Ginormous

Astra Flex and Flash Library from Yahoo - Time input component

I love simple components that just do a job that we all end up having to do and think "there must be someone who's already done this".  Astra is a fairly small Flex an Flash library that has some components that make life a little easier, the time input component I particularly like since it validates the time the user puts in and won't accept an invalid time.

Flash Audio hell - How to loop audio in Flash

I have just been in flash audio hell for a few days, trying to get 14 audio files to sync properly and loop in two different fla's

I first has gaps at the end of the loops so they stumbled as they looped even though the audio file was looped correctly.  The audio file is exactly 13 seconds and my fla is set to 24fps so thats 312 frames but when you place the loop it appear to be about 1/2 a frame too long.  The end result was either gaps, skips or general failure for the loops to "loop".

The biggest thing was don't import mp3's, they have silence at the front that messes up your loop, import wav or aiff files and let flash compress the audio.  It may be possible to create looped mp3's and import them but I haven't tried it.

The other thing if you  want them to loop, don't let flash do it using the timeline, no "gotoandplay(1)" code it will never loop properly. In the layer properties, if you use "stream" or "start" one loop will stay in sync but any other loops will start to drift away from each other.

Set all audio loop layers to Sync :Event and Repeat 9999.  and if you really must, add some code that counts to 9999 and start it again, but at that "loop" it will skip :)

I also found Kenny Bewllews site VERY helpful.

New bus cards

New Bluetube interactive bus cards just came from print 100 !

Adobe won't allow cross "upgrades"

Running Bluetube interactive, we use a lot of Adobe products,  for some stupid reason, I upgraded our CS3 suite to CS4 Production Premium instead of CS4 web premium back on October 2008.  I realized this in march and called adobe to ask if we could PAY to do a "cross grade" since we don't use after effects or premiere and it was a stupid mistake.

Adobe can't help with a cross crade.

So then I asked can we use our dreamweaver Mx or dreamweaver CS3 to upgrade just dreamweaver, no dice either, since I used our CS3 web suite (which includes dreamweaver) to get the CS4 production suite, we can no longer use it as an upgrade.

I understand I made a mistake and I'm assuming its not a common one, but its unfortunate that a company like mine that is small but 90% of its software spending goes to adobe is subject to an inflexibile policy that just plain "can't help". I wasn't asking for "free", I was willing to pay to switch, but the only option they had was for me to buy a full price copy of dreamweaver for $399.

Grant

pureMVC console

Bluetube Interactive does 90% of its projects using Flex and pureMVC, The Flex pureMVC console  looks like a great tool for pureMVC developers, I'll most definately be trying this out, I have a fairly large pureMVC app that would benefit from some insights.

Revolver for sitecore

Have not had chance to check it out yet but looks like it could help with sitecore based sites :

Revolver command line tool for sitecore

Once I get chance I plan to watch the Revolver Video that describes basic usage. Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will be doing some updates to their sitecore implementation and Bluetube Interactive will be able to use Revolver to make some of these tasks easier.