I’m very interested in using Flash for data visualization, so I decided to start playing around with ways to organize and visualize news feeds. I made a little playground site called reverbiage where I created a flash feed reader that uses a world map to show NPR news feed aggregations. The site itself uses freetag combined with a keyword extractor to autotag stories as they come in. The map is still a little wonky at times, and the site itself is at an embryonic stage, but I thought you may want to take a look. I’d like to use this site as a staging ground for all kinds of feed visualization.
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If you are a Flash developer who recently made the switch to OS X like I have, you may be missing some of the great Open Source Flash development tools out there. I’ve always been partial to SciTE, specifically SciTE|Flash, because it is light, simple, and has some nice features. I recently found a port of SciTE for Mac OS X. It doesn’t have the Flash extras, but it does have basic Actionscript syntax highlighting. With a few tweaks, you can make it work just like SciTE|Flash.
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I’m reading in a lot of places that, as a result of the Adobe/Macromedia merger, a few applications might be shelved permanently. There are rumors floating around that one of these apps might be Fireworks. I very much hope that is not the case. I use Fireworks almost exclusively for web design. Fireworks was built from the ground up as a web design tool. It is to web design what Autocad is to architects. It’s vector-based features and nesting symbols make it perfect for designing an entire site’s GUI.
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Ever wish you could alter the variables in a compiled SWF file without having to re-publish the SWF? Or perhaps inject different XML into a compiled SWF? It turns out it’s not as hard as you might think. Variables are stored in uncompressed SWFs as plain text. So, it’s just a matter of finding that text and replacing it. It’s a little trickier than that, though…
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I’m sure many of you multimedia developers out there know the phrase “save early, save often”. I learned from my early days working with Director to not only do that, but to save as a new version every time I made a serious change. As a Flash developer, I’ve found that dealing with multiple FLA’s and corresponding AS files can get rather unwieldy. I assure you, there’s a better way!
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