ATF Tools and Ant

I recently started tinkering with the ATF Tools provided by Adobe. The problem I have with it (as is) is that you have to use the command line in order to compress individual images. This is a pain in the butt and it is quite time consuming. I need a way to utilize Ant to automate this for me. Doing some looking around turned up the Ant Apply task. Unfortunately looking through the documentation is not straight forward for me. I did some more research and tinkering until I got something which worked. Below is what I came up with:

Issue with fonts and FDT, AIR 3.5, and ASC 2.0

I recently updated my AIR SDK to version 3.5 with ASC 2.0. When I did this I ran into issues on a project that was compiling fine before. The issue was that a specific font (that was embedded using the Embed meta tag) could not be encoded and the project would not compile. I needed this font to be in the project so I couldn't just do away with it. After I spent an hour or so searching the web, I started trying whatever. I happened to try setting the Use ASC 2.0 MXMLC Compiler. This did the trick. So I don't know if this is expected behavior, but it was very frustrating. I figured I would post about it so anyone else running into the same problem might find this post.

Ant and FDT

I've been using Apache Ant to automate my projects for probably a few years now. I am not an Ant expert by any means. I know enough to automate my build:

• Compiling a swf for different environments (development, production, etc.)
• Copying files to web server
• Replacing tokens
• Running the app in the browser

It's rather basic stuff. And my editor of choice is FDT. Ant and FDT work nicely together and FDT even has some special Ant tasks which you can use from FDT. I prefer using these tasks as they perform very well. Better than the Flex mxmlc when it comes to compiling. Plus the FDT versions are much easier to work with. But clients usually want to be able to run the Ant builds themselves. And they don't always have FDT to build with. They may have to run Ant from the command line. So in the past I usually had two versions of certain tasks. One that uses the FDT specific Ant tasks and one which uses the mxmlc Ant tasks.

Setting up FDT 5.6 to use latest the version of Flash Player and use Stage3D

Few things are more frustrating than trying to learn new things by checking out examples and they don't work. I've run into that situation when trying to tinker around with Stage3D for the Flash Player web plugin .

Set for up Stage3D

It is necessary to jump through a few hoops before you can utilize the Stage3D features for the web plugin. They are the following:

Release Outside

I was looking into one of the new features of Flash 11.3 which is the MouseEvent.RELEASE_OUTSIDE event type. Check out this link to see it in action. While I was doing some searching around the net, I happened to see that there exists a Event.MOUSE_LEAVE event type. This must be new right? No, it's been around since Flash Player 9, the beginning of AS 3.0. How could I have missed this?

BareTail Logger

I have used the SOSMax trace logger ever since I started using FDT back in version 1. I really liked it because it was simple, easy to use, and fast. I have tried using some other loggers such as MonsterDebugger. I think that tools such as Monster are very useful, but for simple logging I don't like having to jump through some hoops. Most of the time I just want to see my debug messages.....quick and simple, that's all.