ScreenTime's mProjector is a new revolution in "flash-on-the-desktop" technology, via Steven Sacks on FlashCoders.
Personally, I haven't had a chance to play with this yet. The idea of having synchronous access to parts of the Windows API from Flash is really appealing. As a developer who's experienced extending Flash with both callbacks and fscommands, I have to say that callbacks are much better than the fscommand "wait a few frames" mentality, but they're really a pain when you need to chain operations together.
Imagine doing 3 file reads in a row and have to write a callback function to get the status of each read. That's a lot of code, and it quickly becomes hard to debug and maintain. Doing the same thing in 3 lines is much easier to follow, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what mProjector has to offer.
Here's what Jesse had to say about it...
Now, the question remains, who will be the first to create something like this cross-platform? :-)
Flash Studio Pro doesn't have the beautiful synchronous API, but it does have something very appealing on it's own - a Mac OSX plugin.
Some day I'm sure we'll see the best of both worlds. That's what the extended-player list is all about.
All I can say is mProjector is an awesome product. I've done some extensive testing with it and it's easy to use and very powerful.
Do you know if they have a page that lists the differences between their products?
They all look sort of the same to me.
Sorry, sort of new in the flash world.
Thanks
Mathias
Maybe I'm missing something since I'm a noob, but if you code the projector, implementing a synchronous api is nothing more than blocking while you wait for the response.