Yahoo! Flash (R) Blog

Announcing ASTRA 1.1.1

Last month, we released version 1.1 of the Yahoo! ASTRA libraries for Flash and Flex. Since then, we’ve received a ton of great feedback that has led to some important bug fixes and improvements. No critical bugs were encountered, but we’ve committed a reasonable number of changes to make a maintenance release worthwhile. Please drop by the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center to pick up ASTRA 1.1.1.

Being a maintenance release, there are no new components to introduce in ASTRA 1.1.1. Instead, take a look at the list of bug fixes and enhancements straight from the release notes:

AlertManager (Flash)

• Bug fix: Alert dialog lost focus if the user selected the text and then hit the tab key.

Charts (Flash)

• Improved animation and invalidation of markers.
• Bug fix: Setting axis maximum less than the value of an origin-based marker (column, bar) hides the marker.
• Bug fix: With large data sets, line charts are displayed offset from the left, which hides some data on the right
• Bug fix: Axis displays improperly when all items have the same value.
• Bug fix: Infinite loop when calculating minimum and maximum values in some cases.
• Bug fix: PieChart displays the wrong category when values are primitive and equal.

MenuBar (Flash)

• Bug fix: Selected menubar button lost focus if it was toggled very quickly with keyboard shortcuts.
• Bug fix: Skin conflicts between Menu and MenuBar.

TabBar (Flash)

• Bug fix: Styles like textFormat are not passed through to tabs.
• Bug fix: focusIndex setter tries to access buttons before they are created.

AutoCompleteManager (Flex)

• New events
• Added API for adjusting minimum disk space requirements
• Bug fix: caret bug when changing selection of completion dropdown
• Bug fix: itemToLabel bug on certain types of entries
• Bug fix: loopSelection quirkiness

All users are encouraged to upgrade. Packages for the ASTRA Flash components and the ASTRA Flex components are available for download immediately on the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center.

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AS3 Maps: Flick-able and Spinnable

The Yahoo! AS3 Maps API is barely a day old (well, alright, maybe some lucky folks got their hands on it a little earlier), and we are already seeing some seriously cool apps. An example of what can be done with this new API has been created by Jonathan New and Benjamin Halstead, our fellow Yahoos. They built a cool flick-able and rotable map interface which won the most fun hack award for our internal Q2/07 Hack Day. You can check out their application here. Give it spin—literally! Toss the map around and shift drag to rotate it around the center.

If you are reading this blog, you are probably a Flex or ActionScript developer, which means only one thing: Yahoo! AS3 Maps is a must have! We have prepared screencasts, examples and a complete documentation to get you started. Give it a test drive now. We look forward to your feedback.

(Special thanks to Ben and Jon for building an awesome map demo, and to Jeremy Johnstone for the photo)

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ActionScript 3 Maps API: Y3K Compliant

Good news, everyone! Although we are still not quite ready to unveil the “what-if machine” or teach the toaster to feel love (or stop putting Futurama references everywhere), today we are bringing you something just as cool and way more relevant. That’s right, folks: it’s the ActionScript 3 Maps API. Eagerly awaited and now available for immediate download on Yahoo! Flash Developer Center, the Maps API is an incredibly powerful map engine with multiple embeddable tools that make it truly universal. From local searches to custom markers, the API covers it all, and does that in a native AS3 component that’s less than 30 kilobytes in size (that’s smaller than about 4 map tiles.) You can use it in the Flex Builder, or with the standalone mxmlc compiler (which is nice and free) — a Flash version will follow shortly.

So don’t spend another minute without it: head on over to the Flash Developer Center and grab a copy (though make sure to read the license agreement before you do). We’ve prepared some screencasts, detailed documentation and a bunch of great examples to get you started. A whole world of rich map-enabled applications is waiting: and though it may not be the 31st century just yet, with Yahoo!’s AS3 Maps, you’ll definitely be ahead of your time.

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