height="{ (dropDown.height > descriptorBox.height)
? (dropDown.height + 50) : (descriptorBox.height + 50) }” />

Doesn’t look like much but its a quick and dirty way to have conditional bindings without having to use a binding class or getter/setter method to handle the logic. Call me lazy, but I think this is pretty cool.

I’m sititing in on the Flash forward panel AS3 for designers. I’m curious to see some of the new features in the Flash CS3 IDE where AS3 and designers are concerned, more specifically how designers can animate and bounce things down to AS3 for hand-off to a developer like myself.

Rich Shupe is the speaker for this panel.

General changes

Right now hes summarizing general things that have changed for designers in CS3, primarily the lack of the old onRelease and attachMovieClip/duplicateMovieClip methods.

Now he’s going over changes in scaling. _xscale and _yscale are depreciated in favor of scaleX and scaleY. Values are now 0 to 1 instead of 0 to 100.

Now he’s explaining that actionscript directly on stage objects is gone, and that this is a good thing. All stage objects in flash, if they are to have their own behavior, need to be tied to a MovieClip based class.

Now on to the document class. He’s creating and displaying a custom sprite based class for use on a library item.

Now he’s going over mandatory datatyping in AS3. Datatyping, where is a virtual machine or a compiler is concerned, is really going to work wonders for the performance of the binary applications you’re building.

Display list

He’s explaining how addChild adds items to the top of the display list stack, and thast removeChildAt(number) will remove anything at a specified depth.

Rich is also showing us how to:

Heres an awesome feature of AS3: Reparenting movie clips.
Dynamically creating shapes (although, we could do this in as2.0).

Events

Loading

Now Rich is going over the new URL Request loader in favor of the old loadMovie/MovieClipLoader or the old XML.load method.
He’s now touting a new feature where you can now stop the load process in AS3, and gain access to raw data while the load is in progress.

Sound

Rich is going over the additions to the sound API, primarily that you can now have a new sound channel for each sound object, which effectively gives you a lot more control over sounds Loading can be buffered via the SoundLoaderContext class. You can also access the global sound with the SoundMixer class. You can also compute waveform spectrums with the computeSpectrum method.

Rich had built a quick example of computeSpectrum and using a custoom visualization class to draw and is now showing a waveform analysis swf that he built which is quite impressive looking. He just swapped out the visualization class with something that makes use of the graphics API for a more complex visualization. that uses lines instead of dot sprites.

He’s closing with some books he’s authored, and were done

Ok, so first off let me say that the iTunes playlist XML structure looks like it was designed by someone who doesn’t even know XML.

Take a look at this entry for a single song:

<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>64</integer>
<key>Name</key><string>Episode 14</string>
<key>Artist</key><string>Gareth Emery</string>
<key>Album</key><string>The Gareth Emery Podcast</string>
<key>Genre</key><string>Podcast</string>
<key>Kind</key><string>MPEG audio file</string>
<key>Size</key><integer>64803919</integer>
<key>Total Time</key><integer>2700068</integer>
<key>Year</key><integer>2006</integer>
<key>Date Modified</key><date>2006-09-21T15:14:43Z</date>
<key>Date Added</key><date>2006-09-21T15:14:43Z</date>
<key>Bit Rate</key><integer>192</integer>
<key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>
<key>Play Count</key><integer>22</integer>
<key>Play Date</key><integer>3264149297</integer>
<key>Play Date UTC</key><date>2007-06-08T16:08:17Z</date>
<key>Release Date</key><date>2006-09-21T11:00:00Z</date>
<key>Sort Album</key><string>Gareth Emery Podcast</string>
<key>Persistent ID</key><string>FE2067001E4F2C00</string>
<key>Track Type</key><string>File</string>
<key>Podcast</key><true/>
<key>Location</key>
<string>The%20Gareth%20Emery%20Podcast/Episode%2014.mp3</string>
<key>File Folder Count</key><integer>4</integer>
<key>Library Folder Count</key><integer>1</integer>
</dict>

The way they have this structured makes it impossible to do any E4X based XML processing of the playlist and consequently prevents your from using it in Flex or any other MVC based framework that allows you to easily hook an XML data source into components on the view layer.

So, as if you couldn’t guess, I wrote a class so that you can. You can use it to load in an iTunes XML playlist and turn it into something use-able that adheres to XML best practice where the structure is concerned.

Heres a sample of what it outputs:

<song>
  <Track_ID>511</Track_ID>
  <Name>Episode 34</Name>
  <Artist>Gareth Emery</Artist>
  <Album>The Gareth Emery Podcast</Album>
  <Genre>Podcast</Genre>
  <Kind>MPEG audio file</Kind>
  <Size>64804016</Size>
  <Total_Time>2700068</Total_Time>
  <Year>2007</Year>
  <Date_Modified>2007-07-24T16:29:57Z</Date_Modified>
  <Date_Added>2007-07-24T16:29:57Z</Date_Added>
  <Bit_Rate>192</Bit_Rate>
  <Sample_Rate>44100</Sample_Rate>
  <Release_Date>2007-07-19T22:00:00Z</Release_Date>
  <Sort_Album>Gareth Emery Podcast</Sort_Album>
  <Sort_Name>Gareth Emery Podcast - Episode 34</Sort_Name>
  <Persistent_ID>DFA5DE7CE96B0316</Persistent_ID>
  <Track_Type>File</Track_Type>
  <Podcast/>
  <Unplayed/>
  <Location>The%20Gareth%20Emery%20Podcast/Episode%2034.mp3</Location>
  <File_Folder_Count>4</File_Folder_Count>
  <Library_Folder_Count>1</Library_Folder_Count>
</song>

Much better, huh? Heres an example of how you can use it in your Flex/AS3.0 project.

var libraryPath:URLRequest = new URLRequest("testlibrary.xml");
 
	iTunesLibrary = new itunesXMLParser();
	iTunesLibrary.load(libraryPath);
 
	iTunesLibrary.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loadHandler);
	iTunesLibrary.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, progressHandler);
 
public function loadHandler(event:Event):void{
	trace("Library is done loading, lets do something cool with it");
 
	//trace(iTunesLibrary.playlistXML);
 
	trace("songs: "  + iTunesLibrary.playlistXML.song);
 
	var songList:XMLList = iTunesLibrary.playlistXML.song;
 
	//trace(songList);
 
	dg_mx.dataProvider = songList;
}
 
public function progressHandler(event:ProgressEvent):void{
	trace("progressHandler loaded:" 
        + event.bytesLoaded + " total: " + event.bytesTotal)</code>
}

Note that it listens on all the same events as the normal XML class. In the loadHandler function above theres an example of how to hook this into a datagrid component in flex.

Thats it. Right now it only grabs songs, I’ll be adding support for multiple playlists later.

Download the class file here

Download the example flex project here

Here’s an AS3 application I’ve been working on. You wouldn’t know from reading this geeky blog, but I’m actually an EDM DJ and producer, at least when I’m not buried in code.

Here’s the idea behind it. DJ’s distribute mixes that can sometimes be a few hours long. Most audio players out there are only designed to handle individual songs of only a few minutes length. Load a DJ mix into one of these and you’re loading sometimes hours worth of music into one track. Now your listener has to jog around to different points in the mix using the scrubber to get to a track they like, and all the while they have no idea what song they’re listening to.

Enter Dejaxx. It’s designed specifically to handle DJ mixes. In the XML file you specify information about your contiguous mix file and set up cue points throughout your mix. Each cue point contains the location of the track in the mix and its information (artist name, track name, etc). Now when someone wants to listen to your mix they can move through your cue points just like on a CD. Not bad huh? What’s even cooler is that Dejaxx will also update what track is playing if the song changes while you’re listening.

See it in action here.

Just a warning, I haven’t worked out the progressive streaming yet so prepare to preload a large media file (which just so happens to be a mix of my own!). I still have lots of improvements underway so hopefully I can post a new version soon.

Every time I turn around there seems to be great things happening with Papervision 3D. John Garden just released a Papervision3D Flash CS3 Component that allows you to load in COLLADA files and assign textures all right in the Flash IDE. It looks like this is going to be a great tool for artists who want to create and test content for use in Papervision without having to touch any code.