ActionScript.com

You may have noticed some new blue buttons on our site.  We are beginning to roll out Facebook Connect on our site.  Currently, you can help us test by logging into your Facebook account, and seeing your own social activity stream on our pages.

As testing goes on this weekend, we will be adding additional FB Connect functionality.  By the end of this weekend, everyone will be able to log in, comment and interact with ActionScript.com as part of their Facebook identity.

In addition to Facebook Connect, we are also implementing our mobile website this weekend and should be ready to start rolling out the Mission: Zen code and announcements next week.

update: Mobile site design is complete

This is the kind of thing we seem to look up all the time, but don’t have a good place to find it.  So, here are the specific SWF Metadata.  This is the tag that you would put in your root ActionScript class to define the basic properties of a swf (height, width, frame rate, etc.).  You can find more info in Adobe live docs.

[SWF (width="#",
height="#",
widthPercent="#",
heightPercent="#",
scriptRecursionLimit="#",
scriptTimeLimit="#",
frameRate="#",
backgroundColor="#uint",
pageTitle="<String>")]

For the last few months, we’ve been working on a number of initiatives in a sort of stealth mode (as stealthy as any other open source project can be).  The code name for our project was “Sprout”.  You may have seen our splash page for Sprout as our home page during testing.

For the last year, a small group of core ActionScript developers (each with over 10 years of ActionScript experience) have been meeting in San Francisco’s Mission District to pull together all the tricks and tips they’ve collected over the last 10 years.  The intent was to take a scholarly and resolved look at Rich Internet Application development.  Our goal was to find the most harmonious way of working with all the technologies, art, design and stakeholders involved through the workflow of an RIA project.

In essence, we were in search of Zen and the art of RIA development.

This week, we will be rolling out a number of new features and announcements, starting with all of the websites and infrastructure to manage our release schedule (just linking all the sites together in order to announce the project is a very non-Zen process, e.g. Zensless).  Soon followed by our first code library (a small rendering engine for Flash, HTM5 and iOS).

Stay tuned.