Matthew Fabb’s blog

As I blogged about earlier, one of the highlights of FITC these past couple of years has been going to Jim Corbett‘s presentations on the internals of the Flash Player. They are like Tinic Uro’s posts on the Flash, a behind the scenes look at what goes on in creating the Flash Player, straight from one of the engineers on Adobe’s Player team, with tons of great info for Flash developerment. This was his third such presentation at FITC Toronto and this time the focus was what was done for the mobile version of Flash Player 10.1.

Now Corbett doesn’t have a blog and so he won’t be posting his slides unless FITC or someone from Adobe possibly post them for him. I knew this from previous years and also realized that content can be quite helpful to other Flash developers. So I’ve taken pictures of almost every slide (I arrived slightly late after lunch so I‘m not sure if there‘s any missing slide from the beginning) which you can go through on your own here on Flickr.

Some quick highlights on new things about Flash Player 10.1 that I’ve yet to hear elsewhere. Now Tinic Uro’s already blogged that Flash content scrolled out of view or on another tab will be paused or throttled to 2 frames per second, to save resources on the computer or device. Corbett expanded on this saying that there will be a new HTML parameter to control this called hasPriority. The default of this boolean value is set to false and setting it to true will stop Flash content from being paused or throttled. Tinic Uro also mentioned previous that Flash content with running audio and video doesn’t get paused or throttled. Check the slides for more details, but this is obviously important for people to be aware of since it is one of the few times where Adobe has done something to the Flash Player to effect existing content.

Corbett also explained in detail how Flash handles running out of memory on smaller devices, especially when there’s multiple instances of Flash and instances need to be shut down to save memory. If memory is low, new instances of the Flash files will not start up and need to be clicked on by the user to be then activated. He mentioned that Adobe was working on giving developers a chance to load in an image in place of the SWF, until the users clicked on it. Not sure if this last feature is coming with the initial release of the mobile Flash Player 10.1 or in later updates.

He also went into detail about how Flash is supporting hardware acceleration, with mobile getting some advances first. He also refused to answer any questions about Apple recently adding API support for video that Adobe had been asking for quite some time. Which is unfortunate, especially since Tinic Uro was able answer the question just days after FITC ended. That would have been cool info to have mentioned first at FITC. This is not a complaint directed towards Corbett, who’s obviously smart enough not to release anything before it’s supposed to be. This is directed at Adobe, who used to give small little cool tidbits first at Flash conferences like FITC.

Corbett also confessed that Adobe was late to the game in getting a proper 3D engine into Flash, however they were working on it, but he couldn’t say when it would be implemented in a public version of the player.

Before ending the presentation, he showed the abstract art that his young kid was doing in the Flash IDE, to the amusement of everyone and going along with FITC playground theme.

At the very end of the presentation up went a slide saying “What we want from you – What should the player do next?” where Corbett asked the audience that question. He then got out a piece of paper and wrote down requests from the audience, at times mentioning they were on their own wish list on the Flash Player team. One of items of interest to me which I think has been needed now for years is multithreading. He said true multithreading wouldn’t be coming Flash, as it would require a complete rewrite of the way ActionScript is handled, but they looking into having worker threads. Hopefully this is a feature that will make it out in Flash Player 11. I also asked about the direction of ActionScript with ECMAScript 4 being dead and he mentioned that no one wants an ActionScript 4 right now. That Adobe will continue what they have been doing, which is making modifications and additions to ActionScript 3. Colin Moock had an interesting suggestion, which was to have some sort of open forum to discuss the evolution and direction of ActionScript. Many of the feature requests people asked for were already in the Adobe’s JIRA Bug and Issue Management system, but it was still great to see someone from the Flash Player team take such interested in what developers wanted. Corbett wrote down everyone’s suggestions, filling up a page and half of audience suggestions.

Now FITC Toronto has been finished for over a week, but hope to get at least one more blog post about the conference.

Today begins the 9th annual FITC Toronto convention (although the workshop part began yesterday). I’ve been going to FITC since the 2003, although I missed 2 years (made up for it by winning tickets to FITC Hollywood one year I didn’t go). It’s always been a great time of learning combined with being inspired by what others are doing with Flash. I’m extremely lucky to have such a great conference where I live, rather than having to travel to go to conferences. I don’t think I would be the Flash programmer I am today without both FITC conferences and monthly FlashInTO user group meetings.

If you don’t already go to user group meetings in your area, check out Adobe Groups to see where they are organized in your area. If there isn’t one and you know of other Flash creators in your area, consider organizing one yourself.

Back to the conference, last year I was blogged for FITC and never posted the links on my website. However, checking now the links to the old FITC blog seem to be dead. Perhaps, I’ll achieve those posts later in my own blog.

This year it won’t be officially blogging for FITC, but will still be writing a few article for my own blog instead.

I’m really looking forward to seeing Jim Corbett’s 3rd FITC presentation on Flash Player internals, with this year a focus on mobile Flash. Learning behind the scenes info on how the Flash Player works from someone from the Flash Player engineering team is always geeky fun. Plus it’s great being able to ask him some questions after the presentation. Last year I asked about the future of ActionScript and ECMAScript, plus the chance of multi-threading happening in Flash Player. I may follow up on him with about the future of ActionScript and perhaps ask him about Sherlock (although that might be outside of the Flash Player’s team domain).

There’s other presentations that I’m really looking forward to, but the first session at FITC is about to start.

Also if anyone is interested I have a handful of free promo stickers from my work StickerYou, which say “code is beautiful”. If you see me at FITC, feel free to ask me for a sticker if I have any left.

So I’ve finally added my first feature request to the Flash Player in Adobe’s Bug and Database Management System. I’ve voted on quite a number of bugs and features, but never added added my own feature before.

It’s issue #FP-3889: “In the right-click context menu include a link to the player’s bug system”. So that users could see in the context menu something like “Report a Flash Player bug” which goes to http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

I think making more of the general public aware of the bug system would result in catching more bugs, which would result in a better Flash Player. I don’t think that the Flash Player is nearly as bad as many complain that it is, but I think this would be helpful. It could even help the image of the Flash Player to those who think it’s buggy.

Perhaps a step further would be to help less technical people in reporting bugs and include a Flash Player version detection that filled in the form with their version number, browser and operating system. It would also obviously mention if their Flash Player was out of date.

I’ve thought this would be a good feature for quite some time but finally got around to submitting it, as I got thinking about reporting bugs because of Ted Patrick’s recent campaign to get more Flash developers to report bugs in the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 betas. Which is great, as I unfortunately still come across a few Flash and Flex developers and quite a number of Flash designers who aren’t even aware of bugs.adobe.com. Perhaps adding this to the context menu would not only help the general public more aware of the bug database, but could also make more of the Flash community aware of it.

So please vote for issue #FP-3889. If you don’t already have an account Adobe’s Issue database, and you are a Flash developer or designer, do yourself a favour and take the time to create an account. Not for the purpose of voting for my feature request (as that would be nice) but so that you can influence the future of the Flash Player (plus Flex SDK, BladeDS and more) plus bring attention to any bugs you might have come across.

Ted Patrick recently blogged that the betas for Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2 is winding down. Beta #3 for Flash and AIR is set to come out in a couple of weeks, with the release version set to come out within 60 days.

So now is the time to report any remaining bugs, so that Adobe can fix them before the next big release. As the Flash Player team can only fix bugs if they are aware that they exist. While Adobe does do a lot of QA internally looking for bugs, there’s such an incredibly huge amount of Flash content out there on such a wide variety of platforms, that it’s impossible for Adobe to thoroughly test everything themselves. Which is why it’s important for people to discover and report any bugs they discover.

So here’s the link for Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2, and here’s the link for Adobe Air 2.0 and if you find any bugs they can be reported at bugs.adobe.com. Make sure you do a search before adding a new bug, as someone else might have already included that bug. In which case, you can vote for it to give the bug more priority.

This particularly relevant, with the recent discussion lately about Flash the result of the iPad launch and talk about HTML5, as part of these online discussions there are some who think that the problem with Flash is that it’s too buggy. There are groups who complain about the proprietary nature of Flash, yet I imagine few of these people realize that Adobe does have an open bug and issue database.

So it would be great, not just to test content with the betas, but to pass this along (via Twitter, Facebook, email, blogging or old fashion verbally mentioning it) to others. Perhaps even go beyond just Flash developers but also other technically inclined people who might take the time to report bugs. Non-Flash developers aren’t likely to be able to pin-point the cause of bugs without access to debug the source code, but they could still point to any Flash content causing any major bugs or crashes.

The more people are aware of bugs.adobe.com and the more bugs get reported before a major release is shipped, the better off the next version the Flash Player and with it Adobe AIR will be. It’s actually too bad that there isn’t a “Report a Flash bug” in the right-click context menu, so that more people outside of the Flash community could be aware that they can report bugs. Perhaps when I have time later this week, I will add that as a feature request, which is the other great side of the Bug & Issue database.

One last thing, if you look between the lines of Ted’s announcement that the release version of Flash Player 10.1 will be available within 60 days, that means CS5 will likely be out within 60 days. As a new release version of Flash has always come out within a few days of the new version of the Creative Suite.

It’s been a while since this blog has been updated as I have been incredibly busy. I’m going to blog a bit of what I’ve been up to for the past several months. Then I hope to be blogging a bit more regularly, as there’s a bunch of topics that I would like to write about. It’s just a matter of finding the time to type out my thoughts.

Last November 2008 at FlashInTO (the Toronto Flash user group), I was one of the people presenting on some of the new technology announced at Adobe MAX 2009. I did not attend Adobe MAX, but had been closely following all the announcements and was investigation into some of them on my own. I ended up doing 2 small overview presentations one on Cocomo (which has seen been renamed to Adobe Flash Collaboration Service) and the other on the Text Layout Framework (TLF). Both are really cool technologies that I think have the potential to have big impacts on web applications.

The presentation at FlashInTO went quite well, presenting to somewhere between 20 and 30 people. What is quite interesting is that I posted my presentation up on SlideShare and the following day I was surprised to find out it was up on the front page of SlideShare as one of their featured presentations. Then very quickly a good 1000 people had viewed my small little presentation. It’s currently over 3000 views and even more surprising to me is that if you do a Google search for “Text Layout Framework Flash” my presentation is on the first page of results.

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Since this past July, I’ve been one of the Technical Editors for Wiley Publishing working on a Wrox book Professional Adobe Flex 3. Joseph Balderson (aka JoeFlash) the main force behind the book did an incredible job in assembling a top notch group of writers from the Flex community including: Andrew Trice, Peter Ent, Joe Berkovitz, Tom Sugden, Todd Prekaski, David Hassoun, and Jun Heider.  While I’m obviously bias, I think it’s going to be a really great very in depth Flex book (around 1200 pages worth!), going into some of the more advanced topics that I’ve yet to see cover in any of the Flex books on the market so far.

This is the first time I’ve been involved in a book and it’s been quite the interesting process. I was originally ask by  to contribute some chapters. However, I simply did not have the time and I was unsure if my technical writing skills were up to the task. So I was later offered the job of to be one of the Technical Editors, which I accepted and it’s proven to be quite the fun job.

I often have a large stack of various technical books that I’m making my way through, but it’s one thing to casually read a programming book and such a complete different experience when going through the text to paying very close attention and verifying every little detail. As while I have a good handle on the Flex framework, I’ve often been double checking the documentation to make sure I do not have any wrong assumptions. Especially when it comes to smaller elements from the framework that I haven’t used for projects I’ve worked on. The happy byproduct of this job is that I’m getting to know the Flex framework even better than before.

Now here’s the shameless plug of the book, with links online where you can pre-order it:
Amazon.com link to the book
Amazon.ca link to the book

A couple of months ago Rick from FlashinTO (Toronto’s Flash user group) asked if anyone wanted to do a presentation on Subversion (SVN). I do not consider myself an expert on SVN, but it’s a tool that I’ve used on a regular basis for the past few years, so that I felt that I knew enough to put together an introductory presentation on the topic. So I volunteered to do the SVN presentation for the FlashinTO. Also I had originally learned about SVN years ago thanks to one of the speakers from FITC, whoblogged about why Flash developers should use SVN and provided a great documentation how to get set up up SVN for Flash development. So it was cool to give back to the Flash community, from what I had picked up previously from the Flash community.

Also in the process of creating the presentation, I discovered Adobe’s Version Cue CS3. I had heard of Version Cue before, but had no idea what it was and did not realize it was a version control system. I did some research to provide information in the presentation for the designers in the crowd. Because for designers dealing with images, video and other media files Adobe’s Version Cue would be a better fit for them over SVN.

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Before I start writing new original posts for this blog, I want to link what I’ve written so far that’s out there.

At FITC Toronto 2008, I was invited by FITC be one of their official bloggers to report on the event.

I was proud to see articles I had written get a lot of attention in the Flash community and I felt I wrote some good quality articles. It was very cool to see people react and discuss my postings in the Flash blogsphere.

However, I was very disappointed of the number of articles that I managed to get out. I took notes on every session I attended, but only got 5 articles out, by the end of it. I think I was spending too much time trying to polish my blog postings and should had more brief postings.

Anyways, here’s links to the articles I wrote for FITC Toronto 2008:

• ActionScript 4?? by Colin Moock
• FITC: AIR + Photoshop: What Happens When They Talk? by Dr. Woohoo
• Multi-threading is coming (sort of) to Flash Player 10!
• New Flash Player 10 & Flash CS4 features announced at FITC Toronto!
• Mapping with Flex and AIR by Greg Sadetsky

Here’s 3 videos that didn’t end up in any of my blog postings as showing a demo of the new XFL format that will be used in the upcoming Flash CS4

• FITC – Flash CS4 – XFL demo – Part 1
• FITC – Flash CS4 – XFL demo – Part 2
• FITC – Flash CS4 – XFL demo – Part 3

Finally, as part of reporting, I ended up taking all sorts of pictures, which can be seen here on Flickr.

So my old portfolio website, done in Flash 6 many years ago, is horribly outdated with few working links. Since I don’t have time right now to create a new website, I’ve decided to switch matthewfabb.com over to a blog format.

For anyone still interested in checking out my old portfolio website it can be viewed here.

For those who know me personally and looking for my thoughts on music, movies, graphic novels, or anything else in that nature, you can find me on Facebook here. Focus for this blog will be on my professional career and technical interests in the web.