The movie below requires Flash 9 or above to be installed. Some rules to try out: 90, 30, 73, 110, 150. Valid numbers are 0-255, but not all produce interesting results.

Direct link to flash movie (got some people complaining the SWFObject script doesn't work under Vista)

See Wikipedia for more info, and Wolfram.com has a list of all 256 possible results
Here's the code:

I've made two minor updates for people using Flex Builder 2 on Linux. The first is to eliminate the annoying "Incorrect flash player installed...you have 0.0.0.0, and need 9.0.0.0" that pops up every time you run a project. To fix it:

1. Download debugui.jar
2. Overwrite the file eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ui_2.0.155577/debugui.jar with the downloaded one

The second minor update: I've noticed some very annoying bugs in the linux flash player (all reported to Adobe now of course), but in the mean time, I've been using the windows flash player under WINE, which does not have the same bugs. If you want to do this (which will probably greatly reduce performance), all you really need is to:

1. Make sure you have WINE installed correctly
2. Download the windows standalone projector debugger
3. Write a wrapper script that calls wine on the windows .exe, this wrapper will then be called by flex builder. You can see my sampe script to start (it's very simple, just need to adjust for your paths/filenames).

In other news, I'm working on my first AS3 application that is above the tech-demo level! Well...so far haven't gotten much, but I've got code that compiles on both Linux Flex Builder 2, as well as Windows FlashDevelop, with no changes (yay!). You can see what I have so far, but not it's not very exciting yet.

The 'OMG incompatible versions' thing is just a bunch of FUD. If Adobe kept control of the player, there would not be any issue with this. Sure, you might have 1 or 2% of the users branching off to make their own versions, but they already do this anyway! (see gnash, also that other opensource flash player). If the official player were open sourced, then the branches would be much more compatible. Gnash lacks in a lot of areas, and only supports up to F7, imagine if they could reuse code from the official player. So you would actually gain more compatibility by opensourcing, not less!

Notes on Blair's post:

1. Microsoft's JVM was not made by branching an open-source copy of Sun's JVM. It was made by microsoft, and they PURPOSEFULLY made it incompatible, to try and encorage platform lock-in. After the whole suit from Sun, a few years later they made their own language / platform (C# / .NET), and achieved the same goals. (Platform lockin. No, Mono is not a good substitute for 90% of apps)
2. Microsoft's JVM did not kill Java in the browser, Java sucking is what killed Java in the browser.
3. Sun's JVM just went GPL recently, and there hasn't been an explosion of dozens of incompatible JVMs. In fact, off the top of my head, I cannot think of a single JVM besides the official one, because that's what I always use, on windows, mac, and linux. Sure there are different versions, but the same applies to flash, and to any non-dead technology.

(Personally I do not like the GPL, it has some real problems, but that's a topic for another day)

For the case of the flash player, imagine that we still had ExpressInstall, and that it always pointed at the official Adobe upgrade site. The only people who might even possibly install an incompatible version, are the fringe users, and they would be fully aware of what they are doing. The average user who just sees 'New version of flash, click OK' would always have the official version.

I wish people would stop resorting to this argument against flash being open source. Why not just use the real ones?

1. Adobe makes lots of money selling flash player to device manufacturers.
2. Adobe uses expensive proprietary audio and video codes which they cannot open source.
3. Probably a few others as well, but the above two are the main ones in my mind.

The stuff below is left here for posterity's sake...but you probably want the link above, and forget everything below...

With a bit of tweaking, I've gotten Flex Builder 2.01 working under Linux. Everything seems to work, including debugging, except for the Design view.

Here is a brief outline:

1. Download and extract Eclipse. I used Eclipse SDK 3.2.2 NOTE: I could not get it to work when eclipse was installed in /usr. Unless you can figure it out, do not install eclipse via your OS, simply download the .tgz and extract it to your home directory.
2. Download and extract the free Flex 2.01 SDK.
3. Download and install the Flex Charting Components (same link as above) Run the installer by java -jar flex_charting_2_installer.jar and install it to the root of your Flex2 SDK directory.
4. Download the Flash 9 Debugging player
   1. install the plugin into your browser by running plugin/debugger/install_flash_player_9_linux/flashplayer-installer.
   2. (as root) copy standalone/debugger/flashplayer to /usr/local/bin
   3. create a symlink for gflashplayer, (as root) ln -s /usr/local/bin/flashplayer /usr/local/bin/gflashplayer
5. Download the FlexBuilder 2.01 Plugin for Linux (mirror)
   1. Extract this to the root eclipse install folder. It will create files in the configuration, plugins, and features directories which are already part of eclipse.
   2. Open eclipse/configuration/com.adobe.flexbuilder/flexbuilder2.xml and change the value of <sdkpath> to point to the root directory where you installed the Flex 2 SDK
6. (OPTIONAL) Fix the annoying 'Incorrect flash player installed' popup every time you run your project:
   1. Download debugui.jar
   2. Overwrite the file eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ui_2.0.155577/debugui.jar with the downloaded one
7. (OPTIONAL) Use the windows flash player with WINE instead of native linux flash player.
   1. Make sure you have WINE installed correctly
   2. Download the windows standalone projector debugger (see link at top for player downloads)
   3. Download this flashplayer script and place in your path, as well as rename the linux player so it doesn't interfere. You probably still need the symlink to gflashplayer as above.
8. (OPTIONAL) If you already use eclipse, it's possible it wont see the new Flex plugins. Simply run the following command to get eclipse to search for your newly installed stuff:
   1. "./eclips -clean"

That should be it! The only problem I've had is switching to design view messes everything up. Just stay in source view and you'll be fine. Also, whenever I try to debug, it says I don't have flash 9 installed, but I just press continue, and debugging works like normal (catching traces, breakpoint on crash, etc).

Thanks to this chinese guy's post for figuring it out. He has a few more posts on the issue ([1], [2]), but I didn't seem to need any of the info in them.

Somewhat related, this post talks about other ways of using Flex 2 / AS3 under linux.

I have written a quick & hacky script to parse the to create intrinsic classes. It is not perfect, and they still need a bit of cleanup by hand (imports, a few syntax errors here and there). But I've gotten a good 90% of the hard work done.

Download: ApolloIntrinsic_draft.zip

UPDATE: I tried again, this time by parsing the bytecodes from the SWC. There's only one problem, no paramater names (but I do have paramamter types). The cool part about this way, is that it shows all the undocumented and private methods as well!

UPDATE AGAIN: was missing some classes due to not parsing dynamic or final classes.

Download: ApolloIntrinsic_draft3.zip

(sorry for the lame interface)

AS3Tips.air -- install file, requires Apollo Alpha Runtime.
AS3Tips.mxml -- source code

Thanks to senocular for writing these amazingly helpful AS3 tips!

Basically, the idea is to use the File (which extends FileReference) class, and pretend to upload or download files from the net, but not actually perform the action, and just grab the file's path directly.

This app allows you to load a PNG or JPEG, apply a blur effect, then save it as a JPEG again. It requires the JPGEncoder from the AS3 corelib

Download BrowseExample.mxml (only works with Apollo, not in a browser etc)

Install BrowseExample.air

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:ApolloApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"
	title="Browse Example"
	backgroundColor="0x222222">

	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			import mx.events.IndexChangedEvent;
			import mx.events.DragEvent;
			import mx.containers.Canvas;
			import mx.effects.effectClasses.BlurInstance;
			import flash.filesystem.*;
			import com.adobe.images.*;

			// File object for saving / loading
			private var file:File;

			// callback when slider is changed
			public function blurImg():void {
				// get the value from the slider
				var blurVal:Number = slider.value;

				// use the slider value to construct a blurring filter
				var filter:BlurFilter = new BlurFilter(blurVal, blurVal, 3);

				// apply the blur filter to the image
				img.filters = [filter];
			}

			public function saveImg():void {
				// start at desktop directory
				file = File.desktopDirectory; 

				// listen for when the user has selected a location to save
				file.addEventListener(Event.SELECT, onFileSave);

				// request a download a bogus file, to get the Browse dialog to pop up
				file.download(new URLRequest("http://foo/foo"), "blurred.jpg");
			}

			public function onFileSave(e:Event):void {

				// cancel the file download, since it was bogus anyway
				// now, 'file' now points at where they want to save
				file.cancel();

				// grab the pixel data from the image
				var bmpData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(img.width, img.height);
				bmpData.draw(img);

				// encode the pixel data into a JPEG
				var jpgEncoder:JPGEncoder = new JPGEncoder();
				var jpgBytes:ByteArray = jpgEncoder.encode(bmpData);

				// open a filestream from the file
				var stream:FileStream = new FileStream();
				stream.open(file, FileMode.WRITE);

				// write the jpeg data to the file
				stream.writeBytes(jpgBytes, 0, jpgBytes.length);

				// close the stream. the file is now saved.
				stream.close();				

			}

			public function loadImg():void {

				// start at the desktop directory
				file = File.desktopDirectory; 

				// listen for select event
				file.addEventListener(Event.SELECT, onFileLoad); 

				// open browse dialog to pick an image file
				file.browse([new FileFilter("Images", "*.jpg;*.png")]);
			}

			// handler for when user selects a file
			private function onFileLoad(e:Event):void {

				// 'file' now contains a url pointing at the file they selected.
				// in a flash movie, you would not have access to the full path,
				// but in apollo you do.
				trace(file.url);

				// load the image that they picked.
				// In Apollo, you can load from file://... URLs
				img.load(file.url);
			}

		]]>
	</mx:Script>
	<mx:VBox left="5" top="5" bottom="5" right="5" horizontalAlign="center">
		<mx:HBox width="100%"  horizontalAlign="center">
			<mx:Button label="Load..." click="loadImg()"  />
			<mx:Button label="Save as JPG..." click="saveImg()"  />
		</mx:HBox>
		<mx:HSlider id="slider" change="blurImg()"  minimum="1" maximum="25" snapInterval="0.2" width="90%"/>
		<mx:Image id="img" />
	</mx:VBox>

</mx:ApolloApplication>

• Download raw lyrics instead of html -- saves bandwidth & time
• Better layout -- I take advantage of Flex's layout capabilities to make the interface resizable
• Partial match searching -- If a song is not found, I call out to the search page in the lyrics wiki, and then parse the results. This allows to find songs if you don't know the exact name, or miss a 'the', or to browse all songs by a certain artist

LyricStation.air -- requires the Apollo Runtime Alpha 1 in order to use. AIR file also includes the source code.

Many thanks to Marcos for giving out the source! It's a great learning experience to hack on other people's code that they've already gotten started for you.

Here is a quick test with some Bouncing Cubes that I've made:

(requires Flash 9 player to view)

(click to randomize velocity) main source file

Official Site (not much yet)
Development Blog (has a bunch of other cool demos)
OSFlash Page (more info, a bit outdated)