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

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

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

Summer is here, but work at the Yooba HQ doesn't stand still because of it. We're hard at work with new features in Yooba Studio as well as in the BackOffice. At this point, we're working on enhancing some of the Add-ons that are available. These enhancements will not be visible immediately with the new release of Yooba Studio, but we'll explain and unveil more about them at a later point.

A select list of features of what will be included in the next release, which will be version 1.3, is:

• More keyboard shortcuts. A full list will be available in the Help.
• Enhanced functionality in the settings panels, to make them easier to work with.
• Minor tweaks and bug fixes

If you keep an eye on our UserVoice feedback forum at yooba.uservoice.com, you can see that we have some features planned for the future:

• The possibility to copy effect and animation settings from an object and apply them to another. This will help save a lot of time!
• Built-in optimization of uploaded images, meaning that compression and rescaling of images will be possible, to optimize the loading times of a project. These settings will of course be customizable, as everything else in Yooba Studio.

We'd be delighted if you took a look at the feedback forum to help us improve!

Keep a lookout for version 1.3 of Yooba Studio sometime in the first part of July!

Tags: yooba studio, 1.3, feedback, uservoice, addons, add-ons

For every release, there are improvements made to Yooba Studio - some visible to the user and some under the hood. While working on the development of Yooba Studio we always consider the invaluable feedback we get from our users.

In the next release we plan to add more keyboard shortcuts for faster access to various editing options something that's been suggested from many of our users. (A list of current keyboard shortcuts are available in the Help) Another feature already implemented in the current version of Yooba Studio is the improved settings panels, where you now can choose to have multiple panels open at once or focus on just one panel at a time.

This is great examples of features becoming reality through feedback from our users - and we want more! To make this process easier for you we have created a UserVoice forum where suggestions can be made and voted for.
So, go ahead and submit your favorite feature!

Tags: yooba studio, users, feedback, uservoice

As always, Yooba Studio is constantly growing, improving and evolving.
The GUI designers are working on some updates for the next release of Yooba Studio right now, improving some GUI elements to fit better with the rest. At the same time, the development team is implementing new exciting features. One feature which we think will be very useful is the ability to see some detailed info on your project. Info on which images, fonts etc. that are being used, with a file size report and suggestions on how to improve the loading experience can really be helpful to make your Yooba project the best it can be for your viewers.

Look out for this and more in the upcoming release of Yooba Studio!

Tags: yooba studio, gui, project info

Web applications are not something new – they’ve existed for years, in different forms and with different technologies. Lately, these applications have become more and more like the applications we have installed on our computers and use in the day-to-day work, so called desktop applications. As the functionality and usability progresses with these web applications, we grow more effective in our work using them. And, they have an advantage over desktop applications: no installation is required and the application is available everywhere that there’s a computer with an Internet connection.

Although many of these Rich Internet Applications (RIA) exists in the browser, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. New technologies such as Adobe AIR and Mozilla Prism make it possible to install the application as a traditional desktop application, but with all the advantages from a RIA. To include constantly changing information from the web and integrate with other web services such as YouTube and Google Maps is all made possible with this technology.

This week, one of the largest newspapers in the world – The New York Times – launched a desktop RIA for reading their paper online. It’s called Times Reader and includes all published articles from a week back. As they put it: “It reads like a newspaper. Updates like a Web site. And delivers like The New York Times.”

Seeing a company such as The New York Times, traditionally associated with an “old media” launching a Rich Internet Application is a strong sign of the impact of RIAs, be it in the browser or on the desktop.

For more reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
http://timesreader.nytimes.com/timesreader/
http://prism.mozilla.com/

Tags: rich internet application, new york times, times reader, desktop

In Yooba Studio, the loading scene is a very useful way to be able to show something to the visitor while the project is loading. What we've found is that many users tend to make their loading scene look like the projects' start scene, by copying objects from the start scene and pasting them on to the loading scene. This method can be rather tedious if your start scene contains a lot of objects, and you also have to compensate for in-animations. Enter the 'Snapshot'! By simply clicking a button in the loading scene settings panel, all the work is done for you. A snapshot will be placed as the background image on the loading scene, showing the start scene as it will look when your visitors first views your project.

You'll be able to try this out for yourself (along with other exiting new features) in an upcoming version of Yooba Studio.

Tags: yooba studio, loading scene, upcoming features, snapshot

In this tutorial we will take a look at how to create your own, custom buttons in Yooba Studio.

1. Start by adding a button to the scene. Click on "Add, Objects, Button" in the toolbar:
   
   
   
   
2. The button will appear on the scene, allready selected:
   
   
   
   
3. In the settings panel for the button, click on the "Change Style..." button:
   
    
   
   
4. This will bring up the "Component Styles" dialog. There are many pre-defined styles to choose from, and you can easily change colors, fonts etc.
   For custom buttons, scroll down and select the style called "Custom Skin", as shown in this figure:
   
   
   
   The button will now look like this on the scene:
   
   
   
   
5. Continue by clicking the "Change Skin..." button in the panel:
   
   
   
   
6. This will bring up the "Button Skin Settings" dialog. In this dialog you specify which images to use for the your button. A custom button have three states: UP (normal), OVER (mouse cursor is over the button) and DOWN (mouse button is pressed), and you can specify a different image for each of these states. If you like, you can use the same image for more than one state. Click each "Select..." button to choose an image from the Library to use.
   
   
   
   You can also specify a "Scale Grid" for the button. As shown in the figure above, only the area inside of the green grid will be scaled when the button is resized. This can be very useful when you have a buttons with a border that you don't want to affect by scaling the button. The grid is specified by setting the values for each respective side, left, right, top and bottom.
   You can skip this part for now if you like, it's not neccessary for the button to work.
   
   You can test the button directly in this dialog by simply clicking on it. After you have selected images for each state, click the "Close" button.
   
   
7. The button will now show the image selected for the UP state:
   
   
   
   Test-run the project by clicking "Preview" in the Toolbar and try out your new, custom button out!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, see you again next time!

Tags: yooba studio, studio, buttons, custom, tutorial, step-by-step