Yahoo! Flash(R) Blog

Flickr: Now Even More Flash-friendly

As you are all surely well-aware, Flickr is one of Yahoo!’s most Flash-friendly properties. And how could it not be? With a crossdomain-enabled API and a thorough AS3 wrapper available from Adobe, Flickr-based RIAs are a joy to develop. But today, our good friends at Flickr lent us a helping hand yet again, and added a liberal crossdomain file to their photo servers. The new crossdomain.xml file (located at http://static.flickr.com/crossdomain.xml) now gives all of your Flash apps full access to a whole universe of photographic goodness. And by full access we mean “really-really full”, with BitmapData readily acessible for every single photo.

And what does that actually mean? Well, just to whet your appetite, it means that you can now import photos from Flickr as actual Bitmaps, rather than generic DisplayObjects, and as such, you can make all the visual transforms anti-aliased by setting Bitmap’s smoothing property to true. In the example below, we load the same image from Flickr twice: on the left, it’s presented as a Bitmap, with smoothing turned on. On the right, it’s shown as a DisplayObject (as it would be if there weren’t a crossdomain.xml file). Now try pressing the button to make the images spin.

Please install Flash 9 to see this example.

Rotation is a pretty simple transform, but can you see the remarkable difference? The image on the right looks like there are ants crawling all over it, whereas the image on the left is stoic and smooth, like a Spartan. This will also hold true for all other transforms, both simple (scaling, transposing, etc.) and complex.

The fun, of course, doesn’t end here. With access to BitmapData, you can efficiently crop the images you load, make fast bitmap collages, analyze image’s colors and edges, perhaps even do clever visual transformations (an “AndyWarholizer”, anyone? We’ll feature it if you build it!)—the possibilities are really making our heads spin like the images above. So please, go out, build Flickr-based apps, let us know about it and make us proud. But of course, when you do, kindly remember to observe Flickr’s Terms of Service, which among other things, ask you (quite nicely) to link all images you load back to their original Flickr pages.

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New Flash(R) Developer Center launched

We are happy to announce the newly revamped Flash® Developer Center, an ever growing repository of tools, articles, tutorials, and information on all things Flash.

New to this revision is ASTRA (ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications) — our collection of Flash and Flex components, libraries and toolkits. In this inaugural release, ASTRA contains five UI components that complement the existing set provided with Flash CS3. The new UI components are: Tree, Menu, TabBar, AutoComplete, and Charts. All of these are built to match the existing Flash component standards and come fully equipped with examples, tutorials and documentation. Best of all, ASTRA is open-source under the BSD license, and follows an approach similar to the wonderful YUI Library.

If you are eager to get started right away, head right over to the ASTRA landing page, download the package and follow the installation instructions. And don’t forget to join the ydn-flash group and let us know how it goes !

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Introducing the Yahoo! Flash Platform Team

These are exciting times since we — the Flash Platform Team — just launched this brand new Yahoo! Flash Blog and are thrilled to have you with us. We are getting ready to fill this blog with articles, in parallel to releasing libraries on the Yahoo! Developer Network. In fact, our first release is just around the corner… no, really! So please stay tuned, and let us start this blog by introducing the team and what we do at Yahoo!.

“Flash Road”: Flash Platform Team taking a stroll outside.

The Flash Platform team is developing the technical strategy and policy for Adobe technologies as it applies to Yahoo!. As such, we are focusing on developing libraries and platform solutions, methodologies and practices, as well as looking into emerging Adobe technologies.

Libraries and Platform Solutions
We are thinking of and designing a library that complements the set of components that was released with Flash CS3. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Tree component? And what about a Menu, AutoComplete, or a simple TabBar? Advanced components like Charts do exist in Flex, but it would probably be helpful to have a lightweight solution in Flash as well. And yes, there are also the Web APIs that we have released some time ago on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

In terms of Platform Solutions, we can foresee releasing a kit that will make badging really easy, yet extensible. Sounds nice? Then stay tuned and come back often, since we are working on things like that.

Methodologies and Practices
We aim to be a central source for best Flash and Flex coding practices, articles, as well as links to valuable information on the Web. We will also create detailed documents that show how to deal with security under Flash, provide pointers for performance optimizations, and enable correct implementations of accessibility.

Emerging Technologies
Air (formerly Apollo) is definitely on our radar and we are staying on top of current developments. We work with Adobe and provide feedback from Yahoo’s point of view. We often evaluate technologies and create novel implementations to validate ideas and inform product.

All of our libraries are planned to be released as open source, under a BSD license on the Yahoo! Developer Network and will be free for all uses. We would like to encourage you and the community to participate in active discussions and sharing code and solutions, because we believe it will help us to create better products — and do it faster. Throughout the year, we also teach classes and conduct workshops around the above mentioned charter (look out for the videos on the Developer Network !), as well as speak at conferences (like the upcoming Adobe MAX conference in October.)

We are a team of talented Flash engineers that have a passion for good implementations and innovative solutions. Most importantly, we are looking forward to reaching out to you and the community to create dialogue around Flash, Flex, and Air. We encourage you to subscribe and participate on the ydn-flash group and mailing list. We are stoked to get this effort off the ground and are eager to move it forward together with you.

The Flash Platform Team:
Alaric Cole, Michael Hoch, Scott Morgan, Allen Rabinovich, Josh Tynjala

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