Flash CS3

Or as we developers know it, Flash 9.

It leaked a few days ago on the Internet and yesterday I had the chance of tinkering with it for half an hour.
Installing:
On Windows Vista, it doesn't succeed on installing the Flash Player 9 ActiveX.

Interface:
Nice with a few glitches. This and other things makes me think there will be a patch afterwards. The main improvement is a better economy of the workspace.

Components:
You'll be glad to hear that the new components are lighter and adding one to the stage doesn't automatically include the complete framework. One button costs 5k in the SWF. If you add everything you'll be slightly above 40k. These are pretier, similar to those in Flex 2, but the list is also shorter, only 17, missing windows, panels, trees and other more complex controls.

Code editing:
A disappointment as ever. Code collapsing but no method collapsing. Some code commenting but not near Flex Builder (Eclipse) or Visual Studio capabilities. No class browser, no file manager, only the old Project Panel with SourceSafe support. No CVS, no SVN. Autocomplete is not significantly better.

Gfx editing:
There are a few extra tools, some old were modified, overall impression good. Reportedly, it crashes when working with assets involving multiple libraries.

Compiling:
Works as expected, even faster in some cases, but it has no class exclusion capability. That is, if you have a SWF that loads another SWF modules you'll have some conflicts, you'll not be able to reduce file size by eliminating classes that you already have loaded previously. Also compiling errors have their own tab, it's not mixed with usual traces from code anymore.

Debugging:
Oh, sweet debugging, I've missed you so much... There are two separate debuggers for AS3 and AS2.

Conclusion:
It's a must for anyone that wants a clean programming language (AS3 is so much better than AS2), but you still have to rely on FlexBuilder/PrimalScript/Sepi for code editing.

PS: Check out Silverlight, the former WPF/E from Microsoft which had its site facelifted recently, although the sdk is not renewed.

Sound levels on video

As you know, Flash Player 9 supports up to 32 sound channels. Flash 8 supported only 8. Great you say, until you need the channel allocated to a video playing. Well, there is no way to access it!

Here is my approach for a unified sound level reading (average between left and right speakers):

private function getSoundLevel():Number {
    var spectrum:ByteArray = new ByteArray();     SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(spectrum, true, 32);
    var total:Number = 0;
    for (var i:int = 0; i<512; i++) {
        total += spectrum.readFloat();
    }
    return total/512;
}

Drawbacks:
1. It gets the entire volume level of the application
2. It assumes some calculations while monitoring. Nothing noticeable on a 20 ms timer though.

Small observation: when setting the volume via SoundTransform, you can use values outside the 0..1 range, larger values result in volume gain. Negative values work too.