http://www.automatastudios.com Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:01:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I was playing around with Flash Builder 4 & Flex 4 after the public beta was announced, and decided to whip up a quick, very simple AIR client for Basecamp.  It's pretty straight forward and there's not much code, but if you're having trouble getting started with AIR, Flex 4, ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2009/06/05/airflash-builder-4-a-simple-basecamp-client/ Check it out! Tom Krcha of Flash Realtime did an interview with Branden at Flash in the Can (FITC) in Amsterdam. The interview is more of a human interest piece. If you've ever wondered what voice to use when you read his posts, now you know. Branden Hall ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2009/02/27/interview-with-branden-from-fitc/ Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that you were building an AIR application that needed to load external SWFs. Let's also say you needed to communicate back and forth between that SWF and the AIR application. As it says on old maps - "here by dragons". AIR introduces two ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2009/02/20/air-and-external-swfs/ Adobe recently announced the first public release of a research project code-named Alchemy. Alchemy is a C/C++ to ActionScript compiler that opens up a huge new world for the Flash platform. Automata Studios has worked closely with engineers over at Adobe for the past few months testing Alchemy and preparing some ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2008/11/21/understanding-adobe-alchemy/ A project we're working on requires third parties to be able to load SWFs of their own design into an overall "shell" that we're building. So far, so good - particularly with the new unloadAndStop method that's part of Flash Player 10. That means I can fully unload the SWFs ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2008/10/16/spiking-greedy-swfs/ Recently, Branden and I were tasked to build a Flash UI on top of a web service.  Seems like pretty standard development...but, as you have to know by now, nothing is ever "standard" at Automata.  After some research, trial & error, and hand-wringing, we realized that the device we were ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2008/10/15/soap-is-just-xml/ Automata Studios is proud to announce the hiring of Maureen Farrington (that's me!), project manager extrordinaire.  Branden likes to add the title "Producer" to describe my position since my job will consist of "making things happen" as I ease into actual code-producing duties. This is my first foray back into world ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2008/09/05/welcome-aboard-maureen/ Yes, it's been a while. We've been busy. The good news (for you) is that we've been making fun new things (i.e. code libraries) that we'll be sharing soon! Now, on to the actual topic of this post - finite state machines. What is a finite state machine you ask? Well ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2008/07/24/simplifying-code-with-finite-state-machines/ During a recent project of ours we found ourselves in the position where the developer creating the server-side code was a full 5 time zones away. This meant that we often had to do debugging over email. This was, as one would expect, excruciatingly slow. The issues that arose during ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2008/04/09/charles-a-great-web-application-debugging-tool/ Branden and I were working in the office today when Branden came over and asked me if I've ever run into the following problem: You are creating tweens using the Tween class in AS3. These tweens are inside of a method (or a loop). The tweens appear to ... http://www.automatastudios.com/2007/12/11/does-your-tween-stop-in-the-middle/