Our latest project for Zoos Victoria has gone live. Part of the FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Educate) portal that supports kids to explore and solve complex issues facing our society through the use of digital technology. Designed for school aged children to create a conservation based mashup video from a series of resources from the FUSE portal.

The site was released yesterday by the Victorian Education Minister, Hon. Bronwyn Pike MP.

Unsustainable palm oil production in SE Asia is pushing orang-utans to extinction through loss of habitat. At the current rate of clearing the Orang-utan could be extinct within ten years. Kids can access a collection of video clips and images and use an online tool to ‘mash up' their own video to support the Zoo's Don't Palm us Off campaign. They can share videos in an online gallery.

Check out one of the user's mashups below:

The site was all built in AS3 using Flash Builder and integrated with a custom build of our content management system (a Flex and PHP-based XMLRPC server). The CMS provided a simple interface for the administrator to preview and approve the submitted mashups. It also included an AIR application build for desktop use, and a standalone version of the mashup player (as used above to show the mashup).

Check it out here.

This one has been frustrating me for a while, I just wanted to open an actionscript project that we have in our svn into my workspace.

Seemed like a simple concept, but I only recently discovered how to do it:

• Go to File > Import
• Select General > Existing Projects into Workspace
• Find your directory with your .project file and select finish

Seems so simple now.

As anyone who knows me would tell you, I live by the command line, so I thought I would share an old trick to compile as3 applications from the command line in bash.

The trick here is to use the Flex SDK compiler which is available free from Adobe. It also requires having installed java, which is so common on most machines that I won't talk about installation.

The setup process is fairly simple:

• Grab Flex SDK: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK
• Extract to a location, eg: ~/.flex
• Make executable: chmod +x ~/.flex/bin/compc ~/.flex/bin/mxmlc
• Add the location to your path in .bashrc: PATH=~/.flex/bin:"${PATH}"

Once that's done you should be able to type mxmlc into the command line and see an error stating you must specify a target file. To compile an as3 file simply use the following:

mxmlc main-app-file.as -o output.swf

Additionally I compile my libraries to my-libs.swc by doing the following:

compc -source-path . -include-sources . -output my-libs.swc

Since this is a flex compile you can also use flex syntax in your actionscript to embed resources in the code. Most commonly I use the swf definition line below to simply definite the frame rate and dimensions of the compiled output.

[SWF(width='990',height='680',backgroundColor='0x000000', frameRate='30')]

Now to use Flash CS3's V3 Components see this post: moock.org

Additionally there are Eclipse tools for actionscript: the rasx() context