Last week, Adobe released the first public beta of the Flash 10 player, codename Astro. Here at Yooba HQ, we've been trying out some of the new, exiting features and thinking of different ways to take advantage of these in future versions of Yooba Studio.

I believe Flash 10 will bring lots of good, and not only in terms of the more obvious features (I'm thinking of the pseudo-3D and GPU-rendering) but also the revamped text engine and the improved drawing API.
It's allready possible to try Astros' features out by making some adjustments to the Flex environment, but still we're eagerly awaiting docs (other than Senoculars nice tutorial) and some more tools to play with.

Yooba is really exited about Astro, and what cool features it can bring Yooba Studio (and you!).

Tags: astro, yoobastudio, studio, flash player, 3d

Of course, we need to stay humble. And obviously we are. But this prooves that if you got good content you will get the attention. To some extent. As a (so far) relatively unknown actor as we are, we still need to do a bit of pushing, especially if we’re looking at new channels such as different social media. Or actually everywhere. So I think it's about the mix of viral and WOM.

I do remember reading about some respected “guru” saying something about; “if you got good content, you’ll get the WOM”.

And, yeah, it does work, but you still need to work hard to make you seen and heard.

Thanks to mydesignaward.com for the recognition.

Tags: yooba, mydesignaward, word of mouth, social media, viral marketing

I'm proud to announce that we have managed to get two awards for the Yooba.com-site so far:

NewWebPick Qualification because of the design and technology

and...

Web Sites of the Day in e-Creative Awards

We have developed and designed the site in collaboration with Soft. Special thanks to Daniel Björkefors at Soft who is the talent behind our little Caliban mascot. You will be seeing more of Caliban in the near future.

Tags: design, caliban, newwebpick, e-creative, soft, yooba

One of the problems we encountered when developing Yooba Studio was getting access to a small but crucial part of a Flex Component: the CheckBox check icon.  In many cases, most of the parts of a component is accessible via relatively easy means, making it easy for developers to modify its behaviour and appearance. But the CheckBox (and the RadioButton) was a different story. We wanted to change the check mark color at runtime and after doing some digging, I found the hard coded color value in CheckBoxIcon.as. Creating my own version of the file (thanks Alex!) we were able to do just what we wanted with the icon.

An example of how to go about it can be found here.

This is an example of when the open code in the Flex SDK is of great value - without it things would have been much more difficult in the every-day coding.

Tags: as, actionscript, source, code

Finding the right symbol for an icon is difficult. One of the easiest icon to design is the save icon. Although it is very misleading these days (especially when developing a RIA as we do) I, as almost everybody else, choosed the 3.5" floppy-disk to symbolise "Save" in our application. It's been ages since I used a diskette and I don't really ever wanna use one again, but it's still associated with saving a project, document ect. I tried other things like an USB pocket memory or a compact disc but they are almost as irrelevant as the floppy disc when it comes to Internet applications. I thought to myself: "Many icons use metaphors of physical objects for their functions, as a magnet for "Snap", so why can't an abandoned floppy disc make the cut?", and so it did, 'cause I will not be the one to kill it (at least not this time).

Next mission: Design the icon for "Save as...".

Question: What will happen to the "Save" icon when nobody remembers the physical disc as a medium?  

Tags: save, icon, graphics, design, floppy, interface, gui, yooba

Hi, I'm Marcus Petterson; I'm an Interactive Developer at Yooba. I'm in charge of designing the look and feel of the interface. I also do a lot of work with the graphical engine for our Yooba Studio tool. My everyday job requires two applications: Photoshop and Flex, and what can I say? I love them both equally.

While this is my first entry and not the most riveting one, I hope it will be more exciting reading my thoughts on the road to making Yooba an easy tool for both your mind and eyes.

Tags: presentation, design, photoshop, flex, yooba