Tag Archive for 'opensource'

Disappointment No. 3

Published on Oct 1, 2010 in Flash, news, personal and projects. 20 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I created a couple of programs like AS3doc and AS3V. Both have never really gotten any adoption because I canceled their development. The reason was that Adobe shortly before or after I finished my tool released a competitive tool. Given the fact that I work fulltime on audiotool.com it is hard for me to find some time off to develop those applications. Some of them are even not written for myself — like the FlexMojos code coverage.

However it happened again. I write a tool that is not even fully released yet and there comes Adobe around the corner with something that must have been in development for a while. Enough time to tell us that we can decide if we want to continue working on it or not.

I have no problem with Adobe developing such products. In fact I second that they have a Flex QA team which develops tools like FlexPMD and the recent coverage plug-in. However the way this process happens really frustrates me. Why would I want to work on something that Adobe is already developing somewhere silently and release it without giving anyone notice? But they do not owe me an explanation for what they do. It would also be arrogant to say that I demand to know upfront.

I am just sad that there is no dialog at all. This happened three times now. I will not continue doing this.

That does not mean I will stop working on Apparat and JITB. Only no more enterprise releated open source software.

TAAS As A Decompiler

Published on Sep 29, 2009 in Flash and news. 36 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The TAAS compiler is different from the ActionScript compiler since its input is not ActionScript source code but already compiled SWF or SWC files. Just like the haXe compiler can output AS3 instead of a SWF the TAAS compiler can do the same.

Now if you add one and one together you see that the TAAS compiler can be used as a very strong decompiler. My own tests have shown that it will work flawlessly where other commercial decompilers output rubbish. Since the compiler behaves like the Flash Player it will “execute” the bytecode in order to parse it which means it has a very highlevel understanding of the structure inside the SWF.

The only question is now what to do with the source code. I wrote the decompiler for my session at FOTB to show much easier how the optimizations behave. It is also a great tool to debug errors. But should it be opened or not?

To take it one step further one might also be able to write an obfuscator using the TAAS compiler. In my opinion it would be cool to have a strong decompiler and obfuscator, both being open source. We might also add an option to protect SWFs from the decompiler by adding something to the SWF metadata for instance. Of course this is just a simple rule which could be removed by someone once the code is open. What do you think?

After The Sandbox

Published on Sep 28, 2009 in Flash, news, news and personal. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

In 2006 I got invited to the FlashForum Conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was my very first Flash conference and my topic was AS3 code optimization. I have talked a lot about bitwise operators, lookup tables and other techniques to speed your code up.
Now about three years later I wanted to prepare a very special talk for FOTB and make a step forward by getting rid of old habits and idioms.

Before FOTB I was not sure if I can present Apparat at all. For me as an autodidact it is not always easy to solve certain issues. Mario Klingemann talked about Magic Moments in Brighton. I guess I had one after a long time of thinking and failing. I got really into the flow and everything became so clear. Stay tuned for more detailed posts on the technique behind the different compilers.

Continue reading ‘After The Sandbox’

Apparat is now Open Source

Published on Aug 11, 2009 in Flash, news, personal and projects. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The full source code of Apparat is now available at GoogleCode. It is the whole framework behind TDSI and Reducer.

Apparat is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Please contact me if you want to contribute to this project. Maybe someone is interested in writing an Ant task for Reducer? I am also happy to receive feedback if you have used the framework to build something cool with it.

Please join the Apparat Discussion Group if you are interested in collaboration.

Hobnox Open Source

Published on Apr 28, 2009 in Flash, news, personal and projects. 12 Comments Tags: , , .

I am proud to announce that we are finally able to release some of our frameworks as open source. It has been a while and we talked very often about this topic. Today at the FlashForum Conference in Cologne I had the honor to show our open source hub to the public for the first time.

We have currently the UIEvent framework including full source code online. I can think of a lot of other frameworks we could release in the near future. Including for instance our DOM, Pogo, Tween or Graph framework. I really hope that we get the go for all those other libraries in the next few days as well.

AS3V

Published on Oct 6, 2008 in as3, Flash, personal and projects. 23 Comments Tags: , .

At the end of my FOTB session I wanted to show you my latest tool called AS3V. Time was short and there was a small glitch so I could not show it. But now I can explain what AS3V really is without having to rush.

AS3V is basically a tool that can check for syntactical correctness. It will do with your code what a compiler does but it keeps formatting metadata. That way it can generate an XML skeleton of your code and apply rules on the XML.

You can have a look at the first output AS3V produces here. The original source code is included in the comment at the top.

As you can see it will be possible to force coding standards for instance and to warn if code could be optimized. I hope that it will be possible to have a first version of a stable parser soon. ANTLR is still giving me a lot of trouble but it is the first time for me working with such a tool as well.

PixelBender Runtime Compilation

Published on Sep 8, 2008 in as3, experiments and Flash. 10 Comments Tags: , , , .

Tinic posted today his PixelBender assembler and disassembler. This makes me happy, because now I can post an experiment I could not show for a while.

If you know PixelBender, than you know that you can not create loops. What you could do is unroll all constant loops with a fixed length. If you know simple convolution filters like a blur, you know that you need an xy-loop and you know it should not be possible with PixelBender at all. Let me prove you wrong and have a look at dynamic loop unrolling with PixelBender (be careful with high values!).

I built a library to assemble and disassemble PixelBender kernels at runtime. I wrapped it also in a high level API so basically you can create a new Kernel by doing var kernel: Kernel = new Kernel();. Then when you need your shader as a ByteArray you simple call kernel.compile(). There are still some glitches here and there but I hope that I can release the source code pretty soon.

AS3C — take a look inside

Published on Aug 11, 2008 in as3, c++ and others, experiments, Flash, personal and projects. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

I have started working on AS3C at the end of last year. After a quick prototype the development stagnated and I added just several fixes and tests to the code. Basically I started AS3C as a complete C# newcommer and because of that the code is very ugly.

Due to the fact that I do not have much free time to continue developing AS3C I think it is the right time to release the source-code on the one hand and to let people experiment with it on the other hand.

You can either download the sources and build AS3C manually (you will need zlib.net) or download a binary from trunk/bin/.

When using AS3C you will need the ActionScript from the SVN. Remember that you write real ActionScript code which gets translated by AS3C. There is also one undocumented and very experimental feature existing. If you run as3c.exe -optimize main.swf you could get some speed improvements if you have heavy loops using the Math class. But it could also destroy the SWF so do not forget to make a backup :o)

Sound.extract() rocks!

Published on May 21, 2008 in experiments and Flash. 16 Comments Tags: , , , , .

When Tinic Uro was implementing the dynamic audio features he was also giving us a very nice present called Sound.extract(). And it is simply awesome!

I wrote a simple experiment yesterday night using the popforge library. Yes — you can use it still with the new features and it is a great help. I just had to convert the sample data into a format for popforge.

The experiment is a simple flanger applied to an MP3. André wrote the flanger about a year ago but it is still fun listening.

The sourcecode will also show you how to loop sounds using Sound.extract(). It is a very safe way so that you get always as much data as you need.

There is only one problem right now. I wanted to use the new FileReference features so that you can load your own MP3s into the flanger. But unfortunately there is currently no easy way to do this. You would have to load the bytes, then create a SWF at runtime and inject the MP3. Then you could load that SWF with Loader.loadBytes() and once that is complete you can extract the sound. I thought doing that would be a little bit too much for a small demo :)

Pratique d’ActionScript 3

Published on Apr 27, 2008 in Flash and news. 5 Comments Tags: , .

We really have a premiere this time. Thibault Imbert just released his book “Pratique d’ActionScript 3″ for free.

The story behind this is pretty sad but I have to say this is an awesome move from Thibault. It is about 1000 pages and took more than a year of work.

So if you are French you definitly have to check it out. And do not forget to donate some bucks to support Thibault if the book is useful for you!