I haven’t seen any examples on how to use the native OS browse dialogs for opening & saving files, so here’s a quick example.

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
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I saw this post by Marcos P. who created an app for searching for song lyrics. I took it and added a few small enhancements:

• 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.

I put together a quick reference to getting started on writing Actionscript3 applications (which target the Flash 9 runtime), using only free tools (on Windows). Also a few handy documentation / language reference links. It’s everything you need to start writing your own high-performance Flash applications, including PaperVision3D. Check it out.

This looks pretty neat, it’s an opensource 3D library written completely in actionscript3, for flash9+. It’s the first serious 3d engine I’ve seen in flash, and while it is still at an early stage (somewhat closed beta, if you join the mailing list you can find info on how to get it), it looks like it will be amazing. The coding is clean, and there is already some documentation (often rare in opensource projects).

Here is a quick test with some Bouncing Cubes that I’ve made:
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haXe is a new powerful programming language that can generate Javascript code and also compiles to Flash SWF (including latest Flash Player 9). It handles all the browsers differences and has crossplatform APIs such as Xml, Http, Date…

The sweet thing about it, is instead of using 3 languages to write webapps, now you only need one. Instead of Actionscript+Javascript+PHP, you can use haXe+haXe+haXe.

As a replacement for ActionScript: contains several powerful language features, including ‘type inference’, and can compile the same code to flash 6,7,8 or 9. No need to switch syntax when going between versions.

As a replacement for JavaScript: Provides a typed language, to help you make fewer errors, versus javascript’s complete dynamic typing.

As a replacement for PHP(Perl/Python/Ruby/etc): Use the same language on the client and the server. Libraries for file/database/image/etc manipulation. Compiled to bytecode, thus can run much faster than the interpreted languages (some benchmarks show it 20 times faster than PHP).

haXe website | digg story