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Adobe Flash Platform in Visual Studio

Amethyst IDE Launches Today

Monday 30 August 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

SapphireSteel Software today shipped Amethyst, the Adobe Flash Platform IDE for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 and 2010.

For more information, follow these links... Amethyst Launch Announcement Infoworld News Story Tim Anderson's First Look at Amethyst Dr Dobb's item on Amethyst

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Adobe Flex 4 Training From The Source (vol 1)

Book Review

Friday 27 August 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Adobe Flex 4 Training From The Source
Volume 1
byMichael Labriola; Jeff Tapper; Matthew Boles
$44.99 / £36.99

Adobe Press
ISBN-10: 0-321-66050-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-66050-3

This combined book/CD package provides a series of step-by-step tutorials which explain the fundamental features of Adobe's Flex 4 framework and aim to guide the user through the creation of a variety of different types of application. The Flex 4 framework is the latest version of Adobe's (...)

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Alien Skin Bokeh 2 PhotoShop Plugin

New release

Tuesday 24 August 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Alien Skin Software today announced the immediate availability of Bokeh 2, the new version of its lens simulation plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

Bokeh provides a wide range of creative focus effects and accurate lens simulation in a simple interface. Photographers use Bokeh to draw attention to their subject by manipulating focus, vignette, and depth of field. “Bokeh has grown beyond lens simulation into a creativity tool, (...)

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Resolver One: Python-programmable spreadsheet

When formulas are not enough!

Wednesday 18 August 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Resolver One $99 / £66
http://www.resolversystems.com

Once upon a time, the dominant spreadsheet was Lotus 1-2-3. These days it's Microsoft Excel. While Excel has added on a whole load of things that were not in 1-2-3, the essential way of working remains much the same: you enter numbers into a matrix and do calculations with formulas placed into (...)

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New Delphi, New RAD Studio

Coming soon...

Wednesday 11 August 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

I cut my programming teeth on Borland’s Pascal programming software.

It all started in the early '80s with Turbo Pascal. When their visual Pascal product, Delphi, was launched in the '90s, I was one of the first people to use it - and I loved it! Delphi - and various other Borland programming products - is now owned by Embarcadero. A new suite of software, RAD (...)

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Amethyst Visual Studio Flash IDE - RC1

Just released

Saturday 31 July 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

It’s been almost 3 years since my company began work on Amethyst and we are finally very close to shipping the final product...

Amethyst is a Flash/Flex/AIR/ActionScript visual design, coding and debugging environment for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. It has all the things you'd expect from a VS IDE - drag+drop, click+code, IntelliSense, drilldown debugging, customizable code formatting, refactoring and so on. Anyway, (...)

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The Death Of Books?

The Life Of Kindle...

Wednesday 21 July 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Yup, it’s official! Books made of paper bound in cardboard (or leather if you have the money) are now a thing of the past. Amazon has announced that digital books, to be read on its hand-held ’Kindle’ reader are now outselling hardbacks.

I guess I might as well pulp all the waste paper that's cluttering up my bookshelves. It's old technology, outmoded, yesterday's dross. From now on, my life will be lived vicariously on a screen. Here I sit at my computer all day, reading words on a screen. In the evening I'll turn on the TV (...)

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Free Web Sites - grab one now!

If you can find a name

Saturday 10 July 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Once upon a time if you wanted a web site you had to be geeky enough to know stuff like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and FTP. Then along came the free blog services such as WordPress and Blogger - and suddenly anyone could run their own site.

But blogs are limited to, well, blogging. If you don't want to blog, you don't want to write HTML and you don't want to pay a company for the privilege of hosting your site, what are your alternatives? One is called Jimdo. You can sign up for a free Jimdo account at http://www.jimdo.com and (...)

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Flex 4 Cookbook

Book Review

Friday 2 July 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Flex 4 Cookbook $49.99 / £38.50
by Joshua Noble, Todd Anderson, Garth Braithwaite, Marco Casario, Rich Tretola, et al.
O’Reilly Media http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805623
Pages: 768

Adobe's Flex 4 framework introduces a number of significant new features so the updated version of this book (the previous edition was called, unsurprisingly, The Flex 3 Cookbook) is very welcome. In fact, this is not merely an ‘updated' version of the last edition. It is a substantially (...)

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Will You Pay For News Online?

The Big Times Experiment

Friday 2 July 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Today, the UK’s well-known Times newspaper started charging people to read online. But will they pay...?

Let me say right up front that I won't. The Times was, until recently, one of the online news sources which I read fairly often. Others includes British newspapers such as The Guardian and The Telegraph, American papers such as The New York Times and Washington Post, broadcasters such as CNN (...)

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Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine - free download

July Edition

Thursday 1 July 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

If you write programs for The Flash Platform, you are sure to find articles of interest in Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine.

This is a high quality, free PDF-format magazine published monthly and available from: http://ffdmag.com/. I've contributed an article to this issue, explaining some of the differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4, particularly in reference to the parent/child relationships between containers and (...)

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Alien Skin Releases Exposure 3

Image Processing Plugin

Tuesday 22 June 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Alien Skin Software, a company specialising in image processing and art-effect plugins for PhotoShop and compatible software, has today released the latest version of its photograph enhancement tool, Exposure.

Exposure 3 lets digital photographers apply traditional camera effects to their images. Over 500 presets aim to emulate the look of photographs taken using specific types of film stock and exposure effects. Alien Skin claims that this new release is much faster than the previous version. For (...)

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Visual C# 2010 Recipes - A Problem Solving Approach

Book Review

Tuesday 15 June 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Visual C# 2010 Recipes - A Problem Solving Approach $54.99 / £43.49
By Allen Jones, Adam Freeman,
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2525-6
ISBN10: 1-4302-2525-4
1016 pages
http://apress.com/book/view/1430225254
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/

I generally like the ‘recipes' type of book. I certainly don't have the patience to study a 1000 page programming book in strict sequence from page 1 to page 1000. And, to be perfectly honest, I can't think of any programming books that really merit that kind of study. Unless you are (...)

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Stuff that’s entertained me this week...

Stuff’n’Nonsense on YouTube

Monday 7 June 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Some blogs make a habit of posting lists of more or less random links to things the blog’s author happens to find of interest. I’ve never done that. But, hey, there’s a first time for everything...

So this week, here are a few videos which, for one reason or another have helped to while away the time.... First, a funny one... Then a banned one... One for fans of ‘60s music (and Petra the Blue Peter Dog)... One for fans of Bollywood.... And finally, one for fans of British (...)

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Codelobster 3.5 Free PHP IDE

A new version of the Codelobster PHP IDE has just been released

Friday 4 June 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

While I must admit that I am not a regular PHP programmer, I have used Codelobster in the past and found it pretty impressive. What’s more, at a total cost of nothing it could hardly be better value!

New in this version: Facebook plug-in: Autocomplete for Facebook JavaScript SDK Autocomplete for Facebook PHP SDK Autocomplete for FQL (Facebook Query Language) Autocomplete for FBML (Facebook Markup Language) Context Help for Facebook Core APIs CakePHP plug-in: Autocomplete for CakePHP (...)

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The Essential Guide to Flash Games

Book Review

Thursday 3 June 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

(Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript)
By Jeff Fulton, Steve Fulton
$49.99 / £39.49
http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430226147
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk
(authors’ web site): http://www.8bitrocket.com/book
ISBN-10: 1-4302-2614-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-2614-7
600 Pages

What a great book this is! Don't be deceived into thinking that, since it is a book about games programming, it must necessarily be trivial. It isn't. I've read many books on ‘serious' programming topics that are much less informative and well structured than this one. In the course of (...)

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SnagIt 10

Screen capture made better

Tuesday 25 May 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

SnagIt 10 $49.95 / £37 Inc VAT
Techsmith: http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp

In Windows it's easy to take a screenshot. Press PrintScreen to grab the whole screen or ALT+PrintScreen to grab the current window. So why would anyone need a special ‘screen-grabbing' application such as SnagIt? SnagIt comes in two parts: the capture tool (bottom right) and the image (...)

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Tweeting At Last

OK, so I finally gave in...

Friday 21 May 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

I’ve been on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and various other ’social networks’ but, up to now, I have never ’tweeted’.

Yesterday, I finally gave in. It turns out that even my older and (I had always thought!) less trendy brother (I believe he still wears elastic-sided winkle-picker shoes) is on Twitter. So I decide the time had finally come to throw in the towel and get tweeting. No idea what I'll tweet about. (...)

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Adobe Flex in Visual Studio 2010

Latest Amethyst release

Monday 3 May 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

As some of you will know, I have a life beyond the confines of Bitwise...

In fact, most of the last two and a half years have been taken up with my company's development of a Visual Studio IDE for the Adobe Flash Platform (including the Flex framework). Well, we just put out our first pre-release version for VS2010. More news here: (...)

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Flash Decompiler Trillix 4

Compiled ActionScript decompilation

Saturday 1 May 2010 by Huw Collingbourne

Flash Decompiler Trillix 4
SWF/FLA/ActionScript conversion tool
$79.95
Eltima Software: http://www.eltima.com/products/flashdecompiler/

Most .NET users are probably familiar with .NET Reflector, a tool that peers into compiled .NET assemblies and displays their contents as human-readable C# or Visual Basic code. Flash Decompiler Trillix 4 is a similar tool for Flash developers. It peers into compiled SWFs and displays their (...)

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