You can grab the Project Sourcecode here.

If you want to watch the video in the size it was intended for, go to the Tutorial Page on the Project Homepage.

The first installment is covering “Installing & Setting up the TweetrProxy” and you can watch it in it’s intended size by following this link.

Installing & Setting up the TweetrProxy from Sandro on Vimeo.

On the Tweetr-Front i’ve already released v1.0 beta 2 which adds a couple fixes. Here a short update:

• AS: changed serviceHost call from getter to internal variable _serviceHost [minor]
• AS: added serviceHost to OAuth Class since same crossdomain problem applies [major]
• PROXY: added OAuth Authorization support [major]
• ASDOC: Update Documentations, also added which Methods require Authentication [minor]

As usual you can download the new version from the Project Homepage.

I’m proud to announce a major update to Tweetr – the AS3 Twitter API Library. We are now very close to reaching the infamous v1.0!

Eventhough i have tested out most of the features, i am not entirely confident in calling this new release v1.0 and am thereby releasing it as v1.0 beta and hope all of you will provide me with feedback as to how well it works out and if you encounter any bugs.

The new version is available as of right now and can be downloaded from to shiney new Project Home at: http://tweetr.swfjunkie.com .

What’s new

As of now, the library integrates all twitter API features and is supporting Basic Authentication aswell as the much requested OAuth!

• AS: added OAuth Support
• AS: added getHomeTimeLine
• AS: added getRetweetsByMe
• AS: added getRetweetsToMe
• AS: added getRetweetsOfMe
• AS: added retweetStatus
• AS: added statusRetweets
• AS: added Geo Tagging feature to updateStatus
• AS: added searchUser
• AS: added description property to ListData
• AS: updated StatusData to include Retweeted Statuses and Geo Information
• AS: refactored GET Request argument passing
• AS: fixed a bug when parsing SavedSearchData (thx Ken)
• AS: removed deprecated methods, sendTweet, destroyTweet, getSingleTweet, getReplies

• PROXY: Fixed an Image Upload Bug (thx Bhargava)
• PROXY: OAuth Support

Known Issues

As of right now there is one known issue with OAuth and DELETE Methods for Lists. This is a official Issue within the Twitter API thereby we all have to wait for Twitter to come out with a fix for it :)

What’s next

Next i will be doing some Tutorials on OAuth usage and in general on how to use the Library. These will then be posted over at the new Project Homepage. Also i really hope you – dear users – will provide me with feedback on how things work. For that i have setup a Issue Tracker which you will also be able to find from the new Project Homepage.

Whom i’d like to thank

There is one person in particular i would like to thank and that person is Dan Petitt aka Coderanger . I was able to base my OAuth implementation on his great OAuth Class, which really helped me getting started. Thanks mate!

Also i would like to thank you all for the continuous feedback you are giving me and please keep it coming :)

As always, if you build something cool with the library, drop me a line!

What is this all about

Since we are not living in an ideal world, where everyone can get all the information they want or speak out their mind freely, i have a simple proposition to make.

Twitter is more than just a simple outlet of peoples thoughts anymore. The recent events in Iran have demonstrated that. That’s why i’ve packaged up my Twitter Proxy from the Tweetr AS3 Library, so that pratically anyone who has a webserver/webspace could create an instance of it and contribute to those who can’t freely access twitter.

What i want you to do

1. Download the TweetrProxy – Freedom of Speech Edition
2. Extract the Archive
3. Move the content into a directory on your server from where you want to serve the proxy.
4. Call that URL and follow the installation procedure
5. Tweet about this and your proxy using any or all of these hashtags: #free #speech #twitter #proxy
6. Pat yourself on the shoulder for doing something good :)

Why i’m doing this

Yesterday i received a bug report on my twitter library, stating that the proxy doesn’t work from iPhone clients.

At first i was confused, since i didn’t really build the proxy for such a purpose. After learning that the person asking for this came from china, i suddenly realized that my recent changes to the proxy wouldn’t allow anyone to use the proxy unless they used it in conjunction with my library.

Since the proxy acts just the same way as if you would call twitter.com usually any client that allows to set a proxy was able to use it, but since i removed Basic Authentication from the newest version, it wouldn’t work anymore.

Upon realizing this, i figured – why not package the older version up with a simple installer so anyone could install a proxy and help people out. And so here it is.

I’m happy to announce a new version of the AS3 Twitter API Library, now in version 0.95!

What’s New:

So let’s get to the juice part, here is a condensed overview of the changes:

NEW: Added Twitter List Methods.
NEW: Added missing Profile Methods, including Profile Image/Background Upload.
NEW: Added friendships/show Methods.
NEW: Added blocks/exists, blocks/blocking and blocks/blocking/ids Methods.
NEW: Added trends/current, trends/daily and trends/weekly Methods.
NEW: Added report_spam Method.
NEW: Added URL Unshortener Class using the public service provided by http://untiny.me/
NEW: TweetrProxy has Installer/Configurator Script now.

FIXED: Authentication Issues are a thing of the past now!

MORE: Tons of small changes and bugfixes. Read full ChangeLog for more details.

Also since i’ve noticed that it’s starting to become difficult to keep track on what is new and what is not within the Documentation, i have clearly marked which Methods are new and which ones are going to deprecate in the near future.

For those who wonder, the examples over at the Googlecode Site for the Library have aswell been updated to reflect the changes to the Library and the sources can still be retrieved by clicking on “View Source” from the Flash Contextmenu.

What Next:

Since i’ve gotten quite a lot of requests for examples, i have decided to create a couple tutorials in the upcoming weeks, which i will post here on this blog, so stayed tuned for that.

I’m also going to start integrating API Methods which yet are not publicly available so that they can be released as soon as they become active, so hopefully we will see more regular releases of the Library.

On the subject of OAuth, i would like to ask you, dear readers, to participate in a little Poll to establish what your needs and demands are. So make sure to fill it out:

Downloads

• Tweetr Library 0.95 Documentation
• Tweetr Library 0.95 Source Code
• Tweetr Library 0.95 SWC
• Tweetr PHP Proxy 0.95

In Conclusion

So there you have it! As always i’ll be glad if you report any problems you encounter over at the Googlegroups Discussion for the Library or create an issue on googlecode.

I want to take this opportunity to also thank everyone who submitted bug reports and sent in feedback, so a big thanks to all of you aswell. Please remember if you build something cool, drop me a line, since i’m always curious to see what you guys and girls build with the Library.

And of course if you appreciate the work going into this Library and it’s continued support, consider making a small donation. ;)

But sometimes you don’t want to go through the process of adding a Loader and EventListeners so you can load that external css file just for a bit of fancy html text. Sometimes it would be nice to just compile that thing into your swf and pretty much be done with it.

Well lucky enough we can embed files in classes with the embed tag.

Example:

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// Embed your stylesheet with the octet-stream mime-type
[Embed(source="assets/stylesheet.css", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
private var stylesCSS:Class;
 
public function createStyleSheetObject():StyleSheet
{
    // create a new StyleSheet instance
    var styleSheet:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
    // create a instance of the styles as ByteArray
    var byteArray:ByteArray = new stylesCSS() as ByteArray;
    // read the content
    var stylesString:String = byteArray.readUTFBytes(byteArray.length);
    // parse the string by the stylesheet and done!
    styleSheet.parseCSS(stylesString);
    return styleSheet;
}

Of course this would be the proper way, if you want to save some lines you could also do the following:

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// Embed your stylesheet with the octet-stream mime-type
[Embed(source="assets/stylesheet.css", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
private var stylesCSS:Class;
 
public function createStyleSheetObject():StyleSheet
{
    // create a new StyleSheet instance
    var styleSheet:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
    styleSheet.parseCSS(new stylesCSS().toString());
    return styleSheet;
}

There you go, your StyleSheet is ready to be used.

UPDATE:

Vikas had a very good question concering how to embed multiple stylesheets with this method. I figured i would give another example on how to achieve this very simply. In order to not have to deal with multiple files to embed, you could just join all the styles for a stylesheet into one file, like this:

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/* StyleSheet 1 */
 
.myStyle
{
	fontFamily: Arial;
	fontWeight: bold;
}
/* @eos */
 
/* StyleSheet 2 */
 
.myStyle
{
	fontFamily: Georgia;
	fontWeight: normal;
}
/* @eos */

As you see there is a comment block called /* @eos */ that represent the “end of stylesheet”. This we will split in our code as follows:

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// Embed your stylesheet with the octet-stream mime-type
[Embed(source="assets/stylesheet.css", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
private var stylesCSS:Class;
 
public function createStyleSheets():Array
{
    // create a instance of the styles as ByteArray
    var byteArray:ByteArray = new stylesCSS() as ByteArray;
 
    // read the content
    var stylesString:String = byteArray.readUTFBytes(byteArray.length);
 
    // split the string with your delimiter. in this case "/* @eos */"
    var matches:Array = stylesString.split("/* @eos */");
 
    // loop through the generated array and create the stylesheets and push
    // them to a new array that will contain those stylesheet objects
    var styleSheets:Array = [];
    var n:int = matches.length;
    for (var i:int = 0; i < n; i++)
    {
        var styleSheet:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
        styleSheet.parseCSS(matches[i]);
        styleSheets.push(styleSheet);
    }
 
    // return the StyleSheet Array
    return styleSheets;
}

And voila, you got an array of stylesheets that you can apply to wherever you want. Hope that helps!

So far i can say that the setup process for a feed is very simple and in a couple minutes you are done. Adobe also provides a nice REST API and a example of how to use it with PHP, so all is good there as well.

I might actually consider looking into the API a bit and see if it’s worth to add it to the tweetr library, might be nice.

Anyhoo, if you want to follow any updates concerning the Tweetr AS3 Twitter Library or any other things i might release in the future aswell as new blog posts, you might want to give Adobe Wave a go by clicking on the badge.

Only 4 days left till the first Swiss Flash User Group Conference opens its doors to the public. Have you gotten your tickets already ? If not, this might give you an overview of what you can expect, besides a beautiful view at the lake:

The SwissFlashUserGroup will be inviting all Flash designers and developers, project managers, illustrators, and developers of all other programming languages to get together in Zurich to share knowledge and enthusiasm about Flash at the conference Flash At The Lake. The conference will be held at the Rote Fabrik right by the lake of Zurich from 26. to 27. June 2009.
During the two days participants will be able to attend presentations and workshops to learn everything they want to know about the development and management of Flash platform projects. Several workshops will give insight into established workflow concepts and the manifold opportunities that have become possible through the application of Flash, Flex, AIR, Open Source, Video and Wii in Flash projects.

Flash At The Lake is an event organised by the community for the community. Next to international speakers of the Flash scene such as Aral Balkan (UK), Peter Elst (BE), Mario Klingemann (DE), Serge Jespers (BE), James Ward (USA) and DeMonsters (NL), there will also be several presentations by local Flash professionals, sharing their experiences with Flash and enriching the conference proceedings.

Tickets and further information can be found at: www.flashatthelake.ch

I also will have the chance to hold a presentation about Phidgets – a nice way for the Flash Platform to phiscally interact with it’s surrounding and user. If you are in Switzerland and close to Zürich, make sure to drop by!

I had the fun opportunity to showcase the newest debugging star in town at the latest Swiss Flash User Group Meeting. The name ?  De MonsterDebugger !

De MonsterDebugger is an open source debugger for Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR. De MonsterDebugger is made in Flex and AIR by design studio De Monsters.

It’s awesome feature-set sure help making debugging fun:

• Tree structure, lets you walk through your entire application on code-level
• Live editing, means you can edit properties and instantly see the effects in your application
• Detailed traces, lets you trace Strings, Numbers, XML, Arrays, Objects with great detail
• Method testing, is very easy as you can run most methods and catch the results instantly

Sounds neat doesn’t it! You won’t let go of it once you used it. I’m sure the SFUG audience thought the same. For some impressions of the presentation click here or click the header image above. Do not pay attention to the picture quality, a friend took em with his iPhone ;).

If you want to check out the slides, make sure to view the presentation over at SlideShare.net .

As promised, i just updated my Tweetr AS3 Library. For those who do not know what Tweetr is – Tweetr is a simple to use AS3 Twitter API Library, including practically all twitter and twitter search API features  and an URLShortener Class.

The new version sports the following improvements:

• couple fixes to authentication for a couple GET Requests
• a brand new PHP Proxy Class that allows Tweetr to be used even for content that is supposed to be deployed on websites! (see why.)
• finally some examples on how to use it :)

As always, let me know what you are going to create with it, or if you need any help and of course any type of critique is always welcome!