It took us a while, and we called in a bunch of favors. Most of which were asking friends to put there faces on my line as we went at them with latex and makeup! Big thanks to everyone that stepped up to the makeup chair!.

We really hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it and if so please head over to the contest page and vote for us! We could use all the support we can get.

Contest Link – Day of the Dish – “Where’s My AMC?”

I didn’t have a lot of slides but if you are interested you can find them at the link below. If you are interested in learning about Mobile App development with Web technologies, Sencha, Phonegap, or just want to get a general understanding come on out to the Sencha Meetup on Thursday July 26th where I will be speaking more in-depth about development workflow, tools and debugging.

Links

• My Chicago AUG Presentation Slides
• PhoneGap
• Sencha Touch 2
• Sublime Text 2
• SASS
• Compass
• Can I Use

The Workflow toolbox is an upgrade to my original Final Cut to After Effects Script. Not only has most of the import code been re-written to, hopefully, fix up many bugs but I have also added many new features.

This script will not only aid in opening a project from Final Cut in After Effects but also adds batch proxy support, footage swapping, and timelapse import automation.

Download: Workflow Toolbox 1.2

Download: Release Notes

Tutorial: Album on Vimeo

Final Cut XML Import

This allows for XML files exported from final cut to be easily imported into After Effects. Dynamic swapping and proxy capabilities allow for files to be changed on import depending on your workflow. Marker information as well as “basic” keyframe data is also imported. Basic keyframe data consists of  position, scale, rotation, opacity and time remapping.

Batch/Dynamic Proxy Feature

This allows for selecting multiple footage items and assigning them proxies. The dynamic features allow for proxy files to be assigned during the import process into after effects

Batch/Dynamic Footage Swapping

This allows for selecting multiple footage items and swapping them with other files on your harddrive. For example if your edit was done at 324×240 in ProRes Proxy you can swap up the footage to R3D Red files causing all compositions to follow suite.

Timelapse Automation Importer

The timelapse mode of the Workflow toolbox allows for importing a single or multiple timelapse’s quickly and consistently. It will automate fps interpretation for RAW and proxy files. Simply selecting a folder with RAW and JPEG files will cause it to be imported. Also selecting a folder containing folders of timelapse sequences will allow to batch importing. Timelapses can be pre-composed to allow for easy workflow with existing footage. Lastly, but most importantly, is automated importing of multiple exposures. Simply set the number of brackets for the timelapse and the script will do the rest using a time-remap script.

This script is provided free of charge to help everyone get through those annoying repetitive tasks. I will do my best to keep up with updates and bugs as they come through. If you love it so much you just can’t contain your desire to send me some money I certainly will not complain!

Send me some thanks via PayPal 

So I have finally settled back in after NAB this year and I wanted to re-cap the DitoGear InMotion Event. We had 4 days of Motion Control madness planned out, sadly I was only able to stay around for 2 of them missing the Wednesday and Thursday festivities. Despite this the event itself was very successful. From the second the doors opened each day my time was flooded with questions and new people curious about the products. The room was sectioned into 3 main showcases.

The Rigs

The first was our 45 Degree OmniSlider Rig. Included with this was the Cinevate Dromos Bowl Riser. This rig was setup to showcase the vertical lifting capabilities of the OmniSlider. It is worth noting that the OmniSlider can pull ~150lbs horizontally and ~33lbs vertically. So most camera rig, especially dSLR setups, could easily pull at a straight 90 degree if you wanted. We ran this rig mostly in video mode shooting out the window over the vegas strip. You could quickly see the benefits of adding a simple 1-axis moves to your shots with the parallax between the plants in the foreground and the pretty scenery that was behind it.

The second rig was prepared in the center of the suite and showcased the precision of the motor and ease of use of the controller. This package was a 1m DitoGear OmniSlider Servo, a Cinevate Dromos, a Nikon D7000,  and a hot shoe mounted SmallHD DP-6 Monitor. Also pictured here laying out in-front of the frogs is the DitoGear DryEye system. This is used to keep fog off your lens for low/high humidity shots. At this station we let people get there hands on the DitoGear controller and take the camera for a spin. We found that people were very interested in looking for shake in the frame which we are pleased to say the slider is very solid and even tight shots with a macros are still silky smooth.

Our third rig was the full DitoGear 5-Axis motion control system setup with a small stop motion set and software controller. I apologize for the low quality camera phone picture but the product shots shown here cover all the identical hardware we were showing. To sum it up this rig consisted of a 1m OmniSlider Servo, a Pan/Tilt OmniHead, and the LensDrive Professional 2-Axis Bundle. The set consists of some basic low power lights for miniatures and a Fancierstudio VL500BI. All of the motors are then run into the DitoGear DragonBridge. The DragonBridge has 8 inputs capable of managing  any of DitoGear’s motors and a single USB connector to run into your computer. Once wired up you can control all the motors using a very intuitive bezier curve based keyframe system from DragonFrame. DragonFrame is the standard for stop motion software. If you browse the production section of there website you can see it speaks for itself. Unlike other motion control companies DitoGear has taken a stance on integration over isolation. Instead of forcing you into there ecosystem of controllers and software you are provided interfaces to communicate with others. When it comes to stop motion DragonFrame is the software to be using and if you want solid motion control DitoGear is the way to get it. For those interest in this more you can see my video demo of the DitoGear Dragon Bridge. When people wandered over to this rig there first impression was usually awe. It certainly was a intense sight to see 5 different motors all rigged to a dSLR, cords run down into this interface box and a computer screen with keyframes and curves. First question was usually “how does this all work”. Luckily the answer was “its very simple”. I know that seems loaded but it is the truth. There are really only 3 types of cords for any DitoGear product; the power, camera shutter, and controller cord. In this rig we are actually only using power and controller cords. The camera is then tethered into DragonFrame via USB. DitoGear sells a Power Scorpion which helps keep things more centralized and easier to manage. The controller cords running out of the motors can quickly be moved from the DragonBridge into an OmniController if you wanted to go to manual operation. I will certainly admit there are a lot of cords to run, but there is simply no way around that. You need a cord for each motor and you’re running a lot of motors. Once the rig is all plugged in there is no maintenance to it, you just start shooting.

You can see all these pictures and more at the DitoGear Facebook photo page for the InMotion Event.

In the Works

There was one last surprise in our event and that was a look at some future technologies that are in the works. I sadly do not have any photos to show but we had a demo unit of DitoGears 3-Axis motion controller. This is a single Joystick with the ability to run 3 motors in realtime mode. The prototype was pretty much hot off the press when we got it, but then functionality was there and being able to control pan, tile and slide all at the same time from a single controller was really a great feature. We cant wait for this to get flushed out and become a finalized product.

Next we got to take a look at a DitoGear motor module. This was a modular system that attached a DitoGear Motor to an existing slider system. Currently we got to see this in prototype with a Cinevate Atlas 30 (pictures to the right) and it is shaping up to be awesome. No real details on this yet as far as what sliders this will be working with or if this is going to ever be anything more then a prototype at all. All we do know is that there seems to be some interest in moving the motors out of the enclosed systems and allowing for more integration. I am assuming with this the precision and build quality will have to suffer, not of the motors themselves but if you think about it the fact that you can add a motor module to a slider will always be less precise then a full slider system that is machined to be perfect. Regardless if this product gets flushed out I have no doubt it will hold up against the extremely high standards we are used to with the other DitoGear products. The added portability would definitely allow for a wider range of shooters!

PhotoWalks

So that is about it for the inside of the InMotion Suite and the demos we were showing to people but the event did not stop there. Once the suite closed down for the night we took a various groups of people, anyone that was interested in going out, onto the strip in Las Vegas to start actually using the gear. This is another area I saw other companies failing at NAB there were a lot of demos and very canned presentations. It was usually someone very close to the company with there hands on the controller showing a predetermined demo. Well not for us, we put our gear in the hands of interested shooters and wandered out into the streets.

Mike Carey on the bridge over the strip.

Small group preps a time-lapse shot

Event Host Ric Kasnoff on the Bridge

Summary

Well to sum it all up we had an amazing time demoing gear, shooting time-lapses, video, and stop motions, and meeting with some really amazing people. I have to say my favorite part was going out on photowalks. Seeing photographers and cinematographers exploring the gear and just having fun again was really exciting and inspiring. There is something amazing about reaching that point where people are being truly creative and not worried about the technology of things or the controls, everything just works intuitively and they are able to just have fun and take some amazing pictures. We had a great response to our sponsored products from Cinevate, SmallHD, Zacuto and SwitchBladeGrip. If your looking for more information or just to get in touch with some amazing people that were involved check out our host Ric Kasnoff (@ricphoto), our co-host Kimberly McMichael (@kimbamcmichael) with the Chronos Film Festival, shooter and inventor Mike Carey (@DSLRtriggers) of DSLR TRiggers, and the ever versatile Stuart Marsh (@stujmar) for all things stop motion, animation, and VFX. You can always find me around here or on twitter @rawss. If you’re looking for more information on any of this gear check out DitoGears Website and follow them on twitter @DitoGear for all kinds of information.

To sum it up this is a dark background theme with some basic code style stuff, tabs instead of spaces and such. Lastly the key mapping allows for more “Flash Like” Behavior with CTRL+ENTER to run and CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to debug. Simple enough, link it below.

Download (.zip) -Ross’s IntelliJ Dark Theme

Alright so I have been doing a lot of research on frameworks and structures for building out some classes of my own at work. We have a lot of code we share between developers and its finally time to move things into a bit more of a structured framework and leverage some of our reusable code. The first hill I had to climb was events. In AS3 events are really our communication pipeline. We use events to talk between objects while still keeping a nice Object Oriented independent structure. Events have there flaws though. The biggest of which, for me, is the lack of a real world usable way to outline for other developers when to use events in an interface. It is currently not possible in AS3 for an interface to dictate what events should be dispatched. Yes I have seen workarounds and even though they do fix the problem they also create more work then needed. This is where Signals comes into play.

As3 Signals is a library for dispatching events through composition instead of inheritance. A class does not need to extend EventDispatcher to use a signal and with that comes the ability to control the listeners to your signal. You can clear out everyone listening, add a listener only one time, and a lot of other neat features. The big deal though is performance. Is it faster? Well I threw together a little experiment using gSkinners Performance Harness to test dispatching 100000 events using a Event Dispatcher and then again using a Signal. The Tests start with 0 listeners to the signal and the event dispatcher and move up to 5. You can see the Performance Tests Here and if your interested in running this yourself feel free to download the code.

If your not interested in looking at all, let me just tell you signals is faster, though oddly enough when there are 0 listeners event dispatching is faster. Honestly I can’t imagine this happens very often though! Hope this helps some people out. Maybe in the near future I will pump out a small signals tutorial for those interested, doubtful though as I don’t think I could any better then this John Lindquist Signals Tutorial. Check it out!

Signals vs Events Performance

Animation with Actionscript Demos

I wanted to quickly post up a few demos that we will be looking at and hopefully creating in my upcoming Animation with Actionscript class on September 15th at the Motion Graphics Festival in Chicago . Here is a quick overview for the course.

We will be learning the basic core of Object Oriented programming first. Looking at classes and inheritance. Don’t worry if you have no idea what any of those things are, that’s what the class is for! After that we will jump into basic interactivity, clicking on things and knowing when the user is interacting with the project. Once we get the technical stuff out of the way we will jump right into the Hype Framework and GreenSock Tweening Platform. These are both really amazing libraries of code written to help artists and motion graphic designers create really expressive works without having to know all the deep technical babble behind them. We will only be working in Flash CS5, so no other tools with be required.  It is highly recommended that you have worked with flash for a bit, programming experience isn’t required, but might be helpful. Just know your way around Flash Professional. How to create movieclips and some basic timeline key-framed animation skills would be great. Regardless of any of that I am sure there will be some really cool tips and tricks for anyone to pick up! Finally we will look at how to get this art into your projects. Be it Cinema4D, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, whichever you like to work in we will find a way to get our generative work into those programs for further tweaking.

Look at flash and actionscript as just another tool in your belt. sometimes you go into photoshop, others into illustrator. Maybe you need to use Particular or some other plugin in after effects. Regardless knowing the tools, you can control and shape things with is all part of the game!

On a sidenote I have been given 3 memberships to give away to Club Greensock which will get you all sortsa really handy tools, its $99 bucks you won’t have to spend! I also have 5 Art and Entertainment Passes to give away for the festival itself. Follow me on Twitter @rawss I will try to get some details on how those will get given out!

Hope to see you there! Even if your not interested in the class the MGFest will be a lot of fun!

Briefly I will touch on the issue at hand here, and make some quick distinctions. I don’t think many people realize there are 2 battles that have been fought on the whole Apple/Flash madness. First is the Battle for the Flash Player. This would be the ability for Flash content to run inside Mobile Safari on Apple iDevices. The Second war was Native Applications, these are applications that you launch from your home screens much like the YouTube App, Mail App, iPod app, etc. Apple has officially closed the door on both of these, the Flash player will not be allowed into the mobile browser instead they will push the “HTML5″ standard for rich interactive web experiences. Native apps will only be created using a “supported language” which I believe are currently C, C++ or Objective C and these applications will be compiled through xCode.

In my personal opinion, and many others, this is a horribly douchey move (yes I said douchey). What is happening here is Apple is locking our a lot of innovation for the web. Lets start with the Flash Player, so Web only Experiences here. I am not sure where this horrible hate for Flash came from, but I can honestly say I own a mac at home and work with windows. I don’t have any crashing issues with Flash, and knowing how a majority of people treat there computer I have a hard time believing it is even a Flash player issue. What seems more likely to me is Flash getting a bad rep due to bad development practice.

Actionscript, the programming language behind Flash, is very simple as far as languages go. Much more human readable then lower level languages like C. I am not trying to dis on lower level languages, they are extremely powerful and create some amazing things, just merely saying Actionscript is an easy language to learn. The truth is though it is easy for almost anyone to experiment with it is also extremely powerful for those who really understand the workings of the language. Just like anything the experts will always be able to show you the true advantages. With this simplicity though comes a huge problem. We get a lot of “developers” creating Flash content that do not really understand what they are creating. We see a lot of work done through copy and pasting of code into frames or even just the reuse of buggy code, because it is so simple to do.Also due to the simplicity of Flash and the fact things can be made to “just work” very easily. A lot of people don’t bother to take the time to even understand what they are doing, or how they could do things better. Projects could be organized better, created for better re-usability and simply made less buggy. The fact that Flash stuff “just works” with crappy code also has changed the expectations of our clients. Clients see other companies and freelancers spitting out products in half the time, and start wondering why they are paying twice as much for something. As far as the client is concerned they just want it to work, they don’t care if your code is organized properly or made to run at its best efficiency for the computer. though I think soon enough with the move into mobile markets clients will be much more concerned with those features. Right now we simply don’t have a demand for extremely well built things, we have this demand to make something amazing in a month, if we are lucky! With these extreme deadlines comes sacrifice, developers are expected to get something working first and foremost, that has to be there! if it doesn’t work we fail. So we spend our time making it work, things like error checking, performance optimization, and even security fall off to the side. this is not because we don’t want our products to be perfect, its because we simply don’t have the time. This is the nature of this business, it wont change. clients will not pay more when a freelancer will do the “same thing” for 1/4th the price. Sadly we have cut ourselves off at the heels with this one.

To sum all that up what I am saying I completely disagree with everything that is being thrown at Adobe and the Flash Player. The Flash Player is very stable and enables us to do so much across multiple platforms. The problem lies in the industry. If enough people create shitty things, suddenly everyone is going to that the technology they are using is shitty. This is not a fault of the technology people, get your heads out of your asses. Stop blaming Flash, especially people that have no idea the power that Flash has. If we want better quality, lets just stop abusing Flash and create better content. its that simple. Stop creating shit that is insecure and buggy. Stop creating banners that abuse the CPU. Lets simply be better then that.

Ok so that was my rant on the Flash Player, lets take a look at native applications. This argument simply baffles me beyond all understanding. Adobe was not allowed to run its Flash or AIR runtime on the iPhone, ok I get that that’s fine, but then Adobe went and created a compiler. This argument is not about Flash, this argument is about a compiler. For those arguing that Flash will not work as a native app, you have no idea what you are talking about. This has nothing at all to do with Flash, and “Flash” people are not upset about this because Flash wont be running on the iPhone. why are we all pissed? because you have cut out actionscript as a development language for these device’s. The new iPhone compiler in Flash Professional CS5 does not create Flash Content, not in the normal sense. We do not get a file that runs inside the Flash player. We get a native application for the iPhone. I really feel people do not understand this. we are not running Flash, actionscript is being compiled into a native application. This is HUGE! why!? because actionscript can also be compiled into AIR, and into a SWF, and who knows what other things Adobe could compile for in the future. The point is I can create an application one time, using my actionscript codebase and compile out to Android, windows, mac, iDevices, the web, EVERYTHING. I do not need to re-write my application for other devices. This is the CORE of Adobe, delivery across devices. Apple has single handedly managed to cut down years of innovation in this world. People! this has NOTHING to do with Flash, this is about control over the device. Apple does not want applications running on all devices. If you have the same applications for android as you do for the iDevices, AND the android device is cheaper and able to run a variety of different technologies obviously the iDevice will fade away. Apple definitely does not want this. the choice to not allow Adobe to compile down to a native application is so absolutely anti-open it makes me actually angry when Apple plays the openness card. Are you absolutely insane?! The Apple system is the LEAST open of any system I have ever worked with. EVER. This is in the nature of Apple. It always has been. the other argument I hear as that a application sent through Adobes compiler will not perform as well as one written purely in a “acceptable” language. To this I say you MIGHT be right, this very well could be true. Native C applications are very powerful, and very stable, only if they are written well. For all those C, C++ and Objective C Developers I say that’s awesome. Write your applications and you will have to comply to the same standards as anyone else. A solid, stable, well performing application. I would also say that the responsibility of creating good applications is on the developer. Saying that “I think apps compiled from Flash will run worse” is idiotic. Let developers innovate, hell Flash developers are used to this kind of innovation. Do not cut off the possibility of pushing technologies further ahead because “you think they will suck”. They won’t suck! because there will be a demand to make them not suck. Developers will advance and find ways to make applications perform better, and use less battery. Adobe will also innovate to make the compiler work better and create more efficient applications. Look people this is NOT about replacing the iPhone with all Flash, its about allowing us the option. Its about giving developers another tool, another way to creative experiences and build amazing content. Just because there is a lot of shit in the industry doesn’t mean that everything Flash is shit. It just means we need up push up the bar on what we create. I think it is absolutely ridiculous that Apple is cutting out other languages. We are not trying to replace, hell we are even following your rules and creating exactly what you have asked for. We are not asking for a virtual machine, or a run-time. We simply want the opportunity to use the tools and the languages we are familiar with to create applications for this hardware. Honestly if this doesn’t exist, we will simply move on to better companies that offer the same hardware. Apple did you learn nothing from your mistakes in the PC world? People want a choice! they do not want to be babysat, and ruled. You will lose this battle, again!

Ok all this being said, no matter how much we yell and scream, I don’t think anyone’s mind is going to change. To much has been made public and too much has been set into stone on this Adobe/Apple thing. If Apple is 100% set on not allowing Flash or even actionscript to thrive in their world there is simply nothing we can do about it. As far as HTML5 debate goes I am all for a open standard for HTML5, I think some of the cool features and amazing things coming up will be awesome to use. HTML5, whatever that means now, is not a replacement for anything. It is a evolution of HTML, and a much needed one. Will it replace Flash? No, that’s stupid also. Not because I am a Flash developer its stupid because Flash is a different type of technology. If HTML can standardize video that would amazing! I would love to have a set way to embed basic video into a website. I would be totally fine without needing to use Flash for basic video. That should not remove the fact that I CAN use Flash for video. There are a lot of times I can still see using Flash for a lot of interactive video, composite ineractive experiences and create rich experiences with video, of course I want Flash for that!

I am a complete advocate of don’t use Flash when you don’t need too. I see a lot of stupid uses of Flash, people who create a site that should NOT be done in Flash purely for the ability to have some silly animation somewhere, or who knows the stupid reasons sometimes. Flash is not the solution, HTML5 is not the solution, they are all tools for creation. Dear LORD people PLEASE leave the choice of what the solution should be to the people that create and innovate the content. DO NOT let these companies start to force solutions. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc, your job is to provide unique operating system experiences at this point. Browsers should be done in the same way. A lot of people like IE, and some like Firefox or Chrome or whatever browser we want. The choice should be up to us, not up to you. I do not want to have to use Objective C, or javascript, or XAML or Actionscript, I simply want the choice to use whatever i think is the BEST solution for the problem. We are problem solvers, do not come in here and tell us we have to use hammers, when we know there are better tools for the job.

I also want to say “HTML5″ I love this idea, and I am all for it but I have been down the road of web standards before. I know the pains of developing something for IE, and Firefox that will play nicely together. Your world of standards has not instilled me with the most confidence. I REALLY hope you get it right this time, because I am excited to use your technologies, but I swear to you if we are moving back to the days if IE detection scripts I am going to punch someone in the sack, I swear it. It will only inflate the costs of our products for really no reason what so ever.

Lastly I just want to touch on my view of standards in general. Adobe is great about openness, the fact that Steve Jobs has crapped on that amazing part of Adobe is really sad. Adobe has done a frickin AWESOME job of keeping Flash very open. Hell you can create your own damn Flash Player if you want too, the spec is open. Also is there anywhere at Apple or actually any other big company that has a open bug database for a major product? I mean I dunno of any non-open source product with a open community bug database. Right now if i have a problem with the Flash Player I could go submit it to the Flash team. This simply does not exist anywhere else. Apple you are full of crap and just playing a vocabulary game with the word open. Give it up.

How about this, Adobe releases all the code for the Flash Player, say they do this tomorrow. They release the Adobe Flash Player onto GIT hub and ask Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Firefox to create there own “standardized” interpreter, will you be happy then? Would we need HTML5? If we just had a open source Flash Player that all companies were implementing. Hell I don’t think HTML5 is really much different. That could be a very interesting move from Adobe, they create amazing development products, they make no money off the Flash Player. There money comes in content creation. The ability to control the innovation of the Flash Player simply allows them to push the authoring tool and the player version forward at the same time. This is why I think the HTML5 standard as a evolution is going to actually suck, horribly.

If we want to innovate the “HTML5″ standard say in the future technology evolves, wow what an idea there, and suddenly we want to add something to the standard. Not only do we have to agree its a great idea to standardize it, we also have to get Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla all to agree it’s awesome and to agree on how they will innovate it. Then if we can get them all to agree and move forward we have to wait for all the companies to go off on there own and create this. Once that is finally done we have to wait for everyone to distribute the update to everyone uses the product. HOLY CRAP that’s stupid. that is the stupidest slowest possible was to manage our fast moving technology I have ever heard. Why is this better then the Flash model? The Flash Player is only updated by Adobe, yes I know that is what most people think is the “problem” but really its great. Adobe has been amazing in listening to the community for advancements. I would much rather trust Adobe to push innovation then put my livelihood in the hands of Apple/Microsoft/Google/Etc. Hell Apple is so set on controlling everything right now I cant imagine them agreeing on anything with anyone unless they could own 60% of something. Adobe has an amazing distribution network. The Flash Player can update in months. In 4 – 6 months we can see an extremely high penetration of the newest Flash Player, why the hell would we want to go back to waiting for 4 or 5 different companies to get there shit together. I feel like I am falling back to 1992.

So what am I going to do now? Well I am going to get back to work on a multi-touch application using Adobe Air, and guess what it doesn’t have a single rollover! (what kind of idiotic argument is that, who even thinks of this shit, have they ever used a computer?) I will continue to use Flash as it is the best solution to the problems that are brought before me. I will be learning everything I can about upcoming technologies be it HTML5, or whatever is to come. I will always be keeping these tools available to me as I said I am a problem solver. I think the best people in this industry are problem solvers. Our jobs are not only to solve the problem but decide on the best tools to do so with. As far as Apple goes, I currently own an iPad and a iPhone and I can tell you Apple’s selfishness and just outright closed minded look at the future of technology has turned me off. I used to be such a fan of your work Apple, but you tricked me. Your just as bad and selfish as any of the others. I will be finding myself an android device, in both the tablet market and the phone market. I will continue to look for companies that allow me to solve problems correctly, not companies that force me into solving problems their way. I don’t appreciate being approved of, watched over, or corralled like a group of cows into the Apple warehouse. Its just not going to happen.

I apologize for the lengthiness of this article, I don’t usually write something like this, but this whole tech war has us developers caught right in the middle, and I really think it is a sad sad thing. Hell if you want to write in qBasic and compile for the iPhone and someone makes a compiler I say more power to you, and I will look forward to the gorilla game on my device soon! Thanks a lot of reading, if anyone even got this far!

Hello again, in this tutorial I am going to go over Multitouch, IntelliJ, and Air 2.0 beta 2, along with SimTouch and the MSA Remote for the iPhone . We will be looking at how to setup IntelliJ to compile and run a Air 2 beta 2 project, inside this project we will add Multitouch events and use the iPhone to send those events to the air app. The iPhone will act as a simulator for a touch screen. Currently the SimConnect class we will be using only supports TOUCH_BEGIN, TOUCH_MOVE, and TOUCH_END events, thought hopefully we will see this extend out into gesture support. This tutorial is a bit long, and kinda advanced you should have an idea on how to create a Air app in Flex/Flash Builder already and be somewhat familiar with the IntelliJ IDE. Below are all the links I use in the tutorial, hopefully this saves you all time. Thanks again for stopping in, I will keep trying to push out tutorials as much as I can!

Tutorial Links

• Flex 4 SDK
• Adobe Air 2.0b2 SDK
• SimTouch Google Code Project
• MSA Remote iPhone App

In this tutorial I will be going over how to get IntelliJ working with the Flash IDE. We will look at configuring a Actionscript only project in IntelliJ and then running a Bash Script to call the Flash IDE. We will be using a shell script I have ported over from my TextMate Bundle you can download that below. For those just getting started with IntelliJ I recommend read Jesse Freeman’s IntelliJ Workflow Tutorial before you start into this.

For Windows Users the process is very similar except you cannot use the Bash Support Plugin you need to use the Batch Plugin. Sadly at the time of writing this the Batch Plugin in the “available plugins” section of intelliJ does not work so you need to download the Lastest  Batch Plugin from Google Code. Once you download this simply place the jar file it in your “C:\Users\{username}\.IntelliJIdea90\config\plugins” folder and restart IntelliJ. You will want to confirm it installed correctly by going to your IntelliJ Settings Panel and looking under IDE Settings -> Plugins to confirm that under the Installed  tab y0u see Batch Scripts Support with a check mark to the left.  Now when you edit your configuration instead of choosing Bash choose Batch and point it at the .bat file you download from this site. A quick warning the Batch Plugin does not seem to support folders with spaces in them, so you will need to be aware of that when you place your .BAT file, do not nest it inside any folders with spaces.

Hopefully this will help some more people feel comfortable moving over into the IntelliJ environment. Trust me you won’t regret it, especially if you are a Mac users looking for a good Actionscript coding environment. Thanks for stopping by! check back for more tutorials soon!

Download the: “Publish in Flash IDE” Shell Script For Mac

Download the: “Publish in Flash IDE” Shell Script For Windows