Last week, Adobe released betas of the next versions of Flash and AIR, namely Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0. There are numerous new features and improvements interesting for Yooba and the development of our products, with one of the most noticeble being huge improvements regarding memory handling and performance.

It's good to see that Adobe keeps on pushing out new great updates, getting more and more feature rich and making Flash a platform to really count on in the future.

Read more on the betas at:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/16/adobe-flash-player-10-1-air-2-0/

Tags: flash, air, adobe, yooba studio

We've been quite busy here at Yooba HQ, working hard on a great new feature for Yooba Studio: the Scene Box. A scene box is an object you place on the scene, much like any other object. It can be seen as a container which holds additional scenes. These scenes works just like regular scenes: they can contain objects, animations and transitions.

So, what's the use of these scenes? A scene box can be used to create dynamic "surfaces" on a scene, where different objects and content can act and animate independantly of the rest of the projects. This makes it much easier to create and manage more complex projects, with a lot of different parts.

As a project grows in complexity, you need more control over what parts are loaded and when they're loaded. We've added some functionality for that as well. You are now able to control whether a scene should load (i.e. load it's content) together with the project, or wait until it's being viewed for the first time. This behavior also applies to scene boxes. The design of what's shown during loading is totally up to you: keep it simple with just a plain loading bar, or go for something more with images, animations!

Below is an example of how the scene box can be used to create an image gallery.
Keep your eyes open for more info on these two new features in the short future, with tutorials on how to use them.

Tags: scene box, yooba studio

We have recently released a new Addon for Yooba Studio called External Data. The purpose of the addon is to load data from external sources into a project. The addon loads RSS2 feeds, which is the most common format for publishing data feeds such as news headlines, blogs, tweets etc. The texts from the RSS feed can be loaded into regular textfields in Yooba Studio, which makes it very flexible when working with external data sources. So if you want to show your corporate blog, make a ticker for your recent tweets, or display any other kind of external data, this addon will make your life easier.

Below is a sample project that shows our latest posts on Twitter. Besides of using already existing feeds from Twitter, Blogger etc, you can of course also create your own custom feed to get external texts into your project.

Please contact us for more information about the add-on.

Tags: add-ons, yooba studio, rss, external data

For the next update of Yooba Studio, we have some big and some small features. One of the big ones is a new scene transition: Magic Motion. This transition will create automatic motions for objects that the scenes have in common, making it super fast and easier than ever to make these objects animate between scenes. You can expect a full featured tutorial soon, where we'll explain in detail what you can do with magic motion

Among the smaller new features, we have an extended context menu (right-click) for faster access to some common editing tasks, selectable text plus some additional fixes and updates.

You'll be able to enjoy these new features later this week!

Tags: yooba studio, transitions, magic motion

Revolutionary Swedish online content creation and management system for Flash reaches semi-finals of ‘Best of InsideRIA 2009’ sponsored by O’Reilly Media and Adobe.

LONDON and STOCKHOLM, August 31 2009 – Swedish developer Yooba is proud to announce it has reached the semi finals of InsideRIA’s poll for best Rich Internet Application 2009. The three finalists will be presented at Adobe’s MAX Session in Los Angeles, 4-7 October. Requirements for getting into the competition are that the application is created using any of Adobe’s tools, and that that they were either created or released in 2009.

Yooba’s web-based Content Management System, which is specifically designed for Flash content, was created using Adobe’s Flex and Flash technologies. Key benefits for Yooba’s users are that all programming for Flash creation and management is eliminated, while lead times for Flash production are substantially reduced. Yooba therefore provides entirely new ways to control and execute interactive marketing content for the Internet.

As a ‘Software-as-a-Service’ solution, Yooba is available through any browser with an Internet connection. This delivery model also gives users direct and continuous access to new functionality and updates without additional licenses or installations. The SaaS structure also enables all kinds of user - from individual freelancers to enterprise businesses - to package the most cost-effective solution for their needs.

“Getting recognition from the developer community is very encouraging, as it comes from our peers.” said David Nordin, MD at Yooba. He continued: “Obviously it’s valuable publicity for our company as we’re a relative newcomer to the international market. Getting to L.A. and Adobe’s MAX Session conference would be a small but important step for the future development of Yooba, although we realise the competition is going to be tough.”

The poll at InsideRIA starts from today, August 31^st and ends Sunday 6^th of September.

Tags: insideria, max session, adobe, yooba studio, yooba flash cms,

This time we bring you not one, not two, but six new scene transitions for you all to use. We have added a nice mix of advanced transitions and a little more traditional ones. This is the line-up:

• Iris
• Wipe
• Stripes
• Blinds
• 3D Cube
• Page Turn

We hope these will be useful for all of the Yooba Studio users out there!

Tags: yooba studio, transitions

Version 1.3.1 of Yooba Studio has now been released! Two major improvements are included in this release: Image optimization and an improved preview mode.

Image Optimization
All images in your project is now automatically optimized for faster downloading. The automatic optimization uses various techniques to reduce the file size of your assets, which makes your projects load faster for the end-user. For you as a Yooba Studio user, this also means that it's no longer important to think about compressing the images that you are using in your project - the automatic optimization does that for you, and and lets you focus entirely on the creative process. You can of course also turn the automatic optimization off if you want to manage the compression yourself.

Improved Preview
The look and feel of the preview has been improved. First of all, the preview does not open in a new window anymore. This makes switching between edit mode and preview mode easier. Also, it is no longer neccessary to save your project before previewing. In earlier versions, your project was automatically saved when you pressed the preview button, but now you can preview your changes without saving.

More features has also been added, for instance the scrollbar for text that I wrote about in the previous post. Hope you'll find these new features useful!

Tags: yooba studio, optimization, preview

It’s almost two months since our public release of Yooba, and we’d like to take the opportunity to express some thoughts. So far it’s been an exhausting, but super exciting times. We’ve come a long way but the future holds infinite possibilities for us.

First of all we’d like to thank everyone who has provided with their thoughts and comments. In the hardest of times a positive message gives you that little extra boost. From a more ‘technical’ aspect, we’ve had some great conversations with users. We’ve got some responses that confirms the needs of forthcoming functionality (in progress), and also feedback on what to prioritize when it comes to future development.

So, I think we actually just ended up with one thing – a BIG Thank You! We appreciate it.

Bestest,

Yooba Team

Ps.1 Please keep up with enquiries, feedback, any thoughts – we want it and we need it. Ps.2 Keep your eyes open for our re-vamped website, official very soon.

Tags: yooba, yooba studio, web design

Again, a handy tutorial from our undefeated champ David. Things are really busy here, short of time writing blog posts. Nowadays it's more about nifty messages on Twitter. On the other hand, we rate these posts as the best. It's about simplyfying for our users, and here you get valuable know-how on creating a animated menu in Yooba Studio.

Tags: flash creation, yooba studio, animations, web design, flash cms

With Add-ons, extra functionality can be added to Yooba Studio. Under the Add-ons menu on the toolbar you can find the extensions that are currently activated for your account. An Add-on can add functionality in many ways, and we have already created a bunch of generic add-ons that anyone can use.

For instance, we have recently worked with a customer that wanted to run Yooba projects on touch-screen monitors. We helped them by creating the Touch Screen Add-on, which adds the functionality they needed, including a fully customizable on-screen keyboard to enable user input without a regular keyboard. As a result of this add-on, Yooba projects are at the moment running on hundreds of touch-screens all around Europe and Latin America.

Other add-ons that we’ve been working on with clients includes sending text messages to cell phones, uploading images, counting impressions etc. So if you need extra functionality that is currently not available in Yooba Studio, please let us know! Chances are that it’s already available as an add-on. And if not – we’ll build it!

Add-ons are features for our Enterprise customers and can be ordered by contacting your sales representative or calling Sales at +44 (0)20  8123 2570.

Tags: add-ons, yooba studio, touchscreen