jun :: realeyes

Here’s a screen cast I did recently on the basics of Flash Catalyst.  It illustrates a work flow from Photoshop to Flash Catalyst and then on to Flash Builder 4.  Enjoy.

Tutorial: Intro to Flash Catalyst from Jun Heider on Vimeo.

Thanks to all who stayed till the last session of the last day of MAX 2009 to watch my talk “Tackling Memory and Performance in Flash, Flex, and Adobe AIR“. I hope it was worth your while!

Thanks to Jonathan Campos for working together with me on prepping the session on short notice during MAX and talking at the Tuesday session, it was an honor, and pretty fun too.

Here are some links to the assets:

1. Slides/Resource link PDFs

2. FXPs of the demos I used during the talk

3. Resource links page online

Also, for those that couldn’t make it, here’s a screen cast of the presentation which is embedded below.

So I’m trying to get some screencasts recorded for a class I’m teaching on Flex.  For some reason my Screenflow program version 1.5.2 could no longer save files after my Snow Leopard upgrade.  So I decided, hey, now’s a good time to try out the Quicktime screen recording feature that was built into Snow Leopard.

So after an hour of trying to actually get through anything useful…

Let me put it this way, I found out there’s a Screenflow 1.5.4 update that can save files on Snow Leopard and I’m back to Screenflow.

Let me put it another way, 116 CPU%??  Yeah…that wasn’t even the highest I saw it.  For a little while it was at 147 CPU%.

So in a nutshell…another thumbs down for Snow Leopard.  Oh, and I like Screenflow.

I’m starting to really enjoy conditional breakpoints in Flash Builder 4.  They take a little getting used to, but once you start getting the hang of them, they’re a very helpful tool to speed up your debugging.

Here’s a demonstration on how to use them.  Also, if you noticed, I had slapped together the code in a couple of minutes to run this demo, needless to say, there were a couple of things that needed be tweaked.  Anyway, if you want the source to run this demo on your own it’s available as a zipped Flex 4 project export (FXP) here –> http://www.iheartair.com/samples/screencast_assets/ConditionalBreakpointDemo.fxp.zip

Just note, if you pull the project source down, you’ll need to extract the zip file to get to the FXP.

Enjoy the video!

Conditional Breakpoints in Flash Builder 4 from Jun Heider on Vimeo.

I got a chance to play with Merapi for the first time yesterday.  The reason behind needing Merapi was a limitation in the Flash Player on getting sound information from the microphone.

Here’s a quick demonstration and code walkthrough.

Creating an analog audio controller with Merapi and AIR from Jun Heider on Vimeo.

Couple notes:

1. Although I could have used FFT, I based the frequency analyzer on this Java-based guitar tuner app I found online. It was a much simpler solution for my needs. Thanks John Montgomery!
2. The sound you hear in the demo is not my guitar.  It’s actually sounds being dynamically generated using the Flash Player 10 Sound API based on the frequency information sent from Java to AIR via Merapi.
3. This code is POC quality, basically a toy.  Things could have been optimized and there are a couple bugs to work out.  However, it’s pretty cool as is.

It’s pretty messy right now and lacking comments, etc. so I’m going to hold off on releasing it.  As soon as I do, which will probably be via merapi-examples, I’ll announce it.

In the meantime, here’s some useful links to help get you started:

• http://www.merapiproject.net/
• http://blog.everythingflex.com/2009/05/30/how-to-checkout-merapi-examples/ (Rich is da man!)
  
• http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3457251 (If you want to learn about FFT)
• http://www.hulstkamp.com/2008/09/12/sound-in-flash-10-beta-generating-waveforms-timbre-and-pitch/175 (Info and the reference I used when playing with Flash Player 10 Sound API.)

Anyway, enjoy the screencast, and start playing with Merapi!  Make some noise!