Yesterday MBUSA.com launched their website redesign. The new site is a major face lift from the old version, which was beginning to look outdated in comparison to many of its competitors. Every single element of the site has been upgraded and built completely in Flash, improving the overall user experience throughout.
I worked on the initial stages of this redesign at Critical Mass over two years ago. My involvement at the time was building a working prototype of the site in Flash. Only a few vehicles could be selectable back then, but overall the site’s design has not changed too much. The Mercedes-Benz’ development team has done a great job of finishing it off.
Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this site.
I just stumbled across a great article by Josh Tynjala on the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center. Josh writes about the new features of ActionScript 3.0, focusing on working with the Display List, changes to root and parent, and encapsulation. I’m sure this article has been around for some time, but if you are just getting into AS3 and have not yet seen this article, then I highly recommend you read it.
http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/articles/display-list.html
The Yahoo! Flash Developer Center also has some great open-source components available for download. I am playing around with the Charts and I am very impressed. These seem like a great and free alternative to FusionCharts, which at this time are not available for ActionScript 3.0.
Here are some examples of the Yahoo! ASTRA Charts:
http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/astra-flash/charts/examples.html
Make sure you check out the launch of Adobe CS3 today at 3:30pm EST.
The new products include:
- Adobe InDesign CS3
- Adobe Photoshop CS3
- Adobe Illustrator CS3
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
- Adobe Flash CS3 Professional
- Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
- Adobe Fireworks CS3
- Adobe Contribute CS3
- Adobe After Effects CS3
- Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
- Adobe Encore CS3
- Adobe Soundbooth CS3
The launch will be broadcasted here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/launchevent/webcast/
If you are interested, here are the new features of Flash CS3
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/features/
I am sure this is old news to many of you, but today was the first time I have run into this issue. I am working on a site for a client that has very high accessibility requirements. I originally built my project to be controlled using the mouse and was asked this morning to add the ability to navigate it using the arrow keys of the keyboard. It only took me a couple minutes to get this functionality working in Flash, but when I tested it using Firefox I was not getting any response from the keyboard. I tried it out in IE7 and everything worked like a charm. After a couple minutes of searching I came across this site and found my solution. Apparently Firefox always returns the Key.isDown() function as false if you have wmode=”transparent” or wmode=”opaque” in your html object and embed tags, but if you use Key.getCode() everything works perfect.
Here is a snippet of code showing the workaround to this issue:
Read more…
While reading through MXNA today, I came across an article written by Peter Baird outlining new updates to the latest release of the Flex Style Explorer. This application is a huge time saver when creating CSS to control the look of your Flex applications.
Some of the new features include:
- Advanced Color Picker
- Export All CSS
- Support for StyleName Styles
- Text Formatting Styles
- Text-Entry for Slider Controls
- Inclusion on New Components
- Improved Navigation
- Indication of Components Edited
- Progressive Disclosure of Controls
- Improved Graphic Representation of Styles
- Improved Scrollbar management
To read more about the new Flex Style Explorer visit Adobe Consulting.
Try the online version.