You are viewing the Articles published in

Adobe Soundbooth Preview

Adobe has released a preview of Soundbooth, their new audio editing software. Being that I used to be involved in audio production and sound design (check out my music site) I look forward to trying this one out for myself.

After a quick and easy install my first test was to see what file types Soundbooth supports and I was happy to see that 24bit .wav files are supported as well as most other standard audio file formats. A quick peek in the effects panel reveals that Soundbooth provides some basic audio effects such as chorus, flanger, vibrato and analog delay. The effect algorithms closely model their hardware equivalents and are a pretty good match in comparison to most effect units available today. However, the lack of a reverb unit is a bit of a let down. All of the effects render rather quickly compared to most other audio editors in the same product range. The zooming features take a bit of getting used to but they work just fine for a quick audio editor. I was also very happy to see that the app has yet to crash, which is pretty common amongst audio editors in general.

All in all I would recommend using Soundbooth for quick and easy audio edits as that seems to be it’s strongest point, and being that I am used to using Wavelab and other high end audio editors says alot about Soundbooth. I am happy with my initial test of soundbooth and look forward to seeing the product develop. You should definitely give it a try.

It is really cool to see everything finally coming together and all of the pieces falling into place. Adobe has been doing a great job as far as I a concerned. We now have a solid framework in which to build robust applications – Flex 2.0 built on Eclipse, as well as the Flex 2 SDK allowing anyone to develop applications in ActionScript and compile Flash content. Photoshop will now integrate seamlessly into Flash Professional 9 allowing designers, animators and developers to have a truly integrated work flow. Dreamweaver is being geared towards enforcing best practices in regards to css and xhtml validation. The Spry framework provides a framework for developing AJAX applications, the FlexAJAXBridge fills the gap between Flex apps and AJAX apps rather than building around proprietary technologies. And then there are all of the other things such as ASDoc which is invaluable in my opinion, the acquisition of Iteration 2 and Cairngorm becoming the defacto-standard micro architecture for Flex applications, and so on and so on… And now Adobe has added an audio application to fit the audio gap. And so it is really all coming together nicely.

Things have come along way in a short amount of time and it all seems to be for the better. It feels like just yesterday that the plans of the acquisition were announced. This is a great time to be a Flash Platform Developer – enjoy it.

Flex 2.0 Generic Portal Application

I built a generic, configurable portal application awhile back which I have added to my portfolio site. I even added a background image of myself acting like a nut which has a filter effect applied to it based on the position of the mouse cursor.

The Flex 2 Portal is a simple application that is intended to serve as a central location for launching multiple applications. It works great with Firefox as each application will load in a new tab in the same browser, allowing for all of the applications to run without appearing to be disjointed. You can also just simply use it as a portal for launching other websites.

You can view the Flex 2 portal application by clicking the image below. You can also right click and select ‘view source’ from the context menu to view the source code.

Portal

AS3 PHP LoginService API

This morning I wrote a quick API which allows you to easily invoke a PHP script from Flex 2, run a query on a MySQL database for authentication, and pass the results of the query back to the Flex client. The API consists of a simple login value object and a QueryService that calls an accompanying PHP script. The PHP script then runs a query based on the login value object passed in the query string as name value pairs.

The AS3 PHP LoginService API is intended to simply serve as a base class only. It is to be used as a starting point from which you can create a real world application based on sub-classing the QueryService to apply an MD5 encryption algorithm and so forth.

You can check out the example, accompanying ASDoc and source code as well as a Cairngorm 2.0 implementation which I created.

AS3 Iterator Pattern Implementation

The greatest thing about design patterns is that they are typically not much more than an efficient, structured way of doing things that most of us have already been doing for a long time. Design Patterns allow us to simplify common design problems into standard, common named solutions. By implementing common design patterns and best practices we can keep our applications consistant without re-inventing the wheel everytime. They allow us to solve the same problems over and over again in the same way. Design patterns also allow us to write code that is common amongst other developers. This is helpful as it allows other developers who are familiar with these patterns to easily and intuitively work with our code, and vice-versa.

Every Software Developer iterates over objects on a regular basis. That is, every software developer has the need to loop thru an array or traverse an object at some point during the development of an application. This is obviously a basic part of programming so we usually don’t give it much thought. However, once in while it is good to reflect upon the things that have become routine to determine if there is a common solution out there. We often run into situations where we create an API that consists of a collection of objects that a client may want to iterate over. In order to provide the required functionality we have to define an interface in which the client can iterate over our collection without exposing the collections underlying implementation. This is where the Iterator Pattern comes in handy. Iterators are used to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation. Iterators are intended to remove traversal responsibility out of the aggregate object.

I have created an AS3 Iterator API which consists of an interface (IIterator) that defines the methods which implement the Iterator Pattern. The IIterator interface is implemented by an internal base class (Iterator) which is sub classed by concrete iterator implementations (ArrayIterator, ArrayCollectionIterator and ObjectIterator). I have also provided an IteratorFactory which handles instantiating Iterator sub-classes so that they may be referenced by the same iterator instance.

You can view the example and ASDoc as well as download the swc for the AS3 Iterator API.

AS3 Custom Tween API v0.9.3

After numerous requests I finally found the time to update my AS3 Custom Tween API to version 0.9.3.

In case you are not familiar with the Tween API it is a simple API which enables any object on the display list to have a tween effect applied to a property of the object. You can view the the original Tween API post here.

Version 0.9.3 has had the following additions implemented:

  1. Tween Interval has been increased to 30fps as oppossed to the original 12fps. The original 12fps would run slow unless the framerate of the swf was increased.
  2. A callback function can now be passed in as an optional parameter. The callback function will be invoked once the tween effect has completed.
  3. An optional callback argument of arbitrary length can also be passed in as a parameter of the callback function.
  4. An additional Tween.stop(); method has been added which will allow a Tween instance to be stopped at anytime while the tween effect is executing.
  5. TweenTarget parameter’s type has been changed from DisplayObjectContainer to DisplayObject. Originally I had wrote the Tween API as a simple, application specific API that I thought other developers could use. I have now updated the API so that it is generic and can be applied to any object on the display list.

Download source and view ASDoc.

Keep in mind that this is an unstable beta release, that is, I have not thoroughly tested the API as of this release but it does however meet the requirements that I have been requested. Once testing is completed and all bug fixes are complete I will make one last major build before a final version 1.0 release. So if you happen to find any bugs please feel free to let me know.

AS3 Model-View-Controller Implementation

Most developers who are relatively new to Patterns immediately think “MVC” when they here the term “Design Patterns”, and this makes perfect sense considering most of developers have either been using MVC for a long time or have construed their own variations of it’s implementation. What ever the case it is important to understand the basic concepts and implementation of Model-View-Controller, especially as it pertains to Rich Internet Applications, or more specifically, Flex Applications.

Model-View-Controller falls under the category of what is known as a compound pattern, that is, a combination of several different Design Patterns to create a named solution. The patterns that make up MVC are typically the Observer Pattern (Model), Strategy Pattern (View and Controller) and the Composite Pattern (View). MVC originated in the Smalltalk-80 language back in the 80’s and it has since been implemented by just about every programming language that requires a user interface, so it is a perfect solution for building Flex Applications.

Implement MVC in Flex Applications is very simple as Event dispatching and data binding can be utilized to simplify invocation between members of the MVC triad. This allows developers to remove the somewhat awkward Observer pattern which is dependent on passing references of each member throughout the MVC triad.

The MVC paradigm is a way of breaking an application, or more commonly, just a piece of an application’s interface, into three parts: the model, the view, and the controller. Each member is intentionally segregated and represented by an object that is responsible for handling a specific task within the application.

Model: The model is used to manage information and notify observers when that information changes (typically via data binding).

View: The view is responsible for rendering the model to the user. This is usually rendered as a visual display but a view may also be a sound, a controller vibrating or anything that needs to be conveyed to the user.

Controller: The controller accepts input from the user (via Event Dispatching) and instructs the model and view to perform actions based on that input. In effect, the controller is responsible for mapping end-user action to application response. For example, if the user clicks the mouse button, the controller is responsible for determining how the application should respond.

To view a simple example which demonstrates implementing MVC in Flex 2 / ActionScript 3.0 click here.