.swfgeek

This 17th of November adobe has made available at Adobe Labs the prerelease of  Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and the beta of  Adobe  AIR 2.0 and the attendees of Adobe Latin Flash Tour MX received these news from the hands of Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers who showed us some of the great things to come in the new versions of these runtimes.

Adobe Flash Player version 10.1 is the first runtime release of the new Open Screen Project that will enable to have the same user experience across multiple devices be it browsers, tv, mobile phones and more. Some of the new features of the the Flash Player 10.1 are ubiquitous reach witch means that the full Flash Player will be the same on your smartphone as your browser enabling you to make your content and user experience equal across many devices. The new Global Error Handling will enable You developer to write a single handler to process all runtime errors that weren’t part of a try/catch statement. Improve application  reliability and user experience by catching and handling unexpected runtime errors and present custom error messages, what does this mean is that your user will never get that window saying there’s an error and you will not see the output panel throwing you those errors everytime you test your application. Multitouch support a Microphone class that will let you capture sound from the microphone the new Text Layout format and various other features that i’m sure that i’m missing so to The Flash Player 10.1 prerelease page at Adobe Labs and start playing with it.

Some useful links:

Release notes

What’s New in Flash Player 10.1

Download the updated global SWC to create content using the new APIs

Download the memory monitoring component to optimize your content for mobile

Watch Flash Player 10.1 video demonstrations

ActionScript 3.0 Developers Guide

ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform

Adobe AIR 2.0

Some of the features of AIR 2.0 were showed to us by Mike Chambers like the support for the detection of mass storage devices , comunication with the system and that you can now export as a native system application allowing you to use native code integration this lets you do some other things like opening default applications here’s a list of some of it’s new features.

Some useful links:

Release Notes.

Introducing Adobe AIR 2 beta

What’s Coming in Adobe AIR 2.

What are You waiting for go there and start playing.

Happy Flashing

A new API for using  Google Analytics Tracking in Flash/Flex projects this API is developed in ActionScript 3.0 and can be used as a component or called in your ActionScript code, Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash seems to solve a lot of troubles and the needed workarounds for making consistent user tracking in your Flash projects, keep reading for a more detailed explanation extracted from the implementation overview.

The Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash component makes it easy for you to implement Google Analytics in your Flash-driven content. This component contains all of the functionality of the Google Analytics Javascript code, and is 100% compatible with the latest ga.js tracking code. The Flash Tracking component is a compiled tracking object native to ActionScript 3, making Analytics implementation intuitive in Flash, and Flex development environments.

You can develop Analytics Tracking for Flash in either Adobe Flash or Adobe Flex environments. Each environment requires a different component, which you can download from http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/. These components are based on ActionScript 3 and can be set up in one of two ways for each environment:

In Adobe Flash

• Add and configure a simple component in the component inspector and drag it to the stage.
• Import the Flash Tracking libraries directly into your library and start coding.

In Adobe Flex

• Include an MXML component that you configure from am MXML file.
• Import the Flash Tracking libraries into your script tags/AS3 files.

How to use the Component in Adobe Flash

In order to use the Flash tracking component in your environment, you either use the visual tools inside Flash, or you set up the tracking object directly in your code. Regardless of whether you are setting up the component visually or via code, you provide the following elements:

• the web property ID—This is also known as the UA number of your tracking code and looks like UA-xxxxx-yy, where the x’s and y’s are replaced with the numbers that correspond to your account and profile information for the object you are tracking. See Web Property for more information.
• the tracking mode—Choose either bridge mode or AS3 mode. This mode determines how your tracking communicates with the Analytics servers and is described in detail below.
• the debugging mode—No matter which environment or tracking mode you use, you can turn debugging on to validate and test your tracking.

Installation for Flash CS3

Before you begin to use gaforflash to add Analytics tracking within Flash CS3,
you first need to add the gaforflash SWC to Flash CS3.

To do so:
1. If you have Flash CS3 currently open, quit the application.

2. Navigate to the location where you unzipped the Google Analytics zip
and find the swc (e.g. lib/analytics_flash.swc).

3. Create a “Google” directory in one of the following locations
and copy the SWC file there:
- (Windows) C:\Program Files\Adobe\ Adobe Flash CS3\language\Configuration\Components
- (Mac OS X) Macintosh HD/Applications/Adobe Flash CS3/Configuration/Components

Flash CS3 is now set up to support Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash.

Alternatively if you want to use gaforflash in code-only mode
you can do the same as the above and add the lib/analytics.swc,
you will then need to drag the “AnalyticsLibrary” component in your Library.

Installation for Flex Builder 3

Before you can compile your code, you will need to link it to the gaforflash SWC file.

To do so:
1. select Project->Properties.
A Properties dialog box will appear for your project.
Click on Flex Build Path and then select the Library Path tab:

2. Click Add SWC… within the Library Path pane.
An Add SWC dialog box will appear.
Navigate to the location where you unzipped the Google Analytics zip
and select lib/analytics.swc file and click OK.

or

Just drop the analytics.swc file into your Flex project /libs directory

Here’s the link for the Google code project

The gaforflash direct download

More info on the API