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Obviously Facebook is popping up everywhere and I’m sure a lot of companies will be looking to integrate it with flash. Pieter Michels has started a great effort in bridging Facebook Connect and Flash using Actionscript 3. He provides a simple example using Flex and AS3.

Pieter Michels post on Facebook Connect to Actionscript 3
Pieter Michels Code Library at github as FBFlashBridge

Example of Facebook Connect with Flash at http://connect.redbullusa.com/

http://developers.facebook.com/
Facebook Connect Wiki
Facebook Developer Forum

UPDATE 3/30/09: I just noticed this post while looking through Facebook documentation. Looks like Adobe and Facebook are officially working together to support Flash and Facebook.

ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform - revamped open source version by Jason Crist
Adobe Developer Connection for Facebook - materials and samples

Forgot to mention there was an recent update to the Career Navigator for the Army Experience Center. I worked on making the Papervision 3D helix loop around and adding in the job titles on the planes and various other bug fixes and improvements.

Text in Papervision 3D - Clearing Things Up - This post by Andy Zupko helped with making the text a bit clearer on the planes (basically you need to use a larger textfield and change some settings) - check out his post and demo if your text is unclear on planes.

Tom and John put on a great 360 | iDev Conference. It was a pretty relaxing conference where we were all well fed (breakfast, lunch, dinner) with sessions that were just the right length. There were also pre-hands-on sessions to bring people like me up to speed that have never worked on iPhone development before. Since I’m a flash developer, James Eberhardt’s hands-on session that relates flash development to the iPhone SDK was especially very helpful. He actually teaches a 2-Day course on it with the Rich Media Institute.

Overall, the conference was well worth it and more than I expected. It was inexpensive and a great introduction to the iPhone development world. It was also nice to learn that part of the fees goes towards a charity. Awesome job Tom and John!

Slides from the conference: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/360idev

Here are a couple links/blogs I collected from the session speakers:
http://www.craftymind.com/
http://iphonedeveloperjournal.com/
http://www.byteclub.com/
http://jonathansaggau.com/blog/
http://gamesfromwithin.com/
http://alanmusselman.com/blog/
http://www.mobclix.com/
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/
http://www.luisdelarosa.com/
http://iphone.timefold.com/training/myschool/resources.html
http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/

I remember this previous problem with a ComboBox not showing up properly when a swf is loaded into a parent swf and the problem came up again as I was updating a project to AS3.

Main reason for problem (according to yarcub):
“The component uses system fonts and masks only work on embedded fonts.
Finally the FP10 new text engine will fix a lot of those issues.”

Here’s more info on the problem and possible solutions:
http://www.gotoandlearnforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=19118

I just bought my ticket for 360|iDev! The show will be going down March 2 to 4, 2009. You can find more details at the conference website: http://360iDev.com It’s being organized by the folks who put on the 360|Flex shows, which is a crowd favorite. Tickets are cheaper on a first come, first serve basis! So buy your tickets asap at http://360idev.eventbrite.com to get the best possible price. I did! See you there. ( I copied this from the receipt, doing my part to spread the word. )

I know everyone is trying to save money so here is a 10% off coupon from Brightkite : “brightkiterocks“. It came out to $315.

Now its time to find a good flight and hotel deal.

UPDATE: Booked a pretty good flight-hotel deal on Hotwire using Discover Card which gives 5% cash back as well. Total came out to be $421 for flight AA roundtrip from LAX and 3 Nights Holiday Inn.

I’m working on converting a AS2 project to AS3 and this error showed up. “WARNING: Text field variable names are not supported in ActionScript 3.0.” I had trouble finding the problem, but it turned out I just had to change the publish settings back to AS2 first then I could delete the text field variable being used for the text field. You can’t change or even see that there is a text field variable when the publish settings are AS3.

Just found out about this AS3 AIR/Flex/Flash Debugger called De MonsterDebugger from Tiago’s Weblog. I’ll definitely have to try it out for my next project. Editing properties during runtime will definitely come in handy when trying to satisfy the positioning of elements for designers.

De MonsterDebugger

I had this problem in Flash, which entailed disabling some dynamic buttons that had mouseover,mouseout and click events when they were moved under a certain area. This was easily solved by creating an invisible button and setting the property useHandCursor = false. So if you want to disable anything that moves under some area, you can just create a button and set its useHandCursor = false and anything below it will not work. I’m pretty sure I came across this problem before because it seems so familiar. Hopefully this post will help me remember how to solve it and others if they come across this problem as well