Whether  you want Flash for a uniform desktop experience but need to support the iPad? No problem. Standards junkie and only want HTML5? That’s cool too.

We’ve gathered a list of the top free and premium HTML5/Flash video players that provide an all in one solution to video playback on the web regardless of the device.

Enjoy and Happy New Year!

Check out this article by Jun Chen, where he describes priceless development practices that help improve performance of mobile AIR apps. Topics in this article include applying manual garbage collection, improving performance by updating the AIR SDK, vector versus bitmap graphics, etc.

via the Adobe Flash Developer Center

Rather than getting down into details in the post, feel free to check out the site’s Flippa auction page.  If you or someone you know might be interested in a property like Flash Speaks ActionScript, please point them to the Flippa page mentioned above.  At the very I’d appreciate if you can simply share the link to your online audience.  The more exposure the better.  Thanks again!

Over the years, many JSFL extensions have surfaced within the Flash community. Below are a collection of 20+ JSFL extensions ranging from audio/lip syncing to tween management to Git/Svn version control. Enjoy!

If you have either developed or know of an awesome JSFL extension that I missed from this list, feel leaving a comment below. Thanks and enjoy!

Automatically Enter at the Desired Frame with FrameAim

This adds a panel that enters the selected graphic at the currently displayed frame. By default, Flash just opens the Graphic to its first frame, regardless of what’s being shown on the main stage. No more!

Download

Auto Flash Class Panel

Class and package names are generated form your library folder structure. With one simple click your library is ready for export.

Download

Citrus Engine Panels

A flash extension to create easily CitrusEngine’s objects.

Download

Ease Caddy

The EaseCaddy panel allows you to store your custom eases and re-apply them. You can save your eases to a file and send them to someone else.

Download

Easy Palette

Easy Palette is a color management system that gives the user a friendlier and more useful way to manage custom palettes by allowing them to name colors to speed identification, save and load custom palettes.

Download

Extend to Longest Layer

Very simple but annoyance-saving command which extends all layers in the timeline to the length of the longest layer. Great if you find yourself pasting audio into a bunch of nested symbols.

Download

FrameSync

This is a handy-dandy animation plug-in similar to Animonger’s AnimSlider, except that it uses frame labels and requires no other setup.

Download

Git Version Control Panel for Flash

Commit FLAs to your Git repo from within Flash.

Download

Icon Publisher

Icon Publisher is a Flash extension panel for publish your icon in different sizes in one click.

Download

LabelJumper

This adds the Next Label, Previous Label, and Goto Label commands which allow you to quickly jump to keyframes with specific labels.

Download

MotionBlur

The MotionBlur Flash extension takes a (new) motion tween, analyzes the movement, and creates a motion blur.

Download

MotionSketch

MotionSketch inserts a command to record a drawing in real-time and create a tween based on that drawing.

Download

Multi Swap

Multi Swap allows you to swap multiple symbols at once, and allows swapping symbols across multiple frames.

Download

NewerAnimClip

This is an extended version of Dave Wolfe’s NewAnimClip which takes care of all the legwork. Just select a section of frames in your timeline, run the command, and that animation will be symbolized in the exact correct place. Basically a fully automated “Pringle”.

Download

Queasy Tools Panel

Queasy Tools is a new set of quick and easy tools for Flash designers and animators. This panel provides the fastest way to create tweened animation with easing in Flash.

Download

Search and Replace

This will search for and replace text in the names of Library items. You can search all Library items or only the selected items.

Download

SmartMouth

SmartMouth is a Flash extension that automatically analyzes vocal audio tracks and adds mouth shapes. Your Flash Timeline remains 100% editable, leaving you in full control of your animation.

Download

StructureCreator

Flash extension panel for creating website project structure

Download

Subversion Panel for Flash

Commit Flash documents and related files to your Subversion repo right from within Flash.

Download

Swap Instance for Duplicate Symbol

This extension adds a command that will take a selected symbol instance, create a new duplicate in the library, and swap the selected symbol for the newly created duplicate.

Download

Sync To Timeline

This adds a command which syncs a selected symbol to the timeline, regardless of if they’re isolated on their own layers. Really useful for re-timing nested animation.

Download

3D Rotate EZ

3D Rotate EZ is a Flash Panel using which you can create 360 degree object or 3D product rotation, called also ObjectVR.

Download

Personally, I feel this release of FDT 5 is a great leap for multi-platform IDEs and what to expect from them.

What is FDT 5?

FDT 5 is a flexible development toolkit in Eclipse for interactive developers. It’ s made with passion for expert Flash and Flex coding, innovative mobile development and versatile HTML5 / JavaScript / WebGL / PHP programming with haXe. Create your applications in FDT and efficiently target multiple platforms.

This release consists of a freemium and premium version.  FDT Free is free of charge and the perfect editor for small projects while FDT Max is the high-end IDE for all your advanced projects.

Download

New Features Include:

• haXe support
• Extract Method
• Extract Constant
• Extract Local Variable
• Convert Local Variable to Field
• ASDoc View
• Fat SWC ASDoc Support
• Sources Attachment for SWCs
• ActionScript ASDoc Support
• Breakpoint Support in Flex SDK
• Launching Mobile Projects
• Project Templates for haXe
• AIR SDK Merging
• … and more nice improvements

FDT haXe Features

One of the hot most requested feature in this latest release of FDT 5 is support for haXe.  Developed in collaboration with Powerflasher and supported by Influxis, the FDT’s haXe support provides developers a powerful tool for authoring in a multi target fashion.

FDT’s haXe features include:

• Live error checking
• Autocompletion (variables and functions)
• Syntax coloring
• New Class/Interface/Enum wizards
• HaXe Project Wizard

New to FDT?

Are you need to FDT?  If so, don’t worry.  You can find very helpful tutorials from setting up a FDT to using FDT’s debugger.  If you are comfortable with Flash Builder like I am, then this transition shouldn’t be too bad since it based on top off Eclipse.

FDT 5 is a great IDE  to watch out for as it headed in the right direction as a multi-purpose, multi-platform IDE.  Kudos to the Powerflasher team on producing a great and freemium product.

The concept/use of sprite sheets in the gaming industry is such a common technique.  It is a technique that cannot be left out of your nifty toolbox.  At the most recent  Flash on the Beach, Adobe demoed an exciting new feature that allows you to export sprite sheets from your library MovieClips. This will be extremely useful for game developers and for anyone doing mobile development.

Check out this sneak peek video create by Lee Brimelow on export sprite sheets from a future release of Flash.

Stage3D Cover Flow

The magic of Stage3D appears to be an ongoing affair throughout the Flash community.  The most recent sighting is a cover flow created using Alternativa3D and Stage3D.  The performance on this guy is awesome!

Check it out for yourself.

Adobe Flash “Speed” Feature

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use the “Speed” feature in Adobe Flash. If you use the Bone tool (Inverse Kinematics) you may find this hidden gem useful.  Enjoy!

Reach the Final Frontier with Circ and Flash Builder

Circ, available for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS, is so simple in its gameplay but challenging at the same time—players navigate their spaceships collecting stars and points, while escaping from planets and stars trying to pull the ship away from its course.

It’s the kind of game that’s perfect for passing the time between train stops or even just for a quiet few minutes at home. Learn more!

Check out the official trailer!

Enhance your media with this stunning three-dimensional template!

Features

• Deep Linking & Navigation History with SWFAddress.
• Customizable, dynamic two level menu.
• Complete realtime 3D Media Viewer powered by Papervision 3D
• Smart navigation featuring Quaternions for Pixel Precision.
• Native support for both Flickr and YouTube.
• Supports JPG , GIF, PNG , SWF, FLV files and H.264 encoded videos.
• Built-in garbage collection and smart loading system managed by CASA Lib.
• Over 146 XML Settings to customize nearly everything.
• Slideshow function with auto play and resume.
• Supports left/right arrow keys for global navigation.
• HTML formatted captions positional everywhere on the stage.
• Custom Homepage support & Single assets behaviour.
• Smooth, optimized render system to free resources when needed.
• No Flash authoring needed, customize everything with XML & FlashVars.
• Complete Fluid layout with Fullscreen mode and smoothing filters for big assets.
• Tiny music player with playlist support and autoloop function.
• Social icons with custom tool tips and external links.
• Load background images at runtime and resize them automatically with correct aspect ratio.
• Content module which handles HTML tags and supports external CSS Stylesheets.
• PHP Contact Module with confirmation email and field validation.

“Proscenium” (codename)  is an ActionScript 3 code library built on top of the Flash Platform Stage3D APIs that allows for rapid development of interactive 3D content.   It is being released to encourage easy experimentation with 3D content in Flash, and to garner feedback on the API design.

Download Proscenium

Enabling the Flash Debug Player on Chrome

Have you ever tried to debug your Flash content from within Chrome only to find out that Chrome thinks you don’t have the correct version of the Flash player.  I am sure most developers have come across this at some point.  Mims H Wright was nice enough(or forced to) provide a nice problem/solution to this issue.  Be sure to say thanks!

Particle Editor for Starling Framework

Check out this in-browser particle editor for the Starling 2D Framework for Flash Player 11. Export your particle effect as a Starling particle extension and embed them into your Starling projects as usual.

Preloading TLF runtime shared libraries in Flash CS5.5

Adobe Flash Professional CS5 introduced a new type of text field to Flash called TLF text. TLF text has several advantages over Classic text, such as advanced formatting options, better font compression and rendering, and support for complexly formatted languages. In order to support TLF text, Adobe Flash Player was updated to change how it loads the related runtime shared libraries (RSLs) and the content you define in the SWF file.

In this article, you’ll learn about the changes to Flash Player and the best options for publishing files containing TLF text.

Simple Stage3D Benchmark

Flash 11?s new Stage3D API gives us hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, which is a major jump forward for Flash-based games and simulations. Along with this comes some added responsibility: we must now care about our users’ graphics cards. Today’s article features a simple benchmarking application that you can run to get a basic idea of how Stage3D is performing on a certain computer.

The layout of contents in multimedia applications developed in Flash that include text has always been cumbersome and limited, now TxtBlock will help to give life to those contents trough of a good list of features, which allow combine text, images and videos in a way extremely easy and simple.

Layout your paragraphs smarter

TxtBlock can be integrated into any project developed with ActionScript 3.0, whether templates or components were required to display texts or other type of content. It’s very flexible, resizable and the best of all is totally customizable.

One of the features worth highlighting is that TxtBlock works based on styles configured via XML , providing a large amount of customization possibilities to the users without necessarily having to compile the application.

Display Videos, SWFs, and Images

Features

• Full customization.
• based OOP .
• Customizable ScrollBar.
• MouseWheel support.
• Video visualization using VPlayer.
• Image visualization using SideCutSlider.
• SWFs visualization.
• Custom components visualization. Users can add their own components as extra elements.
• Data Management via component properties or XML .
• Style Sheet Management via XML .
• Text Fonts fully customizable and independent from the component.
• Resizable
• Only 33kb.

Migrate Mobile Crossplatform Headaches

Android is now the most widely used mobile operating system in both the United States and the world, according to the research firms Canalys and Nielsen. But behind that news lurk a lot of headaches for enterprise developers.

Starting ActionScript Programming

In this new series, Huw Collingbourne explains the fundamental features of ActionScript programming. If you are new to ActionScript, this is the place to start!

10 Things Every Java Developer Should Know About Flex

Java developers make great Flex/Flash developers. As an Adobe Certified Technical Trainer who has taught many Java programmers in the last several years, I have seen first-hand how quickly Java developers adapt to ActionScript.

Nice Gesture, But What Does It Mean?

One step forward, two steps back. That’s how Don Norman describes today’s gesture-based user interfaces (UIs) for smartphones, tablets and a growing assortment of other devices.

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