On a side note if anyone is looking for a tool to help out with translations David Deraedt wrote some nice air apps called Lupo Localization Studio that are reasonably inexpensive.

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Is there an orthodox way to develop Android TV apps

I have a few problems with understanding of android tv development. First of all when i had launched android tv project and was trying to create custom interface for new activity, unfortunately i couldn't find any xml elements which could help me. From the example i got some ideas that whole interface provided by android SDK collected in many fragments. I just can modify colors, fonts, fonts size, transparency maybe animation and etc. But if i really need to customize structure of controls and WTF i wanna output "Hello World" inside label!!! Is it possible? I read all articles from this link https://developer.android.com/training/tv/index.html but it is still useless for me (maybe I am unique :) ). After this suffering with google guide, i have done a conclusion that the platform so new and there is no way to do some thing except only way that was provided by google. Am i right? If not, what should i do to find successful way?
The fragments provided by Google as part of the "leanback" framework are templates designed to make it easy for content providers to start publishing to Android TV without having to worry about the technical details of building a TV UI. The idea is that a content provider can create a channel just by feeding in their video content. This ease of use comes at a cost, customization is difficult or impossible with these templates.
However there is nothing preventing you from creating your own Activities and Fragments from scratch and implementing a completely custom UI for the TV, it works just like any other Android device. Add "android.intent.category.LEANBACK_LAUNCHER" to your manifest and see for yourself.

What's the difference between stage video and spark video display?

I'm a little confused on the terms. I understand that the spark framework has a video player and a video display. The difference being that video display doesn't have the video controls.
I know that stage video is new in AIR3 and uses hardware acceleration to play videos.
My question is, does videodisplay and videoplayer take advantage of stage video out of the box? Do I need to implement it another way?
After doing some research StageVideo for AIR desktop and extended desktop profiles is not available.
There seems to be an announcement about AIR in the coming days. Hopefully they put this on the road map. Some adobe guys hinted that this is coming.
I don't find any references to it within VideoDisplay and I don't see anything in VideoPlayer regarding StageVideo, plus from reading this article it sounds to me like they would keep them as two completely separate beasts, due to the possibility that the GPU is already in use and therefore can't be used at any given point in time (just what it sounds like to me). http://corlan.org/2010/12/01/working-with-stage-video/
Also when I Ctrl+Shift+T to get to VideoDisplay and VideoPlayer it specifically notes that they aren't optimized for mobile, which it seems is the main purpose for the new class (it's built in to the flash player it seems so I can't access the source).
If you're looking for something with pre-packaged controls and that can take advantage of the new StageVideo, check out the open source media framework (OSMF) says they support it in versions > 1.6. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.adobe.com%2Fosmf%2F2011%2F02%2Fgetting-started-with-stage-video-support-in-osmf-and-strobe-media-playback.html&ei=gbo6T46qKIyXtwedwonzCg&usg=AFQjCNHpm7AV9MZHw79TZjAs_nIZc-qoow&sig2=45WDlwOlB60uMzivf1fZOw

Client Technology Choice - Any HTML5/Canvas libraries as capable as Flash/Flex?

I know similar questions have been closed for it being "impossible to answer objectively", but stick with me here.
I built a prototype in Adobe Flex, they (customers) liked it. Everything was fine until they later told me that iPads / iOS needs to be supported too.
I checked out Adobe's Packager for iPhone. We're evaluating that and we will know if it works out in a couple of days. (We need to get through Apple's red tape and certificates raj so this angle is delayed by a few days!)
There is a growing voice for using HTML5/Canvas as a technology platform itself. And despite being quite proficient in Flex, I think this makes sense.
I'm in need of a HTML5 library that can:
Render "widgets" i.e. containers with forms and components (this should be easy and possible using POHJC - Plain old HTML, JavaScript and CSS ;-) )
Provide a Tree like control for laying out some data
Provide a Canvas where data structures can be represented as basic shapes
Provide drag and drop capabilities between Trees, Buttons and Canvas
Provide some sort of Tab Navigator container (I guess JQuery works here)
Interact with back-end services (JSON/XML calls will be okay, but mapping directly with back-end entities will be awesome!)
Renders on latest versions of major browsers, Android OS and iOS (WebKit for mobile?)
Am I asking for too much?
I'm ready to give JQuery & JQuery UI a try.
I looked at Sencha / ExtJS but it seems we need to maintain two code bases one for normal browsers and the other for mobiles (is that correct?)
Are there any other JS libraries worth trying out?
My concerns areas are
Single code base, I don't want to suggest to them that multiple code bases for the client need to be maintained. That's a last resort option and would lead to complete ruling out of HTML5 with Flash apps and native apps being developed.
Canvas capabilities - I don't want to work with raw canvas and shape tags. This too is a last resort option. Is there any abstraction available?
Integration with back-end services, obviously I need some capability here!
Help me out. Communitywikify this if required.
Thanks,
Sri
How about trying Vaadin?
http://vaadin.com/comparison
I do construe its irrelevant to your question, but still this framework can help in great deal. I still use Flex and PHP as main base for many application, but actually fell in love with Vaadin and started using it for my new projects.
Grant Skinner the flash guru is working on a html5 libary. It has some features you requested. It is still in development.
The new Canvas element in HTML5 is powerful, but it can be difficult to work with. It has no internal concept of discrete display elements, so you are required to manage updates manually. The Easel Javascript library provides a full, hierarchical display list, a core interaction model, and helper classes to make working with Canvas much easier.
The libary is called easeljs, you can find it here : http://easeljs.com/
For the normal html and css manipulations without html canvas JQuery is very easy to learn.

.NET : How to Create thumbnail from flash

Is there any way where i can create a thumbnail image from a flash movie file(flv /swf) [NOT FROM A VIDEO File ] in ASP.NET ? Any samples of implementation ?
you can use ffmpeg to create thumbnails of the flash video
For .flv you can use ffmpeg to convert parts of the video (e.g. one frame) into an image (sequence)
I've used it as command-line application by calling Process.Start(), but there is at least one wrapper for .NET (I haven't tested it myself):
http://www.codeplex.com/ffmpegdotnet
For .swf I don't know any way to achieve this without some Adobe tool.
for flv it can be done easily, as others mentioned ...
for swf, it depends HIGHLY on the swf ... if the swfs visual appearence is determined by code, there is no other way than to embed a flash player in you app and either let the flash player make the snapshots, encode them as JPEG/PNG, and send them somewhere using TCP or LocalConnection (a flash<->flash communication connection, which can be used with C# as well) or try to somehow grab its output buffer yourself ... the first possibility should be no more than 10-20 lines of actionscript code ... don't know about the latter ...
other than that, you might use an external command line converter ... there are a few floating around the web ...
greetz
back2dos
Take a look at this article, it should point you in the right direction. It uses SharpFFmpeg to extract thumbnail images from movie clips from a variety of formats.
the only way to get an image, is to use a full flash client that starts playing and allows you to capture the first frame.
I would take a close look at flirt (they actually have an example that renders pngs)
Maybe some of the other flash libraries may be of help ( swfdec gnash swift tools gplflash)
Gnash is probably the best choice since its the most mature project out there, but i do not know how easy it is to integrate into command line tools or into your own projects.
We have been working on this in my company, and we got a proof of concept working pretty fast (but the project we made it for is on hold right now). I am not able to share the code, but I can give you some pointers.
It is not pure ASP.NET, but maybe you can still use it. We made a windows service that can be called from ASP.NET.
Basicly you install the flash plugin on the server, the windows services can then simply open the swf through the swf ActiveX component and then you can grap a picture of the whole thing. It works pretty well, notice that you do not have to actually render the ActiveX component on screen to capture the picture.
Check out this post. It does not tell you everything but I guess it provides the ground work required for it. You probably have to figure out how to get the object tag out of the flash-html you are trying to download from a web page. After that you'd have to figure out when to capture the frames. Its a long ride however. You don't need the asp.net part. Just concentrate on the windows project part. Hope this helps. :)

What features do you need the most in Adobe Air?

I recently started to develop using Flex 3 and Adobe Air and I wanted to know what features you want to be in futures releases of Adobe Air ?
The ones that I miss are:
Cross-systems way of launching a local file (shellExec) right from an Air application (although you can do this using workaround at least under Windows)
Ability to setup dynamic paths for Embed statement (e.g. Embed[(variable+"/path/to/file")] ). I didn't find any way to do this properly.
Some way of setting Flex object's positions with absolute values from CSS (that sounds more Flex related by the way)
Don't hesitate to add your workarounds to theses limitations if you know somes.
Ability to call out to native code - you currently have to ship a server written in another language and make calls to that to do anything more than Air gives you.
Modal windows. There's a hack you can do which involves setting Application.application.enabled = false, setting dialog.nativeWindow.alwaysInFront = true and then re-enabling the application when the dialog closes, but this is long-winded and doesn't disable any native menus you may have! It's crazy that something so simple is made so difficult.
A usable way to set the application's icon. I spent 2 hours trying to do this the other day and gave up after persistent "303" errors that gave me no idea of what I was doing wrong. Again, really basic stuff.
"Call native code", "Modal windows", agree-agree.
loadLibrary would be really great :)
ps.:
if we can not have this features in AIR, if would be awesome to have an opportunity to embed flash(AIR) graphics engine into your own app. in that case we'll get great performance improvement and liberty of choice what to write (not only small gadgets).

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