A look at the Open Video Player initiative

August 17th, 2009 Brandon No comments

I had somet time recently to take a look at the Open Video Player initiative and see what it has to offer Flash/Silverlight developers.  Take some time to read about my findings over at the Phenomblue blog!

Categories: Flash/Flex Tags: , , , ,

Text Layout Framework — An Overview

August 12th, 2009 Brandon 2 comments

First off, let me start with an introduction as this is my first post. My name is Brandon Bone and I work as an Interactive Developer specializing in Flash and Flex for a company in Omaha, NE named Phenomblue. Phenomblue is a digital design and technology collective focused on building brands through immersive interactive experiences. With offices in the US and Canada, Phenomblue’s clients include some of the biggest advertising and marketing agencies in the world providing websites, digital applications, 3D modeling and animation, interactive presentations, content management tools, and other strategic technology services.  If you haven’t had a chance to check us out, please stop by and take a peak(and don’t forget about the blog).

Moving on…

This post is going to serve as introduction to a series of posts that I’ll be making over the next few weeks about Adobe’s new Flash Text Engine (FTE) and, more importantly, Text Layout Framework (TLF) that have been introduced with Flash Player 10. Adobe’s done a great job about getting wise about text in latest release of the player by integrating the more complex features that you see in applications like InDesign. Word actually has it that FTE is the brainchild of several of the InDesign team. Below are some of the features FTE and TLF bring to the table (from labs.adobe.com).

  • Bidirectional text, vertical text and over 30 writing systems including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, the major writing systems of India, and others
  • Selection, editing and flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers, and around inline images
  • Vertical text, Tate-Chu-Yoko (horizontal within vertical text) and justifier for East Asian typography
  • Rich typographical controls, including kerning, ligatures, typographic case, digit case, digit width and discretionary hyphens
  • Cut, copy, paste, undo and standard keyboard and mouse gestures for editing
  • Rich developer APIs to manipulate text content, layout, markup and create custom text components

A pretty huge step up from the limited world of the TextField class, if I do say so myself — and I do. Personally, I won’t use bullets one and three much and as a result won’t be discussing them much in this series, but rest assured the others will be covered.

Of course, major updates like this come with a barrage of new libraries, as well as a new architecture that need to be learned in order to take full advantage of all the new features. This is always a daunting task at first to say the least. Adobe has done a fair job delivering documentation and support so far, but resources are still limited. And with Adobe still developing this framework as we speak, relevant resources become more and more sparse. I hope to clarify some of the more ambiguous parts of the new framework and offer as base of simple code examples to get started. So stay tuned for the next post where we’ll compare TLF’s architecture to the ubiquitous Cairngorm framework.

Categories: Text Layout Framework Tags: