We’re looking for someone who eats, sleeps, and breaths Flash ActionScript.

iChameleon Group offers an incredible career building full-time position working with notable National + International companies. Some of our client projects include Mini-Cooper, EarthLink, Slim Jim, De Beer’s, Bridgestone, and Coke. Our fast growing company develops various exciting, innovative, and high profile websites and applications fusing media, video, audio and Flash.

We strongly suggest viewing our portfolio at www.ichameleongroup.com to understand the quality of work.

We are a fun, eccentric, hardworking, creative group in a business casual environment.  We are looking for a dynamic, motivated team player who will enjoy working in a fast-paced, deadline driven, ever changing development and solution-based environment.



Requirements, skills + abilities:

     Team Player
     Self Starter
     Interactive site development experience
     3+ years of experience                        
     Flash MX 2004 / Flash 8 / CS3
     ActionScript 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0, XML
     Strong Motion Graphics
     Ability to create animation via ActionScript as well as the traditional timeline.
     Knowledge of Flash Components
     Experience with Flash Remoting
     PC fluent (Mac A Plus)
     Solid communications skills (written and verbal)
     Outgoing, Energetic Personality
     Good Organizational Skills
     Detail oriented, strong follow-up skills and ability to work on multiple projects.


Additional bonus skills:

     Flash Communication Server
     Photoshop
     Illustrator
     Dreamweaver MX 2004
     HTML
     CSS
     Experience in producing games and game interfaces.
     ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, PERL, or any other web language.
     After Effects
     Final Cut
     Ability to levitate things with your mind.

Want to come join our team? Submit your resume and cover letter, including salary history, to hr@ichameleongroup.com

I am curious why no one has posted any articles on the IIS/Apache Flex Modules... Adobe made available on labs a plugin to compile Flex code server-side, just like Flex 1.5 did... with that said, it's probably simpler to write Flex than Flash Forms, and by far more powerful... so why haven't we seen any ColdFusion / Flex Module examples? Performance? I haven't tried it yet (guilty as charged), but I will put together a few examples to prove my theory... yes, they say it's not for production use, or at least they won't support it .. but if it works w/o a bug performance hit, can you imagine the possibilities? Maybe a cf-wrapper, a custom tag that already includes some of the higher level code allowing you to replace your old-slow-pain-in-you-cheeks flash forms? Who's with me?

Don't you hate to only have one version of the Flash Player installed? I've been wanting a tool that allows me to switch to any version I want for the longest time... Alessandro Crugnola wrote a small little extensions for Firefox that allows you to quickly swap the Flash version installed, amazing! The icon resides in your firefox taskbar and allows you to switch back and forth over and over... It is not even restricted to the versions that come with the extension, he explains how to add additional versions too.

Alessandro Crugnola by the way is the same dude that wrote the Flash tracer plugin, he's on a role!

If you're a sysadmin or have every been one, you've got to play this game! Server Mechanic is a flash game about a man and a stubborn server that just won't start. You can play a 1-Player version against time and competing to win free hosting packages, x-box 360's, and a 42' plasma TV, or a 2-Player version to compete in real time against other visitors.

Behind the scenes, the server mechanic is using a ColdFusion MX7 Server and Flash Communication Server 1.5 for the 2-Player game.

Ben Forta, Ray Camden, myself, and others have been working on a secret project for the past few months. Well, it is secret no more ... Welcome to RIAForge.

RIAForge is a place to host open source projects built with Adobe technologies - from ColdFusion applications to Photoshop plug-ins to Flex components and more. And of course the site is built using those same technologies.

RIAForge features:

• A unique project URL
  
• File hosting
• Bug tracking
• Forums
• Blogging
• Basic stats
• Subversion access
• ... and more

This is not an official Adobe project, although the site is Adobe supported. Ray Camden did the primary development work with a lot of help and support from others, including Brian Rinaldi and myself. Most of the project was written in Model-Glue, and Ray added portions of his existing projects like Lighthouse, Galleon, and blogCFC.
I wrote the SVN support and I'll post it tonight as an open source project.

Let us know what you think!

A new update in Flash 9 allows the flash player to switch to full screen mode triggered by ActionScript. This is neat, but scary at the same time... can you image how many flash banners will unsolicitedly occupy your entire screen? I can see where this can be handy for RIA's, in fact, very handy! But I can predict much abuse ... Thus far it has been hard to overtake the user full browser, and it's common sense not to allow this to happen. Flash Player 9,0,20,0 will change that. With a single line inside your actionscript: Stage["displayState"] = "fullScreen"; you will accomplish every marketers dream.

Adobe did add some security to try to prevent abuse, for example, requiring an additional parameter in the embed tag, preventing banners from doing it w/o the sites permission. here's the full list:

• To enable full-screen mode, developers must add a new <object> and <embed> tag parameter, allowFullScreen, to their HTML. This parameter defaults to false, or not allowing full screen. To allow full-screen, developers must set allowFullScreen to true in their <object>/<embed> tags.
  
• An overlay dialog box will appear when the movie enters full-screen mode, instructing the user how to exit and return to normal mode. The dialog box appears for a few seconds and then fades out.
  
• The ActionScript that initiates full-screen mode can be called only in response to a mouse click or keypress. If it is called in other situations, it will be ignored (in ActionScript 2.0) or throw an exception (in ActionScript 3.0).
  
• Users cannot enter text in text input fields while in full-screen mode. All keyboard input and key-related ActionScript is disabled while in full-screen mode, with the exception of the keyboard shortcuts that takes the viewer out of full-screen mode.

I just found a Firefox Extension that allows you to see the Flash traces from within your browser. This is the best extension I've installed in a while.

Flash allows you to trace text, kind of like a print line, cfoutput, writeline, you name it... it just outputs to a debugging window in the Flash IDE... the problem is, once you export it and run it into an html page, you can't get those traces anymore...

To overcome this problem, we created a tracing class that detects if you're running the swf from the Flash IDE or through a browser and either uses regular trace methods or uses a custom trace_lc() -- trace local connection -- method. The local connection method connects to a standalone swf we use as the debugging output window. This method will connect the swf movie in the browser with our standalone swf, allowing us to see all the debugging strings.

No more! Developers can install a Flash debug player version, which is really just some extended version of the regular plugin. Then you can install this Firefox extension to see all traces right there in your browser. You do not have to export the movies as Flash 9, all you need is the player and the extension. Can't say how useful this is.

I need to be able to export a flash movieclip as a bitmap, send it to the server, and save it as an image. Quasimondo provided some ActionScript and PHP code, but I can't seem to make it work with ColdFusion... does anyone out there successfully accomplished this or want to give a try at translating the php code?

Any help will be appreciated... Please drop me an email if you have something or willing to give it a shot.

The images can make it to CF in any format, which will be converted later to a jpeg, but you don't have to worry about that part.

You may use up to Flash 8 and ColdFusion 7.

I've been using Flash/SWFObject lately for all my Flash project (a lot!)... SWFObject is an open source JavaScript to embed swfs in html pages... it helps with SEO because it overwrite a standard xhtml DIV, includes option for express install, and most importantly, gets around the new Microsoft facacta. It even loads your swfs when viewing locally in IE, where you usually would get an Active X Alert...

The new release includes the following small changes:

   1.  [updated] SWFObject.write() now returns true or false depending on whether the SWF content was written to the page or not (true if it is, false if it is not)
   2. [changed] The ‘com’ namespace has been removed, now everything lives in the ‘deconcept’ namespace only, instead of ‘com.deconcept’ namespace
   3. [updated] I made a couple of very small changes to get rid of warnings in the mozilla script debugger when the debugger was in strict mode
   4. added ‘the mark of the web’ to the examples pages to (hopefully) prevent the ActiveX bar from appearing at the top of the page when viewing these files locally in IE on Windows.
   5. [changed] And last, but certainly not least: FlashObject is now known as SWFObject because of legal reasons

Due to legal and trademark issues, the formerly known JavaScript FlashOject has been renamed to SWFObject... The author said he doesn't really like this name, but he wanted to keep the 'object' part in the name.

There's a new link for the project page, so update your bookmarks.

By that way, if I didn't mention this before in previous posts, using the FlashObject or SWFObject helps to overcome the lame M$ decision in blocking all activeX content, including SWF Movies. Even if you don't use the express install features, the fact alone the it helps with SEO'ness and is not affected by M$'s latest change in IE security policies, is worth trying.