designwithtorlon.com was developed for Quadrant Plastics by Liquid Interactive to promote the use of a particular product called Torlon. This site was developed using Gaia 2.1.8 AS3 with some customization the developer made for features Gaia did not yet support (which were added in later releases). It takes advantage of Gaia's integration with SWFObject and SWFAddress, preloading, asset management, and event system.

Jason Fistner, the lead developer at Liquid, had this to say about his experience with Gaia:

"Using the Gaia Flash Framework, we were able to focus on the site itself and not the complications involved in every Flash site build. Gaia abstracts out the difficult parts and provides a solid, no-bloat framework on which to build Flash sites. In addition, Gaia's sound logic and clean code also makes customization highly intuitive.

Steven's dedication, willingness to improve Gaia, and constant communication with Gaia users makes using the framework an easy decision."

Gaia 2.2.5 has arrived and has some great new features. Among these features, binding expressions, landing pages, and framework optimizing top the list.

Gaia now supports binding expressions in the site.xml, similar to how Flex does it with MXML. This makes things like localization much easier. You can assign a binding expression to a FlashVar, to a public property in your Main class file, or a public property in any page class file. Anytime Gaia accesses the binding expression, it uses the current value, so you can change it at runtime. This allows you to do things like change the language on the fly. Rule!

Also, a new page attribute "landing" has been introduced. This has been requested quite a few times and now it's in. This allows you to set any page as a landing page regardless of whether it has children or not.

Framework optimizing is a fairly advanced feature which allows you to reduce the size of your main.swf file by up to 10k by not compiling unused Asset classes. Why compile classes you're not going to use? With a single button press, Gaia automatically comments out any unused code based on which assets are present in your site.xml. Add some new assets, optimize again, and Gaia will uncomment any new asset types that are present.

There are a few other little items, such as being able to use an id other than index for the index page, optimization of the SiteModel class, and some AS3 bug fixes.

You can read the full release notes and download Gaia here:
http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/forum/index.php/topic,581.msg2436.html

It's official. Gringo has taken Silver at the Cannes Lions awards for their agency website, Gringo's First Few Words…

André Brunetta used Gaia to build the Gringo site quickly and easily. As explained by Gringo:

"Gringo is an advertising agency lost in the far corners of the world. We only speak Portuguese but our friends from around the world love to teach us new words every time they pay us a visit! We are thankful for their help! Now we've gathered a very wide vocabulary and we feel ready to tackle Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth next."

Congratulations to Gringo and Andre Brunetta for yet another award winning site! Great work, guys! The site is really outstanding and definitely a break from the norm.

If you haven't seen the Gringo site yet, check it out, but you might want to put on headphones if you're at work or around children.

Gaia 2.2.0 is a major update and contains many awesome improvements and upgrades!

First off, SWFObject 2 + SWFAddress 2.1 are now fully supported. Updating older Gaia projects will automatically convert all your html pages, including your SEO Scaffolding ones, all while keeping any custom params and FlashVars you have in the old syntax. One click and your project is up-to-date with the latest SWF embedding technology. It doesn't get much easier than that!

Another cool new feature is queued on-demand asset loading. Gaia will now only open a maximum of two HTTP requests at a time, which means your Gaia site is more stable (people have reported AS3 becomes unstable when you have too many pending HTTP requests) and more responsive.

External pages now have a window attribute which enables you to target which window you want to open your link in right in the site.xml.

The panel now has Site XML and Class Path validation so you don't accidentally scaffold invalid class folder names (no spaces, no number at the start, alphanumeric), or invalid page ids. Additionally, the panel tells you exactly which nodes are invalid so you don't have to waste time trying to determine which ones they are.

Gaia now has AS3 Event Metadata for auto-completion when using Flex Builder 3.

Separate page templates for Actionscript and Timeline are now available for easy customization (and to solve a nasty JSFL bug with removeFrames).

Plus, some important bug fixes were made in both the framework and the panel.

And to top it all off, the latest version of the TweenMax family (v 1.17) is also included (released June 10th).

If you haven't tried Gaia yet, what are you waiting for?

http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/forum/index.php/topic,542.0.html

Gaia 2.1.9 is here and contains a variety of improvements and updates, including a new flow called CrossFlow, and ApplicationDomain support for AS3. Gaia is now distributed under the MIT License.

You can download the latest version of Gaia and read the release notes here:
http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/forum/index.php/topic,534.msg2253.html

JSFL does not have a method to rename a folder, which means you have to create a new folder with the new name, copy all the contents of the old folder into the new one, and then delete the old folder. It's a bit of a pain.

Here is the JSFL code to do this until Adobe sees fit to add a rename folder method. You can also use this to move a folder from one place to another.

function renameFolder(sourcePath, targetPath)
{
    FLfile.createFolder(targetPath);
    copyFolders(sourcePath, targetPath, FLfile.listFolder(sourcePath, "directories"));
    copyFiles(sourcePath, targetPath, FLfile.listFolder(sourcePath, "files"));
    FLfile.remove(sourcePath);
}
function copyFolders(sourcePath, targetPath, folderList)
{
    var i = folderList.length;
    while (i--)
    {
        FLfile.createFolder(targetPath + "/" + folderList[i]);
        copyFiles(sourcePath + "/" + folderList[i], targetPath + "/" + folderList[i], FLfile.listFolder(sourcePath + "/" + folderList[i], "files"));
        copyFolders(sourcePath + "/" + folderList[i], targetPath + "/" + folderList[i], FLfile.listFolder(sourcePath + "/" + folderList[i], "directories"));
    }
}
function copyFiles(sourcePath, targetPath, fileList)
{
    var i = fileList.length;
    while (i--)
    {
        FLfile.copy(sourcePath + "/" + fileList[i], targetPath + "/" + fileList[i]);
    }
}

Seal has a new album, a new tour, and a new website, built with Gaia. The site was built quickly and easily by using Gaia, and features some really nice Papervision 3D, as well. The site is continually being updated with new content, so if you're a fan, check back often to keep up!

Gringo is a world-famous São Paulo, Brazil-based award-winning agency, and developer André Brunetta used Gaia to build their new company website. Their site invites users to share webcam recordings of naughty phrases spoken in their native language. It takes advantage of Gaia's SEO scaffolding, as well! It's a fun site but make sure you put on headphones or that new Swedish intern might get offended.

Gaia was recently used to build the website for the new game by Electronic Arts, Tiberium. It was developed for 2Advanced by the award-winning designer Jonathan Moore, Senior Art Director at BLITZ. Jonathan was recently interviewed by FWA. Here's what he had to say about his experience with Gaia.

"For the recently launched Tiberium site the overall production took place in little over over a week from start to finish. Because of the short amount of time available for the completion of the Flash development and motion I utilized the new AS3 framework - Gaia 2.0 by Steve Sacks. After reading through the documentation, it only took an hour or two to have the entire site's framework and architecture in place - transition engine, deep linking, browser back/forward functionality, asset management, and much more. I'm officially a fan of Gaia."

When Lionel Low, Interactive Developer at Tequila Asia Pacific, the Singapore branch of Tequila (TBWA Chiat-Day), was tasked with building the site for Royal Salute Whiskey under a tight deadline, he turned to Gaia to help him out. Here's what Lionel said about his experience with Gaia:

"Roughly about 6 months ago, my then colleague Arul blogged about Gaia, and that marked the changes in me ever since. What I love about it is that it provides common solutions to repeated tasks that we, as front-end developers, have to face in almost every project. The Scaffolding engine creates a click through version of my site in less than 10 minutes! The extent of the convenience and time that I saved allowed me to even blog about this right now. To fully understand it’s capabilities, there’s no other better way than to use it in your next project."