I left Glue and joined Iris in September where I’m now Head of Interactive. Still developing on a daily basis, I lead the 4 or 5 strong Flash team here (+ a bunch of freelancers) and my days are split between bookable AS3 dev time and a smorgasbord of brainstorming, pitch work, creative consultancy, scoping, team management and technical R&D (when we’re not too busy which isn’t as often as I’d like). We’re a gloriously flat organisation and use mongrel Photoshop/Flash/Copy/UX/AE/3DSMAX/Assorted Wizardry creatives instead of traditional agency pairs which is brilliant. They’re some of the nicest and most talented folk I’ve had the pleasure of working with and all’s well.

I went to FITC Amsterdam ByteArray workshop & conference http://bit.ly/5lSRzT which absolutely rocked. Herr’s Reitberger http://www.prinzipiell.com and Klingemann http://www.quasimondo.com in particular were outstanding. I left there feeling reinvigorated and creatively inspired as a great conference should.

So; August 2010 I just updated my WP installation to shiny 3.1 behind the scenes and am back in the glorious future.

TODO – Update my portfolio with the ~100 sites I’ve worked on since I last updated
TODO – Post several very useful snippets of code I’ve written in various languages
TODO – Tool up to battle the accursed spammers (main reason I let this blog slip)
TODO – Maybe some sort of JQuizzle WP Skin upgrade when I get a spare minute

I’m afraid I just deleted 36,786 comments this afternoon & reading any of them wasn’t an option so if you’ve trying to get hold of me for legitimate purposes I apologise. Please try the other social channels available via the links on this blog if you want to get in touch.

Warm Regards,

Rob

[code lang="actionscript"]

Error: unable to build font 'B Nasim'

[Embed(source='/../fonts/arabic/BNasimBd.ttf',
^

Error: Unable to transcode /../fonts/arabic/BNasimBd.ttf.

^

[/code]

I've also noticed that I only experience these transcoding issues that I mention on fonts where the font name contains a space, this could perhaps be a coincidence but it's coming up a little too frequently for it to be chance. If you have a font that you are forced to use; I would consider editing it in FontLab or similar and modifying the font name metadata.

[code lang="actionscript"]

UPDATE: Got this working with no MXML in FDT compiling against Flex SDK 4.0.0.7052. FDT Project src below:

[/code]

@UPDATE May 26t 09h: FDT no MXML version : app here – FDT Project src here

—————————————————————————————————————————

#OLD Anyway here’s what you’re after, an example (some hindi poetry) and some gloriously open source (get the source from the Flex Builder srcview tree):

Examples with embedded fonts using the new Text Engine are thin on the ground, partly due to proprietary font files. I’ve picked JanaHindi as it’s open source and freely downloadable from here courtesy of our friends the Indian Government. Namaskar

If you want to compile this you’ll need the FP10 debuggers, Flex Builder (I have standalone 3.0214193) compiling against the latest Adobe (not open source) SDK from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4 I  had luck with  4.0.0.705. For the Text Engine Layout components, the package flash.text.engine and flashx.textLayout come bundled with recent builds of the Gumbo SDK. If you want just the textLayout package, use a nightly build from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/textlayout.html

API changes like the renaming of hostParagraphFormat and DisplayObjectContainerController ( now hostFormat & ContainerController respectively) and function names like flowComposer.updateAllContainers  which is now flowComposer.updateAllControllers make things a bit tricky as they change on a per nightly build basis but I found that using the ASDoc from specific builds and some common sense you can get around most of these. Running other examples I kept getting the error :

[code lang="actionscript"]
ArgumentError: Error #1063: Argument count mismatch on flashx.textLayout.property::NumberProperty(). Expected 6, got 5 [/code]

…whenever I instantiated a ParagraphFormat. I am just putting all the issues I came across here as googling them should then show up this post and help people out.

I think the key thing is to remember to add CFF (Compact Font Format) as an embed arg and understand the differences between DefineFont3 and DefineFont4 http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo+Font+Embedding

As mentioned I am currently unable to get embedded fonts to transcode and embed correctly using FDT despite compiling against the same SDK. I prefer FDT to Flex Builder and in my opinion Flex has some serious drawbacks, principally in the way it bloats everything with hundreds of kilobytes of framework code that I have no intention of using, though lets not get into the Flex bashing, it’s a post for another day! I have just collected a few things that people may find useful…

Transcoding – I experienced numerous errors with seemingly identical files. OpenType and Truetype information may or may not be present in font files which are identical as far as WinXP is concerned. As I’m not hardcore into typography I don’t have FontLab or any such goodies so I can only conjecture that there must be some sort of metadata required but I know not what. Digging around online a lot of people were able to solve this by using these compiler mods. I was not:

• -managers=flash.fonts.AFEFontManager
• -managers=flash.fonts.JREFontManager
• -managers=flash.fonts.BatikFontManager

Flex 4 Gumbo SDK issues:

• I kept getting errors related to the Gumbo namespacing e.g: “Could not resolve <Application> to a component implementation.” my solution is in the posted source code.
• Design view doesn’t work with the Text Layout Components (not bothered and doesn’t affect the finished SWF)
• Remember to edit project preferences to target FP10 (I just publish the SWF direct & skip FB’s HTML integration)

There are a few nice articles I recommend checking out too:

• http://www.insideria.com/2009/03/flash-text-engine.html
• http://blog.flexexamples.com/2008/08/02/using-the-beta-gumbo-sdk-in-flex-builder-3/
• http://sherifabdou.com/2008/09/flash-player-text-engine-examples-for-flex-4-gumbo/
• http://rest-term.com/archives/975/ (Japanese article about ScrollPolicy)
• http://corlan.org/2009/01/19/how-to-use-text-layout-framework-in-flex-32-or-air-15/
• http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo+Font+Embedding

That last one explains why Text Engine text is not compatible with flash.text.TextField text and why you’ll have to embed the same font in a project twice at present if you wish to mix and match the methodologies. It also mentions performance issues with Vellum but I can’t verify these yet.

Adobe make great software & it’s only pragmatic that they nail down the API in one branch before they spread it out across their toolsets but why is it the Flex branch rather than the pure Actionscript one where the focus is? I would suspect this is a tactical business decision to flog Flex Builder. In my opinion anything that is possible in Flex should also be possible in Flash/Pure Actionscript and vice versa; they are 2 sides of the same coin – I’ve no vested interest in either I just want tools that make complex jobs simpler. The most annoying aspect of “Flex Creep” is things like the Embed tags creating Classes that extend items within the Flex specific MX package. Here’s an example – this Embed code:

[code lang="actionscript"]
[Embed(source='/../fonts/RKJanaHindi.TTF',
fontName = "JanaHindi",
mimeType = "application/x-font",
cff='true')]
public static var JanaHindiClass : Class;

[/code]

Creates a Class that extends  mx.core.FontAsset - forcing you to include the otherwise unnecessay Flex MX framework

Anyone from Adobe listening – Please don’t do this! And also Text Layout Engine is such a mouthful, can we go back to Vellum? Is this a copyright issue?

Anyway, I hope that was useful – thanks to anyone who made it all the way through! Cheerio

The AS3 unzips this data, grabs the blob/face detection data, polls frames from the camera and scans them for faces. When it finds them it will draw a rectangle around the detected faces and render them back on top of the video feed.

Check it out at http://bit.ly/HYkJF

A quick nose at the OpenCV Wikipedia stub will show you just how interesting this technology is as it’s used for:

• Ego-motion
• Face Recognition
• Gesture Recognition

FDT made knocking this together and sharing it on SVN in house at Glue a breeze. Hopefully I’ll knock something up with this and share some source other than what Squidder has already kindly posted.

Cheerio

•  http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=the_sun_newspaper

In my rummagings on Cross Domain I discovered this good hack for accessing the pixels from Video on distributed CDN’s:

• http://jessewarden.com/2009/03/handling-crossdomainxml-and-302-redirects-using-netstream.html

More posts soon hopefully although my day to day link posting is all being done via Twitter these days so follow along if you’re interested in these things. I am endeavouring to keep my microblogging professional rather than letting you know I am ‘on the bus’/'popped to the shop’ etc so Flash goodies are promised 

• http://www.lostinactionscript.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/25/fitc-amsterdam-presentation/
• http://wiki.joa-ebert.com/index.php/Category:Code_Optimization 

I’ve been trying to save some of these little loops e.g. [code lang="actionscript"] list[length] = item; [/code]which for a simple Array push for example is 3x faster than:[code lang="actionscript"] list.push(item); [/code]out as FDT  snippets called arrPush for example so that I don’t even have to remember to use them and the benefits will appear throughout production rather than post optimization whcih can be a pain. In other news, I’ve been spending a lot of time getting used to Fabrication this week and it really is incredibly good. I’ll post something about it in the next fortnight. Happy Friday all

 Rename the .air to .zip and decompress (I use Winzip) – it throws an error but you get some source including a .swf which you can then run through a decompiler (I use Sothink) and you get the symbols (PNG’s, Movieclips etc…). This could be useful under certain circumstances so I thought I’d share. Cheerio

www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/10/cory-doctorow-digital-britain

Absolutely not. We will march through the streets of Shoreditch!

And also IE8 actually introduces 2 new browsers to test in because IE7 ‘Compatibility Mode’ does not render sites in the same was as IE7 ????? See news here from IE’s marketing department and a pretty damning analysis from someone with more sense

Please don’t use IE ever! Chrome is blisteringly fast and doesn’t crash because if one tab hangs you can kill that process without losing the whole application and having to kill your session (though god knows what private data is collected while you use it) but I’m split between that and Firefox 3 as it’s got so many amazing tools and I love Mozilla. If Google would only add FFox plugin support though…