New open source code repo. First commit: YouTube API Player

I’ve set up a Google code repository at http://code.google.com/p/stinkdigital-flash/ with the idea of releasing some the work I do to the community. The plan is to add simple, encapsulated, useful (hopefully) chunks of code such as utilities and APIs.

The first commit is a wrapper for the YouTube ActionScript Player API. This was created for the first phase of a project we’re working on for Diesel and it basically simplifies working with YouTube within Flash.

I wrote about it in detail on the Stink Digital blog at: http://www.stinkdigital.tv/blog/2010/01/14/youtube-player-api/

Usage example:

var player:YouTubePlayer = new YouTubePlayer();
player.autoPlay = false;
player.source = “lQ3D4CqHbJM”;
addChild( player );

New Year New Dev Environment

The first thing I did as a developer this year was to install a trial of FDT; the result of my ongoing frustration with Flex Builder and the persuasion of a swathe of developers I’ve worked with recently.

A week in and I must say I’m mightily impressed. The whole application is really responsive, much more so than Flex Builder, and some of the code generation tools are invaluable. For example I love that after adding an event listener the event handling method is automatically created with a couple of key presses.

Being Eclipse-based, overall FDT is very similar to Flex Builder. This made it exceptionally easy to make the transition and start exploring. I haven’t figured everything out yet, but have already used it to make a small widget and develop a prototype for an upcoming project for Diesel. It definitely feels like I’ll be sticking with FDT for the foreseeable future.