Yesterday I was trying to install the new beta version of Adobe AIR 1.1 for Linux ..
At first the installation didn’t work for me, it says:

An error occurred while installing Adobe AIR. Installation may not be allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.

After contacting Adobe Support they thankfully put me on the right track with the following steps:

1. If you don’t have the Alpha version of AIR runtime, skip to step 4.
2. Uninstall the Alpha version of AIR runtime:

   $ sudo dpkg -r adobeair-enu
   $ sudo rm -rf $HOME/.adobe/AIR /root/.adobe/AIR /opt/Adobe\ AIR /tmp/FlashTmp*

3. Uninstall all the AIR applications that were installed using the Alpha release using dpkg, or simply just use click the air package for each and choose Uninstall.
4. now you can install the Beta version of AIR runtime:

   $ chmod +x adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin
   $ ./adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Note: if you get the following message:

The application could not be installed because the AIR file is damaged. Try obtaining a new AIR file from the application author.

That means you did not uninstall all the AIR applications that were installed using the Alpha release.

There’s so much to tell about how media files can be manipulated in web applications, especially when we talk about large amount of video files compared to quality displayed ..

A web application will use certain file formats depending on which technology is used to render videos at front-end and/or back-end streaming server [if there's any]

Since Flash Platform is the best environment for such processes, it was difficult to prepare videos before using them on the web, developers had to have videos encoded from their original formats to FLV in order to use with Flash Player and Flash Media Server, then Adobe added the support for H.264/AAC since the release of Flash Player 9.0.0.115, that was wonderful feature but still we face the same old problem with encoding videos ..

According to my experience, the best practice to make this encoding process easier is to use FFMPEG in conjunction with PHP as a back-end server service, such procedure requires installing FFMPEG along with all its required libraries, after all a developer can use PHP to dynamically encode uploaded videos with FFMPEG and save the final FLV videos on server, plus other features like extracting image frames from videos ..
this article describes how to install FFMPEG on Centos 5

Yet this operation doesn’t give a perfect result regarding to quality and performance, but ..
It seems like there is a better solution is waiting to be unleashed ..

Adobe has announced the upcoming release of Flash Media Encoding Server on fall 2008 ..
you should read the features, quite amazing ..
Just think about the possibilities here ..

I was working on a weekly events module ..
At some point I need to be able to get a list of week days by providing only on day, for example if I provide today date I expect the whole week contains today regardless to the current month or years ..

The following example shows how we can do that, with some extra features ..

source code available via flash context menu

The following method simply converts a given RGB value to hexadecimal format..
i.e. 0 > #000000

public function getProperColor(input:int):String {
	var color:String = "#";
	var checker:Number = 0;
	if (input.toString(16).length<6) {
		while (checker<6-input.toString(16).length) {
			color += "0";
			checker++;
		}
	}
	color += input.toString(16);
	return color;
}

ComboBox is a very common component used in many projects, what if we can extend its features?
The following example creates a custom tooltip for each item in the DropDown List, data provider for these tips can be set in the ComboBox dataProvider as follows:

[Bindable] private var comboProvider:Array = [
		{label:"item 1", data:{tip:"bla bla bla .."}},
		{label:"item 2", data:{tip:"bla bla .."}},
		{label:"item 3", data:{tip:"bla bla bla bla .."}}
		];

source code available via flash context menu

Next step is to implement custom controls to make this ToolTip interactive by adding some like “rename” and “delete”
I’ll get back to you soon with another example

ActionScript DisplayObject has a property called scale9grid used to scale objects according to nine regions based rectangle, detailed information could be found here

One day I was trying to use it for scaling effect applied to a MovieClip with curved corners and dynamic loaded image within, the problem was that the mask didn’t scale properly using scale9grid ..
I didn’t find an answer to why not, this post on Kirupa still has no reply, and I was using ActionScript 2.0

Well, I used a work-around way to bypass this issue, it’s simple, just leaving the mask with sharp corners with no scale9grid applied, and draw extra border that has the same background color to hide the image corners visually!
this won’t work nice unless we have only solid background color

hiding image corners

I was hoping that adobe fixes this issue in AcrionScript 3.0, but unfortunately they didn’t ..

Few days ago I found this post at Mark Grossnickle’s blog, his custom Scale9Mask works fine with masked objects, but it has to be applied individually, and there’s a scaling factor issue, here is a demonstration example with source code available via flash context menu

Many thanks to Mark Grossnickle ..

First time I heard that term ‘Interactive Development’ it felt like I found my lost space ..
I did not even try to find a definition or a meaning, it’s simply describing tons of ideas I had in mind ..
When I remember the day I learned about ActionScript and the reason that made me very curious about it’s capabilities regarding to the user experience, and looking to the present day worldwide internet race, I can say that being an Interactive Developer is the most important criteria which leads to a new digital world.

The road in out there, where Adobe as an Architect and Fi as an Implementer, they’re the keys to the future of web, If you want to be a part of this evolution don’t waste another second ..
Start right now and join the commnity ..