Blog on richardleggett.com

Android Ecosystem: 2008-2018

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 16:45:55 +0000

About 10 years in it dawned on me there was more stuff coming out around Android than it was possible to keep up with.

So I thought it’d be fun to draw up a high level map of most things Android developers have come into contact with, in general, since the start. Links to large-sized files are at the end…

Roughly speaking as you move out from the centre you are moving forward in time, although to group some items by theme I bend the rules. The lines represent relationships, though not always direct, and the dotted boxes are things that may no longer be in active use. There are also some 3rd-party honourable mentions in there.

Value Objects in Java with AutoValue and Lombok

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 21:31:13 +0000

In this post I want to discuss the subject of Value Objects, their purpose and some ways of easily implementing them in Java, specifically, although not exclusively, within the context of Android development.

I’ll cover a couple of popular libraries that I’ve tried, namely Project Lombok and AutoValue, how they approach the problem of making value objects easier to create and maintain, plus a few pitfalls.

In computer science, a value object is a small object that represents a simple entity whose equality is not based on identity: i.e. two value objects are equal when they have the same value, not necessarily being the same object. Examples of value objects are objects representing an amount of money or a date range.

Bots as Celebrities

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 14:14:12 +0000

Messenger-based services, bots, agents, AI. It looks like app fatigue has led us to look to these for the next green field, something new for VCs to plough their money into, something that feels different.

From time to time technology comes full circle and here we are again using something like IRC, in the UX slam dunk that is Slack, and setting loose upon it an army of bots… again, like we do/did with IRC. Of course both of these things are significantly evolved from their forebears; the semi-public messaging platform (albeit, now less suited for massive audiences) but also the bots, who once were relegated to performing simple tasks like running file shares or hosting quizzes for a handful of geeks, are now powered by significant “AI” resource and connected to millions of people and myriad services from Uber to Dominos.

How did you start coding?

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 21:21:00 +0000

Recently Usborne books made their beautifully illustrated 1980’s computing books for kids available for download. It turns out several of my friends and Twitter acquaintances picked up their love of coding from these books as youngsters, myself included.

I owe my career to these books. I first learned BASIC from this one back in 1993: https://t.co/a9SwJxLTrc https://t.co/cdinNZi47j

— Nick Lockwood (@nicklockwood) February 7, 2016

I remember being in a dentist’s waiting room where an old battered copy of “Computer Space Games” lay on the bookshelf. I was so engrossed they actually let me take that book home, and thus began my journey.

Are You OK? App

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 09:19:06 +0000

I’ve just published a companion site for my free app Are You OK?.

The app is aimed at people wishing to regularly check the status of family or friends who may for example live alone and are vulnerable to accidents like a fall in their home, unable to call for help. Something like the reverse of a panic button system; if they don’t press a button every few hours, it sends an SMS message to selected contacts with a call to check in.

Fragments and Activities in Android Apps

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:02:31 +0000

UPDATE: 5 years later this post is pretty out of date. Some of it still holds, but it is now possible to better architect primarily “single Activity” apps, especially with the advent of the android Navigation component. For posterity the post below remains…

When asking “should I use a Fragment or Activity?” it’s not always immediately obvious on how you should architect an app.

My advice is try to avoid a single “god” Activity (h/t Eric Burke) that manages navigation between tens of Fragments – it may seem to give you good control over transitions, but it gets messy quickly*.

Load Testing Live Streaming Servers

Fri, 13 Jun 2014 17:11:21 +0000

There are two types of test I’ll describe below. First of all using Apple HLS streams, which is HTTP Live Streaming via port 80, supported by iOS and Safari, and also by Android (apps and browser). Then we have Adobe’s RTMP over port 1935, mostly used by Flash players on desktop, this covers browsers like Internet Explorer and Chrome on desktop. These tests apply to Wowza server but I think it’ll also cover Adobe Media Server.

Postman Collection to HTML (node script)

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 11:10:33 +0000

If you use the excellent Postman for testing and developing your APIs (and if you don’t yet, please give it a try!) you may find this little node script helpful when generating documentation.

It simply converts your downloaded Postman collection file to HTML (with tables) for inserting into documentation or sharing with a 3rd party developer. The Postman collection is perfect for sharing with developers as it remains close to “live documentation”, but sometimes you need a more readable form.

Registering Your Android App for File Types and Email Attachments

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:40:00 +0000

I’ve recently finished work on an app that registers itself as a handler for a given file extension, let’s call it “.mytype”, so if the user attempts to open a file named “file1.mytype” our app would launch and receive an Intent containing the information on the file’s location and its data can be imported. Specifically I wanted this to happen when the user opened an email attachment, as data is shared between users via email attachment for this app.

Seconds Pro for Android

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:31:00 +0000

The latest Android app I’ve been working for Runloop, the hugely successful iOS interval timer Seconds Pro, is now live. Packed with the following features:

• Quickly create timers for interval training, tabata, circuit training
• Save your timers, as many as you need
• Organize Timers into groups
• Text to speech
• Install timers from the timer repository
• Send your timers to your friends
• Full control over every interval
• Assign music to intervals or timers
• Large display
• The choice of personal trainers up and down the country

Getting Started with NFC on Android for .NET Magazine

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:23:00 +0000

A tutorial I wrote for .NET Magazine is now up on their site. This tutorial takes you through the basics of getting NFC working with Android 4.0+ with a “Top Trumps” like demo. It covers both reading and writing data to/from NFC tags, stickers or cards.

Head over to .NET Magazine to read the tutorial!

Winners at Create London NFC Hackathon

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:10:00 +0000

We had what was probably the first BBQ weather of the year over the weekend, but I wouldn’t know about that. Instead I spent the time coding away at the NFC Hackathon (sponsored by O2) with my fellow team members George Medve and Aaron Newton.

The idea was to spend 28 hours designing and coding something that made use of NFC (Near Field Communication). We were supplied with NFC enabled Galaxy S2s and some useful SDKs from Proxama and BlueVia for tracking NFC campaigns, making payments and tracking users.

FanChants for Android

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:29:00 +0000

My latest Android project is now live. This app for FanChants.com provides access to the 20,000 real football chants as sung by fans all over the world. Chants include lyrics and through an in-app-purchase chants can be set as your phone’s ringtone.

View FanChants over at Google Play

Snowball Fight for iOS and Android

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:54:00 +0000

I’m pleased to announce a game we’ve been working on is now out. A collaboration between The Creation Agency and Bitmode (my previous home), we bring you The Great Snowball Fight!

The game is played over Google Maps, launching virtual snowballs at unsuspecting players in order to rank up, earn points and even win prizes from retailers you hit. You can also add buddies, connect via Facebook and receive special powerups.

.NET Mag: User Interface Design for Android Apps

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:42:00 +0000

I recently wrote a tutorial for .NET Magazine covering styling and theming components in Android. This includes how to use resolution independent units so that your UI looks crisp across a wide range of devices and 9-patch images for smooth scaling.

Here’s a link to the article.

Are You OK Made The Finals of The Vodafone Smart Accessibility Awards 2011

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:33:27 +0000

I was absolutely delighted to hear that the app I put together for the Vodafone Smart Accessibility Awards has been made a finalist. The app, “Are You OK” falls under the wellbeing category. If you’re not familar with the awards, the idea is to improve the lives of the elderly or disabled through technology.

Are You OK is a simple app that was inspired by the panic button pendants many elderly use in their homes. The button communicates with a base-station plugged into the phone which contacts an emergency call center and and a voice can be heard over the speakerphone. The problem is these buttons are often left lying around out of reach, and many hours, or at worst days can go by before they get help after something like a fall. On top of this there’s a monthly fee for the service.

Android Workshop at TechHub London 24-25th November 2011

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:49:07 +0000

The Android Workshop is coming to TechHub in London, tickets are now available for Thursday 24th and Friday 25th of November this year. It’s a full 2 day introduction covering a wide range of topics from layouts and widgets to styling and database access, for more info please head over to the site. Sign up fast to guarantee your Early Bird price, or add yourself to the mailing list for future events.

Dynamic Application Cache Manifest for PHP

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:29:14 +0000

Earlier today Paulo Fierro blogged an example of how to build a dynamic application cache manifest for HTML5 web apps using Ruby.

A cache manifest is a text file that browsers look for in order to determine which files to store locally on the device, this lets you open the site/app offline, great for web apps (on iOS bookmarking a site to the home screen also let’s you specify an icon and removes browser chrome). Creating a cache manifest dynamically means that you don’t have to worry about modifying a text file every time you add or remove a file from the app.

Book Review: Android Wireless Application Development

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 17:16:40 +0000

I’ve just finished reading through a copy of Android Wireless Application Development (Addison Wesley Developer’s Library, 2010 by Lauren Darcey & Shane Condor). Having read a few books on Android development over the last couple of years, it’s always interesting to see how a book tackles this big, constantly evolving platform. The book covers Android up to version 2.2 and includes access to the online Safari edition which hopefully means they can add a few post-print updates where necessary.

Android Workshop September 2011 at UpdateConf in Brighton

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:53:05 +0000

I’ll be running a 2 day introduction to Android development workshop at UpdateConf in Brighton this September. If you’re looking to get into Android development, this will get you up and running lickety-split. Sign up for updates over at the website and follow the Twitter account @androidws.

If you have any questions about the content anything else, please drop me a comment or tweet.

Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals for Android is Out Now

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 12:17:30 +0000

Just a quick post to say Zolmo’s latest application is now on the Android Market, and for a limited time at an introductory price. It was a genuine pleasure to work on this, I hope you have a lot of fun cooking great meals with it.

Download Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals from the Android Market.

Android UX Patterns

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:10:18 +0000

I just stumbled across this truly excellent collection of Android UX Pattern wireframes and examples. This is certainly essential reading for anyone starting Android development as the official documentation is somewhat lacking here.
http://www.androidpatterns.com

Using ProGuard with Android

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 15:14:22 +0000

ProGuard obfuscates and shrinks .apk files, providing some added protection for your app, but you may encounter some problems using it right now, at least with ADT 9 preview 3.

By default ADT creates a proguard.cfg file with every new project, so if you have an existing project just copy it over from a new dummy project. The next step is to enable ProGuard, you do this by adding the following to your default.properties file:

Applications of NFC Chips

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:00:09 +0000

Google recently announced the Nexus S phone, created in partnership with Samsung. This is the latest in the developer phone range, aimed at providing a reference device for the next wave of consumer Android devices running Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread) and higher.

One of the features of this phone is an NFC chip, which is capable of transmitting and reading data at a distance of up to 10cm. It is compatible with existing systems such as RFID tags: tiny, incredibly cheap slithers of componentry able to store information and be embedded in anything from food packaging to stickers.

Chrome Web Store: Why Online Apps?

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:48:12 +0000

Yesterday Google unveiled the Chrome Web Store. In a nutshell this is an App Store for the Chrome browser and a critical component in the upcoming Chrome OS. The Chrome browser is found on all major desktop operating systems, on the enormous numbers of Android phones and tablets, and the new TVs and set top boxes from companies like Sony, Logitech and reportedly the biggest of them all, Samsung. Chrome OS is a desktop operating system replacement designed to operate entirely in the cloud, using web technologies, with almost negligible startup times for the instant-on, always connected generation. Chrome touts automatic synchronisation of everything from bookmarks, to auto-fill info and passwords, and preferences.

Speaking: An Introduction to Android

Mon, 17 May 2010 17:01:23 +0000

I’ll be speaking at this month’s London Flash Platform User Group meeting (27th May) on the subject of native Android application development.

The presentation will get you up and running from installing the tools to building and skinning applications.

You can sign up to attend and find out more details here.

UPDATE: Recording here. (Volume is very low, so without external speakers you may have trouble hearing).

jQuery CSS3 3D Animation

Mon, 03 May 2010 16:46:16 +0000

Update: The code has now been updated to support jQuery 1.6+, thanks again to Zachstronaught. Please bear in mind the original date on the post below, there may be some inaccuracies due to new browser versions.

I’ve just finished a jQuery extension which adds support for modifying and animating CSS3 transformations in 2D and 3D. This was based on the 2D transform monkey-patch by Zachary Johnson.

I needed this for a project I’m working on which specifically targets Webkit (tablet devices), but I’m releasing the code under the existing MIT license for anyone to use as they wish. I’ve put together a little demo to show how it can be used. This demo has been tested on Safari and Chrome, in Firefox you’ll likely only see the 2D transformations, I haven’t tried IE.

Implementing SpellCheck (Squiggly) with the Text Layout Framework (TLF)

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:39:48 +0000

I’ve just posted over in the Text Layout forums how I went about implementing Squiggly with “pure” Text Layout Framework… so that’s not using TLF/FTETextField or the Spark components.

This is really just an overview which should give plenty to help you figure out the steps. I can’t paste the exact code because it’s embedded in a client project, but I do refer to some of the TLF functions throughout that you have to make use of, if anyone can suggest improvements, please drop them in the comments.

Flash/Flex Builder <-> Flash Professional Asset Workflows

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:19:54 +0000

This post discusses the various workflows for producing SWFs with the standalone compiler that use graphical assets and animations created in Flash Professional (“Flash Pro”). At time of writing the latest version of Flash Pro is CS4, with CS5 briefly out in beta for a short while. Specifically we look at the methods that involve exporting SWCs and using the [Embed] metatag within class files.

Recently I posted a bug report regarding the [Embed] metatag, which led me to write this post in order to find out whether people are happy with their current workflows and how well others receive projects when it comes to handovers and maintenance.

Nexus One Review

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:53:04 +0000

I was lucky enough to receive one of the first waves of Nexus One’s (N1) from Google’s direct online shop. Before I go on, the shopping experience was a little too slick IMHO. I signed in with my Gmail account, clicked buy, clicked confirm and it was shipping, if you’ve used Google Checkout before they will likely have your card details and address. You do have 15 mins to cancel the order though. When you see Google’s ever growing list of properties getting together you can see why they are so immensely disruptive.

Unity(3D) Game Development Essentials [Book]

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:23:41 +0000

I’ve just been told Packt has released their Unity3D book “Unity Game Development Essentials” by Will Goldstone, I think I first saw this on the author’s own site learnunity3d.com site when Packt released the RAW edition (similar to Safari’s Roughcuts).

They are kindly sending a copy so I’ll have a review on here shortly, but for now there’s a sample chapter PDF download here.

ASDoc (via ANT) When Using Conditional Compilation

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:43:54 +0000

This relates to using ASDoc to generate documentation for a Flex or AIR project that uses conditional compilation (read more and see tip at end).

Conditional Compilation

Just for some background, the Flex compiler supports what is known as conditional compilation. This allows you to set one or more constants via a compiler flag which is then made accessible from anywhere in your code. This may be a boolean, a string, a number and so on. Within your code you can read this value and switch between using certain methods, or execute blocks of code depending on the value it contains.

Creating Drupal Sites with Flash or Flex: Update

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:27:37 +0000

It appears a new Views module has been released which is causing a couple of problems with the Drupal/Flash stuff, so I’ve updated the post to describe the necessary steps. Hopefully the Adobe DevNet article will also be updated soon with these changes.

You can read the updated post here.

Creating Drupal Sites with Flash or Flex

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:26:51 +0000

I’m pleased to see that an article I wrote for Adobe DevNet has just gone live. “Creating Drupal Sites for Flash or Flex” describes the benefits of using a CMS for your Flash or Flex sites, how to set everything up, getting Flash talking to Drupal, and also covers the various modules available to power your site.

Drupal is probably the most popular open source CMS out there, it has an enormous user community, and the best thing of all is probably the fact that you don’t have to write any PHP or SQL to take advantage of this as a result! (Unless of course you want to, Drupal is fully extensible).

The Save Button – A Thing of the Past?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:38:26 +0000

This afternoon I caught a tweet from @afovea which said “Why is a floppy disc icon still indicative of ‘save’ … when was the last time you used a floppy disc?”. He has a very good point, we are stuck with quite a few analogies which have since become anachronisms; no longer part of how we physically use hardware or software; even “files” and “folders” are struggling to migrate the generations, splinted by Spotlight and Windows Search. Why is it so hard to think up an alternative? I think one reason is that “saving” itself is an outdated concept that might need re-thinking as we become fully connected, all the time.

New Monkey Island Game

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:38:13 +0000

The Monkey Island games were something of a cult phenomenon, certainly back when I was at school, even though the first two were already retro at that time, I think that just added to their charm. Easily one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time.

The Secret of Monkey Island and The Curse of Monkey Island: Le Chuck’s Revenge were VGA masterpieces. The story and humor absolutely first class. The later upgraded 2D and then 3D sequels still hold a candle to the originals, but the news is there’s a new episodic Monkey Island coming out, and a remake of the original to boot.

Compiling FFMPEG Statically on OS X (and Windows)

Tue, 19 May 2009 18:19:15 +0000

I was up extremely late last night figuring this out, so I made some rough notes as I went along. Hopefully they’ll save someone a small nightmare.

Disclaimer: I haven’t written C code since I was in my teens, and apart from some Objective-C from the comfort of XCode, I haven’t really done a whole lot of GCC compiling on any system, so this may not be the best way to do any of this.

Flash on the Beach 2009 Tickets Now on Sale

Mon, 18 May 2009 11:29:44 +0000

The schedule has just gone up, new speakers have been added, and tickets are now on sale. You’ll want to get your tickets as soon as possible because the sooner you get them, the cheaper they are, and they’ll be going fast.

There are options for companies that wish to send several different employees over the course of the three days (see Flexi-pass option), as well as student tickets and single day tickets.

EncryptedLocalStore processErrorCode() in AIR

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:54:24 +0000

I’ve just migrated from an old MacBook Pro to a new one using Apple’s Migration Assistant. I then thought it’d be a great idea to perform some manual cleanup and accidentally deleted a keychain (in KeyChain Access) which was used by an AIR app I am currently developing.

After doing this I started getting the following error when running my app, as soon as it accessed EncryptedLocalStore:

Error: general internal error<br></br> at flash.data::EncryptedLocalStore$/processErrorCode()<br></br> at flash.data::EncryptedLocalStore$/getItem()

Bullet Point Characters Incorrect for Word Documents in OpenOffice Mac

Sun, 17 May 2009 16:00:53 +0000

Just a very small post here because I had trouble finding a solution myself. Users of OpenOffice for the Mac may experience odd-looking bullet point characters when opening and saving MS Word .doc files. The character looks like a W inside a box.

Anyway, the problem is due to MS Office not encoding the character correctly when saving the file, but the temporary solution is to use OpenOffice’s Font Replacement feature (see Preferences), to replace “Symbol” with “OpenSymbol”.

Filtering Hierachical Data in Flex using ITreeDataDescriptor

Mon, 11 May 2009 21:27:07 +0000

This post describes how to filter data for use with any component that displays hierarchical data, such as the Tree, AdvancedDataGrid, or your own custom component. For the purpose of the post I’ll just consider the Tree, but the same technique applies to the others.

Background

Suppose I have constructed a “Library” of Folder and Leaf nodes and I want to display that in a Tree. Each Folder node has an ArrayCollection called “children” which contains any child Folders and/or Leaf nodes.

Rockstar to Offer Flash Game Counterpart to GTA for Money Laundering

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:25:18 +0000

Console games, popular. Flash (browser) games, popular. Combining the two, winning combination.

Flash games have made the leap to consoles several times, from full on ports like Alien Hominid, to Xbox live arcade titles, to Wii browser games. But one idea from Rockstar (creators of GTA), sees gamers laundering money and unlocking stuff for their Nintendo DS copy of GTA: Chinatown Wars.

Another sign of convergence perhaps, where data and services related to a product are made available remotely, or even in the Cloud. Ultimately for Rockstar it means more player time in the GTA universe when their customers are not able to be on their consoles, or perhaps simply a change of scenery.

Loading SWFs into AIR 1.5.X and LoaderInfo.sharedEvents

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:05:38 +0000

Today I had a bit of a nightmare with regards to loading SWFs into AIR. Specifically, I am loading my SWFs from somewhere inside app-storage://, and those SWFs use Flash CS4 UI components. These components extend UIComponent which accesses the stage object. When you attempt to load and add this child SWF to the display list of your AIR app, it generates a SecurityErrorEvent which stops things, dead.

The AIR app owns the stage object, there is only one Stage instance, and depending on what security sandbox the content SWF is loaded into, the child SWF is not allowed access to that stage because it could run amok.

Achron – Meta/Real-time Strategy Game

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:11:15 +0000

I rarely blog about gaming, probably because I rarely game, but occasionally something is so extraordinary it grabs my attention.

I caught a video over at Offworld that demonstrates a new real-time strategy game. The twist is that you can both view and interact with the events in the past, present and future (interacting in the past costing a new type of resource).

Here’s the video, it may appear confusing at first but he is demonstrating advanced tactics. This shows the player being attacked in the past by an opponent who is changing history.

OnLive – The Future of Home Gaming & Media: Video Demo

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:04:48 +0000

Maybe a sensational headline, but it’s no secret in previous posts I have said that I’d “bet the farm” on subscription based services completely overthrowing traditional media consumption in the next few years so this service has really caught my attention.

One of the earliest mainstream examples of this kind of unlimited subscription media probably being Nokia Comes with Music, some years ago now. Well, music is one thing, and video took a little longer, but Netflix, XBox and AppleTV show that’s well and truly “solved”, but what about gaming? Gaming of course relies entirely on reaction times, and on modern consoles runs in higher resolutions than even movies.

Silverlight 3 Beta Release and Adobe

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:07:31 +0000

Yesterday, to much excitement, Microsoft released Silverlight 3 beta, and gave a run-down on the new features at the MIX09 conference. It has been a very long time since I first looked at Silverlight (here’s my post on a pre 1.0 early build I got to use over in Redmond), and I’ve used both Silverlight and WPF since (which will eventually be two in the same IMHO), one app for the BBC was demo’d at the MIX07 keynote, so I’m fairly familiar with the offering and how it compares.

Flex 3/4 Font Embedding: CFF-DefineFont4 vs DefineFont3

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:17:17 +0000

There are now two types of font embedding available to both Flash (CS4) and Flex 3 and 4. These are DefineFont3 (classic), and DefineFont4 (supporting CFF and the new text engine.)

In Flash, Flex 2 and 3 you’d traditionally embed fonts for use in the TextField class, whether that’s a vanilla TextField, or a component that uses the TextField class and has been set to use embedded fonts. This is DefineFont3 embedding. The steps are usually:

Flex Builder is Free to Students

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:05:54 +0000

Via Andrew Shorten, Flex Builder Professional is free to students. You can sign up for a copy here.

Edit: Also free to those unemployed, limited time only on this one I would think.

Bullet Points and Text Alignment in the Text Layout Framework

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:30:52 +0000

I don’t have enough time right now to go into too much detail so I’m afraid this post will just consist of pointers and no real code samples, but I wanted to say that bullet points, although technically un-supported in the Text Layout Framework right now (in terms of <li> tags), are possible. Text alignment is already supported, and you can build a pretty solid text editor that uses these, as well as all the kinds of formatting you’d expect from colour to font weight.

Embedding Fonts In Flex – Tip

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:01:59 +0000

Short and sweet, if you want to know the Unicode ranges for various glyphs, such as Latin 1, Cyrillic and so on, open up flash-unicode-table.xml from your “Flex SDK/frameworks/” directory.

You’ll find everything listed, and it’s a good way to save on font size.

Characters Not Embedding With Flex DefineFont4

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:22:09 +0000

In a nutshell: Don’t try to use Windows TTF files when embedding fonts in Flex on OSX, possibly a CFF thing.

Long version: I had a strange problem with font embedding in Flex Gumbo on OS X when trying to embed the following character ranges (using CFF):

																// numerals, full stop, lower, upper, punctuation, basic latin
[Embed(source='ttf/arial.ttf', fontFamily='Arial', unicodeRange='U+0030-U+0039,   U+002E,   U+0041-U+005A, U+0061-U+007A,   U+0020-U+002F,U+0030-U+0039,U+003A-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A,U+005B-U+0060,U+0061-U+007A,U+007B-U+007E', cff='true')]
public static var Arial:Class;

The first range (U+0030-U+0039) contains the numerals 0 through 9, but they were not being embedded in the resultant SWF. The TTF font I was using was Arial (regular) from my XP machine, this is because on a Mac you get a totally opaque “suitcase” file (dfont) for the whole family.

Text Layout Framework Follow Up PureMVC Solution

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:00:23 +0000

In my previous post I posed the problem of using the new Text Layout Framework in an application where you already have an Undo stack/mechanism, for example in PureMVC with the Undo utility (CommandHistoryProxy).

The challenge arises because the TLF already has an UndoManager, so the solution must hook into that. Added to that, in an application you’re likely to need to serialize your TextFlow to disk/server, which means de-serializing it, which means you’re storing your data outside of the TextFlow instance and needing to keep this store up to date as the user interacts with the TextFlow via the EditManager provided by the TLF.

Text Layout Framework Follow Up and Request

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:17:41 +0000

UPDATE: I’ve posted a solution to this PureMVC + Text Layout Framework integration here (this applies not just to PureMVC, but anywhere you want to use your own “undo” stack in an MVC application).

I’m having a bit of a tricky time with integrating the TLF into an application which already has an “undo” system. The TLF has itself an UndoManager, but more on that later…

The public demo’s are all quite concise, showing the functionality of the TLF in a small amount of code, but I wonder if it’s possible for someone at Adobe to take a look at how people might be using the Text Layout Framework when they have implemented their own application-wide Undo stack which I believe is quite common for RIAs now.

Introduction to the Text Layout Framework

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:32:54 +0000

I’ve been using the TLF for the last day, and it’s really a major leap forward from the limitations of the TextField class introduced in Flash 6. TextField still has its uses, it’s most likely more processor friendly (unconfirmed). But if you’re in need of some of TLF’s advanced features like bi-di text (or complex script like TCY elements), support for flowing text between multiple columns and containers, better handling of in-line images, advanced styling of things like ligatures, superscript, and tracking, then TLF is for you.

Flash Player 10 Coming to Mobile (en-mass)

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:13:44 +0000

Back in October 2007 I wrote a post entitled “Does Flash Lite Have a Future?” which is one of my most popular posts and it sparked some interesting comments. The main argument I had for this wasn’t that Flash Lite was going down the pan, it was simply that we didn’t need it because the full Flash Player would be suitable for mobile due to touch-screen, higher powered mobile devices and lower power requirements for our applications anyway (the argument here is that we only use a tiny percentage of the CPU for most applications now unlike before).

Adobe Releases Distributable Flash Lite 3.1 Player

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:44:19 +0000

A thorn in the side of Flash Lite has been removed. Today Adobe has released a developer redistributable version of the Flash Lite 3.1 player along with the packager tool. This greatly improves the situation of not knowing whether someone has the player, and being helpless to get them it if they haven’t.

The View-Model-ViewModel Pattern

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:51:22 +0000

Yes, another pattern, but I’ve just come across a great post on the M-V-VM pattern and it’s a good one to share. I was introduced to the V-M-VM pattern just under a year ago by an outstanding .NET dev when we worked together on an RFID/database powered WPF application (pics), and I have to admit it worked *really* well, I was utterly convinced by this concept with regards to WPF developement. (Link to article at the end of this post.)

Upgrading Flex 3/AIR Projects to Gumbo/Flex 4

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:52:39 +0000

This article is about creating Flex Gumbo (Flex 4) application that run in either Flash Player 10, or AIR 1.5. I also describe how to upgrade an existing FP9/AIR 1.0 application to use the new SDK. In my case I also had to upgrade a Flex Library project so that’s also covered.

Word of warning: before you jump in please refer to the section entitled “Problem: Losing Syntax Highlighting in Script Tag” near the end. As this could affect you if you make use of Script tags rather than the “code-behind” technique (I now use the former strategy to save on files and promote simpler View classes).

Two AIR Applications Reviewed – GoAir and LiveQuotes

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:16:52 +0000

I’ve just tested out a couple of new AIR applications using PureMVC from SourceBits, they’ve built up quite a few interesting apps in their portfolio, the two new ones being GoAir and Live Quotes.

GoAir is an AIR application designed to provide a desktop Gmail experience, and offline mail support (including sending email when offline, and having it actually send when it detects a connection). This one caught my eye because I also wrote an AS3 Pop3 library and hooked it up to Gmail some time ago, alas mine did not have SMTP so you couldn’t send, and the UI was basic, this one has full SMTP/POP support so you can send and receive.

CSS and AS3: Careful with Whitespace

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:18:11 +0000

Small bug here, it looks like the built in StyleSheet CSS parser in Flash doesn’t use a trim() or a more complex regular expression when parsing a CSS string/file. If you’re a whitespace fan this can lead to your style properties, such as “fontFamily”, actually being indexed in the style object as “fontFamily ” (notice the space at the end).

This doesn’t affect the regular dot notation access (style.fontFamily). But it can cause problems if you’re iterating through the style object.

User Generated Gaming Comes to XBOX 360 – Kodu

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:23:42 +0000

I don’t think there’s anyone un-impressed by Little Big Planet for the Playstation 3. It’s genre defining in a throw-a-million-cycles-at-physics-and-build-anything sort of way. Alas, I’m not a PS3 owner as I rarely game at all, but I’m glad to see something similar coming to Xbox, this one perhaps leaning towards Boom Blox. This used to be known as Boku, now Kodu.

I think this game is aimed at kids, not quite as grown up as LBP, but it seems to have a lot of potential, with a built in “building block” programming element. You have access to particle emitters, collision detection, spawning of objects, scripted movement and counting, the basics required for remaking almost any 8-bit gaming classic 😉

Cliff Hall on PureMVC – Video

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:22:31 +0000

I’ve got a stack of posts scribbled over some paper that I’ve been meaning to blog about for months now regarding the MVP pattern (and ViewModels). But more on that later, because what is core to MVP is of course MVC, that most misunderstood of “patterns”…

Well this one is for new-guns and MVC vets alike, Cliff Hall presents on MVC as it is applied in PureMVC, perhaps one of the most refreshing frameworks to come to light in the Flash realm, and it is spreading to many other languages, ports include Python and even JavaScript/JQuery in the works.

Getting Rid of If/Switch

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:33:39 +0000

At my last job I met a software architect who, for a Flash project, jumped in and learned ActionScript in what seemed like a few hours so he could work on the domain logic for a complex application. For background, I believe he primarily worked with .NET but this is about portable skills.

Suffice to say he was indeed an extremely good coder and I’m grateful he spent some time passing on a few tips and tricks that apply to all languages, and some nice demonstrations using Haskell, ActionScript and of course C#. One such tip was the use of “pure functions” for example, which is always in the back of my mind now. (As a side note, I think learning a very different language like Haskell or in my case Ruby is a great way of keeping your mind open and it will help with your “daily” language).

Genetic Algorithm Evolves Better Car Using Flash

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:57:21 +0000

Caught this over at BoingBoing, it’s a nice Flash-based simulation that runs through rapidly evolving a vehicle design, using a physics engine to test the thing out over some terrain (not sure whether it’s home-rolled or one of the big ones).

Quote from BoingBoing article, from Matthew the author:

“This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the ‘mean’ and ‘best’ fitness.”

OS X Secret Spotlight/Search Syntax

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:52:09 +0000

I got a tip from my friend Alex Peretti regarding the built in search in OSX. Skip to the end if you are familiar with the default search pains.

I couldn’t understand why, when you start typing in the search box inside any folder’s Finder window, it defaults to searching inside files of the entire computer for matching text, instead of looking at filenames inside the current folder. That means every time I search for something I have to change the settings (they aren’t stored) because 99% of my searches seem to bring up some wordy Nietzsche e-book instead of what I’m looking for.

Feed Your Mac

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:11:57 +0000

It’s that time of year again. “Give good food to your Mac” is back with another set of software to choose from. The twist is the more you buy, the cheaper it gets, literally. Choose 3 apps, save 30%, 4 gets you 40% but 5+ gets you 50% off. It’s time limited, so 10 days to go.

Last year I purchased 10 pieces of software for the price of the 1 piece I actually wanted (Unity 3D). In that package I also got an impressive casual 3D modeler, Cheetah 3D. It won’t replace Maya or MAX, but for a lot of tasks it’s perfect. Yes some of the apps on there are a little gimmicky, some of them you may never use, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re getting the other apps for free (in my case anyway).

Flash Player Settings: Flash and Silverlight Comparison

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:52:26 +0000

One of the little pet peeves I seem to share with other Flashers is the frankenstein-like html/flash settings manager pages that you have to access via Adobe’s site. This is the thing you see when you right click a Flash movie and choose “Settings” -> “Advanced”. It allows you to trust certain locations on your hard drive, delete “Flash cookies” (LSOs) , auto-check for player updates and other tasks.

The thing is this thing really looks and feels old now (it’s an FP6 file and it shows), it seems strange I have to be online and visit a site to delete files the Flash Player creates on my hard drive… if it’s a chore for a Flash dev, what’s the chance someone else can use it, particularly if people are storing sensitive info in there (bad devs!). I just got pinged a link to a Silverlight site and as I had to update to 2.0.something so I thought I’d check out the new settings panel (below, click to view full size):

getDefinitionByName() Fails in SWFs Loaded Into Another SWF (Solution)

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:51:47 +0000

Just a quick note for future reference. When you are using getDefinitionByName(“ClassName”) inside a SWF that is being loaded into another SWF, it might not find the symbol from its own library (see ApplicationDomain and LoaderContext for why).

The solution is to get a reference from the ApplicationDomain of the SWF being loaded using the getDefinition() method. So the code:

var mySymbol:Class = getDefinitionByName("MySymbol");

becomes…

var mySymbol:Class = loaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("MySymbol");

Hopefully that resolves any issue you had with getDefinitionByName(). Of course you’d use a similar mechanism to work the other way around, and get at classes inside a loaded SWF. In this case it would be loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getClass()… however this depends on what ApplicationDomain you’ve loaded your child SWF into (see LoaderContext class).

Xuinet Mobile Flash Competition – $10,000 prize

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:48:53 +0000

Just got news from the guys at Xuinet that they’re running a big competition with a cash prizes totaling $10,000. You need to submit SWFs via email by November 3rd 2008 and multiple entries are allowed. Looks like a good opportunity to re-purpose your Flash Lite 2 content.

Prize categories include:

Blogs and Social Networks
Games
Images/slide-shows
Sports (scores, trivia, fantasy league)
On-the-go (travel, weather, news, etc.)

I must admit I haven’t seen Xuinet before. It appears to be a distribution platform for Flash mobile applications. By the looks of it the files are converted into a “Xui” which runs Flash 7 SWFs in a custom player on Windows Mobile devices. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s tried out the SDK to confirm the implementation details.

SWF2JAR – Project Capuchin from Sony Ericsson

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:21:27 +0000

I’m just watching the seminar (recording here) about Sony Ericssons project Capuchin. It looks incredible. Ask anyone that’s developed with Flash Lite and they’ll tell you that distribution is one of the biggest problems they face.

The problem is that traditionally SWF files have been treated by some as nothing more than animated gifs (this is particularly the case with a lot of the older Sony Ericsson phones), and treated by others (for example Nokia) as applications that run standalone (and more recently as a web plugin). This makes it tricky to classify how to treat a SWF when it comes to getting it on a phone, particularly when you haven’t been able update your software anywhere near as easily on mobile as on the desktop. Do you run it from a browser link? do you bluetooth it from a PC or to a friend like an image? or do you go ahead and “install” it somehow, to get an application icon? Of course until now every manufacturer has dealt with the problem differently.

Ubiquity for Firefox – From Mozilla Labs

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:39:48 +0000

I’m still a firm believer that technology will make a programmer out of us all due to the “standing on the shoulders of geeks” principal (discussed here), this is where the collective intelligence/skillset of web users as a whole is easily leveraged by those less able through the creation of modularised cloud-based tools and massive simplification of those tools. It’s nice to see those steps are being made here by the Ubiquity plug-in for Firefox, from Mozilla Labs.

Unity (3D) Developer Magazine – Review

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:19:49 +0000

Over the weekend I received a copy of the first issue of Unity Developer Magazine, thanks to Charles Hinshaw. I had high hopes for this magazine, largely because Unity has an incredibly vibrant community of developers and artists. I was not at all disappointed.

The magazine contains a variety of features, including an in depth look at a big budget Edutainment game “Wolfquest”, incredible artwork created in Unity itself, an illustrated introduction to vectors, A* Pathfinding, creating dashboard widgets and a look at some of the hottest Unity productions from a selection of studios and independents.

ActionScript and ECMAScript 3.1/4 – Inter-op is the Key

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:50:49 +0000

Like many other Flash devs I’ve been following the discussions surrounding the ECMAScript 4 decisions and the Harmony project quite closely. There are a few bloggers out there that appear to be stating that ActionScript will become divorced from the standards. To be honest only Adobe can decide that, but either way, that’s only half the story. In particular, it does not mean that ActionScript will not be able to inter-op, and that’s key…

Meta4orce – Papervision Site for the BBC

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:38:33 +0000

I just caught this site via the blog of Iain Lobb (head of interactive at Bloc Media) who commented on my last post. It’s an incredibly slick site developed using the Great White branch of Papervision3D. The site is (for) a TV and online cartoon series, providing a nice cross media experience.

The main things that stood out for me were the production quality of the games and the audio which is very high quality and just as importantly, very well integrated.

JavaFX.com is DHTML Heaven

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:38:41 +0000

I just visited the (new?) JavaFX site in order to keep up to date on how the new kid to the Flash/Silverlight/”Rich” block was doing, and I was presented with an interesting site indeed. Make sure to click some of the “Resource” links on the right to get the full experience.

The whole thing is built in HTML and JavaScript, with the odd Quicktime player for good measure. Unfortunately the site creeks along at 100% CPU with jerky transitions, ugly styling and flickering madness as the browser can’t figure out what to render, with Quicktime movie’s and HTML Divs strobing in and out of existence as you drag panels around. So far not a great impression given.

CalDAV Support Added to Google Calendar

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:29:13 +0000

I’ve been using Google Docs and Reader for a long time now. Reader is the only RSS aggregator that lets me whizz through hundreds of feeds fast enough to keep up to date and from various devices (tried feedburner and newsgator). Docs made it easy to share any document, presentation, todo list with a friend in 2 clicks, and now Docs and Reader have offline support (Google Gears) the worry about not having net access at any point is gone.

Flash on the Beach Conference Passes.. on eBay

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:01:49 +0000

What a great idea from Flash on the Beach, there are now 5 three day conference passes are up for grabs on eBay, the starting price just Ã‚£1. It will be interesting to see how much these end up going for. Whoever wins, I’ll see you there!

Ticket 1
Ticket 2
Ticket 3
Ticket 4
Ticket 5

Handset Detection (Mobile Browser Sniffing)

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:00:08 +0000

A huge challenge when developing web sites for mobile phones, either as a separate entity, or as a gracefully degraded version of the “desktop” version, is sniffing just what features the device has. This might include support for XHTML, JavaScript 1.5, Flash Lite (standalone or embedded in a page) and so on.

I just caught a post on the Flash Lite Google Group regarding a new site, handsetdetection.com, which provides a free API for sniffing over 7000 devices. The API is available through XML or JSON and the list of features the API documents is exhaustive, from screen size and streaming video support to HTTPS and SVG capability.

Unity3D on the Wii Now Official

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:39:21 +0000

Unity 3D, a high-end game development tool for web, desktop and soon the iPhone has announced they are now an official middleware provider for Wii.

From the site:

Unity’s game engine allows developers to create, modify and iterate on Wii game functionality with the following features:

Live Preview: The play button allows developers to instantly preview their game inside the authoring environment exactly as it currently exists, regardless of the development phase. Users can modify any object’s properties and see the results in real-time without pausing.
Scriptable Controller: Simple, straightforward, fully-featured Wii Remote scripting class lets developers read data from the Wii Remote controller, Nunchuck controller, and Classic Controller effortlessly.
Optimized Character Animation: Developers can create characters without special exports, imports, or modifications required. Files drop easily into Unity and the characters come to life with full animation on Wii hardware.
Scriptable Shaders: Unity’s ShaderLab system has been expanded to leverage the full power of the Wii graphics chip. Developers can use one of the built-in shaders optimized for Wii or write their own. They can script and modify any shader on any object.
Click to Publish: Developers can easily run their game on their Wii development kit, building it with one click.

Read the press release.

3D Zoo Site Raises the Bar

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:29:45 +0000

I just received a link to The Eco Zoo site and quite honestly this is a step above what we might normally expect from a web site. Using Papervision a custom 3D engine in a slick fashion, switching between 3D environments, the tree/world and the pop-up book specifically, the site explores some exotic creatures.

There’s a lot of attention to detail throughout, from the butterflies fluttering around the tree and the simulated cloth to the leaves at the top blowing away and the pop-up book pages which you can rotate around and discover the artist has even taken the time to draw the reverse of the characters in the scene.

Nonoba – Free Flash Multi-User Server, API, Hosting and $20,000 Competition

Thu, 22 May 2008 21:05:10 +0000

I’ve just received an email from Nonoba with information on their new multi-user offering, which includes an AS2 and AS3 API, but what I find particularly interesting is that they also include free hosting and execution of your game logic.

The aim appears to be to lower the barrier to entry for anyone wishing to create a multi-user game. These can include turn-based, or real-time games. They currently have some demos up on the site, and these include Nonoba Racer, Fridge Magnets, Multiplayer Asteroids and DrawPad.

Adobe Sponsored Poker Event III

Fri, 16 May 2008 09:19:33 +0000

It’s that time again 🙂

The 3rd Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament is now open for registration. The event is completely FREE and will take place on the 27th May at 7pm at the Loose Cannon Poker club in Cannon Street. Adobe are providing the beer and prizes as usual. This event is open only to those who use Adobe products professionally. Don’t worry if you’ve never played before as there are always lots of newbies and the dealers at your table will be giving you all 20 minutes of training if you need it. Go register at www.pokercoder.com and if you have any further questions, contact the organiser at sean@pokercoder.com.

[OT] Charity 10k Run – Shout out for Sponsors

Sat, 10 May 2008 20:19:39 +0000

UPDATE: It was raining cats and dogs but it didn’t seem to put people off. I ended up getting 45 mins 5 seconds so I’m quite happy with that and really keen to do another one soon!

On the 26th of May I’ll be running the Bupa London 10,000 charity event beginning and ending in St James Park, London. This is just a shout out to say I’ve set up a sponsorship page, so if you know me, you’ve found this blog useful in the past, or you just feel like helping a good cause please click the link below and donate anything you can.

Escher-esque Game (Illusionary Physics)

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:28:52 +0000

My colleague Rick Williams just found an excellent game called Echochrome which is coming soon to PS3 and PSP. It is very reminiscent of Escher’s work, the difference here is that you must complete the illusion yourself by rotating the 3D-space to allow the inhabitants of the world to complete the puzzles.

Images Invert Colours When Using a Loader In Flash Player 9

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:38:20 +0000

Quick warning regarding loading images using the Loader class in Flash Player 9…

Image files that are saved with a CMYK profile will appear with inverted colours, this includes JPEGs. It might sound a random thing to encounter but it can happen if you are allowing users to upload images. So it’s probably best to re-save the images on the server using an RGB profile and also check for things like a high DPI, which is likely to also be the case with CMYK images that have been designed for print originally.

Unity 3D Coming to iPhone

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:26:36 +0000

I’m a big fan of Unity3D, great for cross-platform 3D games. So I was glad to find out from my colleague James that Unity is coming to iPhone, a platform I have also invested a good amount of my time in recently.

Typically Flash has formed the basis of my work over the last 7 or 8 years, but I’m finding now that the technologies are all so similar, it’s just syntax (and more often than not those are nigh-on the same). We are also more able to apply our learnings in say Papervision, to OpenGL ES for iPhone or Unity without too much of a learning curve, and more importantly, we have many more options for spreading our ideas across a wide variety of media without incurring the enormous costs that multi-skilling in those areas could have meant before.

HD Video Silverlight Firefox Extension, Requires Flash?

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:46:30 +0000

Quote:

“Move Media Player and Microsoft’s Silverlight To Create The Most Flexible, High Quality Streaming Video Platform”

Here’s a strange one. Move Networks is offering a HD video player “powered by Silverlight” that comes in the form of a Firefox extension. Once installed you are redirected to a page that shows a HD video, but a look at the source shows the video player header and controls/progress bar are all made in Flash, it just overlays a block, streaming in a QMX file (doesn’t open in Windows Media Player when renamed asx).

Flash on the iPhone, an Alternative to Bringing Flash to Safari?

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:02:47 +0000

There are a few posts out there relating to Shantanu’s disclosure of a standalone Flash Player being developed for the iPhone using the newly released SDK, but of course that doesn’t answer the question as to whether people will be able to browse the web and view Flash content in-line, given that Flash makes up a huge chunk of the web, and also provides the revenue for a great many sites through advertisements (fallback GIFs are not what advertisers are paying so much money for).

Caution with HTTP 201/20x Responses and Custom Request Headers (Flash Player 9)

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:41:23 +0000

Ran into a couple of issues today with Flash Player 9. I’m communicating with a server which uses REST-based services and is very “standards compliant”. So when PUTting* to the server, it was responding with a HTTP 201 code (that’s a “created” response) and a 204 status code for a DELETE*. The Flash IDE was choking on this and generating an IOError, unable to read the stream. (*as a sidenote Flash Player doesn’t support the PUT or DELETE verbs right now, so we were using POST instead, and using a request header (“X-HttpVerbOverride”) to specify the correct verb.)

Microsoft Silverlight Coming to Nokia

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:51:29 +0000

In a press release today Nokia announced that Symbian OS will include Silverlight. This includes both high-end S60, and low-end series 40. Silverlight is of course the cross-platform RIA runtime from Microsoft, that can be considered a subset of WPF (at least with version 2.0 which has a substantial feature list).

I wonder if Microsoft charged a per-device license fee to Nokia like Adobe did, and if so what the difference is. On top of that there was of course the controversial price to pay for the developer edition of the Flash Lite runtime for Series 60 which is thankfully now free. Clearly there is a fierce competition to be had in this space as the web continues to leak out onto what we currently call “devices”, and Microsoft have made it crystal clear Silverlight is high on their list of priorities.

iPhone/iPod Touch Serious Contender for Handheld Games Market

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:00:39 +0000

When the iPhone came out, I thought it was a brave move, but I couldn’t see myself getting one, even though I’m a bit of an Apple fan (my MBP and Nano/Nike+ are irreplaceable). But since then I’ve been using a friend’s Jailbreaked iPhone I’m utterly sold on it (and the Touch), but for a different reason….

The combination of large touch screen, fast processor and accelerometers makes this device a sleeping giant in the handheld games market. The Nintendo DS and PSP have widened the audience considerably, with games like “Brain Training” on the DS, and World Series of Poker et al on the PSP squarely aimed at adults, and many games specifically targeted at girls. They are making gamers of people who would probably not consider themselves gamers at all… even after spending 3 hours straight playing 42-in-1 😉

Data Visualisation and Collective Intelligence

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:46:34 +0000

My colleague James Hay has been experimenting with Processing, working with some public data made available on the UK government’s statistics site:

http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/Download1.do

The end result has been captured below, showing cylinders whose height relates to the population and whose position on the map relate to the GPS coordinates for the post-codes in the data.

Adobe Sponsored Poker Event – Part Deux

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:42:54 +0000

It’s that time again, the Adobe sponsored London Poker Event is back. Luckily for me I can make it this time, and I hear from friends it was a great night last time round. It’s been a while since I’ve played but with such a mix of people there the prizes are anyone’s 😉

Huge thanks to Sean and Adobe for making this happen. Here’s the info, link at the end:

The second Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament (organised by Sean
McSharry) is taking place on Monday 25th February at the famous Loose
Cannon poker club in Cannon Street EC4. The event is FREE and open to all
professional Adobe software users. Adobe are taking care of the bar tab
and providing some impressive prizes for everyone who makes it to the
final table. Don’t worry if you’ve never played poker before, there will
be lots of novices and you all get 20 minutes of training before the event
begins.

Enabling Access to Timeline Items in AS3 after gotoAndStop()

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:17:27 +0000

So there’s a problem with using gotoAndStop() in AS3 classes, as soon as you call it, you temporarily lose access to items on stage (on the timeline) whether they are defined as member variables, or using getChildByName(). This is different from AS2, items on stage were immediately accessible.

Why use the timeline at all? For one you might have a simple button using named keyframes as button states, or when dealing with assets created by designers that include animations with portions that require localisation of text. So like before you use gotoAndStop() or gotoAndPlay() to manage which “state” your MovieClip is in, but when you go to access anything on stage, it is null, even if it was on the previous keyframe. Here’s a snippet from a typical AS3 class:

Update: Using a GPRS, 3G or HSDPA Mobile with eee PC

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:26:41 +0000

I recently posted on using a mobile phone’s data connection with Mac OS X, and I’ve just had some sucess with my new eee Linux based laptop, again on Vodafone (but I imagine other operators will be similar).

To dial up a connection, plug the phone in via USB and setup a new Dialup Connection in the Network Connections manager with the following information:

Phone number: *99***internet#
User name: web
Password: web

The difference here is that I’m putting the access point name in the number to dial, no doubt the script I was using on OS X was doing this for me. These settings worked on a plain vanilla eee PC without messing around in /etc/ppp. So that might vary operator to operator. Best of luck, please post in the comments if your process varied for other operators or devices.

Using a GPRS, 3G or HSDPA Mobile with OS X

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:26:54 +0000

So I’ve just moved house and I’m without Internet. It seems I have to pay a total of Ã‚£384 ($729 USD) for the priviledge this year. Unbelievably only Ã‚£120 of this is for 16mb no-monthly-limit broadband from Sky, but the rest is on an obscene Ã‚£124 activation cost to get a BT line set up in this place (I was told it has been 7 years since one was active), the rest is line rental for said line from BT. So that’s all going to take at least a month, because living in a town of several hundred thousand people counts as being “in the sticks” when compared with London, and they just don’t make enough phone engineers…

Asus eeePC (Sub Notebook) Review

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:06:03 +0000

The other week I picked up an ASUS eeePC Linux based laptop from, believe or not, Toys ‘R’ Us, for an incredible Ã‚£220 GBP ($429 USD). I have recently started commuting to London on the train with around a 40 minute journey time, so for me this was a purchase that would save my sanity and hopefully my (considerably more costly) MacBook Pro from being stolen. It’s small enough to have on one knee so don’t worry about a table and I’m currently using it to surf, code in Ruby, read books and watch videos.

The World as a Virtual Reality

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:07:40 +0000

I’ve just finished reading a paper I picked up over at BoingBoing titled “The physical world as a virtual reality”, by Brian Whitworth. It’s a very interesting read so I’m recommending it on here. It’s not a long read, but it does help stop that grey matter seizing up. As a result I see the word “computer” in a whole different light.

The paper doesn’t try to say that the world we live in is a virtual reality simulation, as we see in the movie “The Matrix”. Instead it examines several theories, including one that I find very pleasing for some reason; which is that the World is not necessarily a virtual reality, but it *is* calculating, and the mathematics we continue develop year upon year simply unfolds these calculations piece by piece.

Jooce Invites (Not Joost!)

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:24:00 +0000

For the “cyber nomad” (cyber-cafe frequenter), Jooce is a new web-based venture which aims to give:

Multi-network-chat – instant message your friends from your jooce desktop, no matter which IM client they use
Instant file share – share files instantly with your friends just by dragging and dropping
YouTube upload – upload your favourite YouTube videos to your jooce desktop and share them instantly with friends
Public desktop – express yourself with your fully customizable public face on the internet
Media Player – play music, watch videos, create playlists;
File Storage – secure online storage of all your files – accessible from any internet connection anywhere in the world.

This reminds me somewhat of Wallop, a kind of MySpace evolved. It’s probably important to remember that you or I might not be the target audience for this sort of thing. Generation Y (and later) eats up the sorts of features on offer by the bucket-load, and the not-so-tech-savvy of all ages could perhaps enjoy the way it brings together a lot of functionality into one manageable entity. Geeks like myself might prefer to use other disperate services that are potentially harder to use but offer extra functionality or features, and this can make it easy to pick holes in these sorts of things, but in reality I think there’s a lot to be said for this sort of thing. For one, having your music collection online (ignoring the issue of DRM for a second) would mean that you can hotdesk or visit a friend and not worry about where it lives. It’s one for the “coffee shop generation” perhaps.

Subscription Model Should Dominate All Media Consumption

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:39:53 +0000

That means iTunes’ current model will be due for some drastic changes, no more downloading things “to keep”. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought all our media consumption (music, video, insert-other-media-here) would be entirely subscription based in the near future. I gave a definite YES in response.

This is something I’ve had on my mind a few years, and personally I’m of the opinion the only viable solution to the increasingly complex problem of content management and ownership -whilst maintaining the rights of artists and authors- is to consume all of our content as the result of a subscription to a media conglomerate or third party broker.

Video for “Touching the Future” Presentation Now Online

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:12:58 +0000

Tink has just uploaded a video of my Touching the Future presentation. A big thankyou to Tink as always for the vast amount of effort it takes to organise LFPUG every month. The video itself is very small but most of the presentation is verbal anyway and the sound is not too bad at all. However you can still download the slides if you wish.

See the video here.
Download the slides to follow along with here.

Presenting “Touching the Future” at LFPUG Tomorrow (Thu 29th Nov)

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:28:40 +0000

Just a quick reminder to say I’ll be presenting my talk “Touching the Future” at LFPUG tomorrow night. All the details can be found over at the site.

Subjects discussed include:

Media management/subscription based models
Matured DRM (DRM that works)
Convergence of devices / desktops
Resulting paradigm shift (Google “Android project’ mentality)
Surveillance, the future of tracking (Amazon)
Privacy when always online (public/private “personas”)
Proliferation of sensors in devices (enabling “magic”)
Augmented reality (advertisting)
Cloud Computing (Information/Media Piping/Mashups for the many)
Ubiquitous computing (social/physical impact)

You can find the slides and source here.

Flash on the Beach 07 – Slides for “Touching the Future”

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:40:23 +0000

What a great event, I only feel bad that I couldn’t have been around for more of it. As has been seen many times already, John did another amazing job of giving this conference a unique feel, where content comes before all else (as well as looking after the speakers very well). So here’s a big thanks to John, and also a hello to everyone I met, there’s now way too many people in this community to list individuals. I would like to say an extra thanks to Tink for being the guinea pig for my presentation!

Almost Ready for Flash on the Beach 07

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 15:10:44 +0000

Just making my last minute preparations for Flash on the Beach 07. On Wednesday I’ll be giving my presentation entitled “Touching the Future” which will look at Human Computer Interaction and the web in 2012. I have a nice little suprise lined up that I didn’t want to put in the session description in case I couldn’t get hold of it, but let’s just say it might be able to read your mind! 😉

Playyoo Contest – Win $10,000 for your Flash Lite Game

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:28:08 +0000

I just received an email from the guys as Playyoo about a fantastic competition they are running where you could win some amazing prizes.

Here’s the info:

“The contest is being held in advance of the launch of Playyoo’s social networking platform for mobile gamers. Over $10,000 is up for grabs!

The rules are simple. Download Playyoo’s Flash Lite extension, create a game and upload it. All uploads are automatically entered until the entry deadline in early 2008.”

Does Flash Lite Have a Future?

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:24:36 +0000

A popular thread on the Flash Lite mailing list right now is entitled: “Does Flashlite have a future with mobile devices?“. This is very alarming, but a very just question with all things considered…

In 2005 I started writing Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (Friends of ED). This came about very soon after Flash Lite 1.1 was released, and writing continued right up until the release of Flash Lite 2.1 (we made sure we waited to include it). Before I give my thoughts on Flash Lite and its future, I should probably explain that in the last year I’ve pretty much taken a back seat in the Flash Lite community, and there are many reasons for that. The reality is my attention span is very short and I’ve been too busy keeping up developing prototypes and commercial sites and applications with every new technology, including Flex 2, Papervision3D, Silverlight, WPF and AIR. There are other reasons, but more on that later.

Adobe Poker Tournament

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:15:45 +0000

Coder?… Poker player?… If so then get down to the Adobe sponsored poker tournament on the 1st of November in London. I’m gutted I won’t be able to make it myself as I’m a hold’em fan but the timing is off. It looks like it will be a great event, and Sean McSharry has even put up a website for it, where you can register for the event and soon be able to check out the prizes on offer. But watch out for Andy Hood, he can be a mean player!

Nokia Series 60 To Get Flash Video

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:27:05 +0000

A press release from Nokia today states:

“Flash Video will be integrated with the Web Browser for S60 … This allows people to view on the go Flash-enabled Web sites and Flash Video, such as YouTube”

Nothing new to many of you, as it’s no doubt the inclusion of Flash Lite 3 that facilitates this. But it’s nice to see continued commitment to including Flash Lite in future revisions of their software.

My Thoughts on Adobe Thermo

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:51:37 +0000

I’ve just read some pretty valid concerns over at EverythingFlex with regards to Thermo, announced yesterday at MAX. I thought I’d post my response on here…

At first I was also a little scared by this [tool]. But if you look at how it is at present, as Tink mentions there, you have to export layers out of Photoshop (which is a skill in itself unless your designer is ultra neat and doesn’t have a thousand layers with adjustments and masks). This means you are expecting your developers to be extremely savvy with Photoshop, luckily a lot of Flashers are, but that’s not always the case, particularly with Flex devs.

MAX Europe Competition

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:06:11 +0000

Just received an email with information on a great competition Adobe are holding for UK and Ireland residents:

“People can win a MAX Barcelona pass and copy of Flex Builder or Flash CS3 everyday this week and on Friday they can enter to win the whole package – MAX pass, flight and hotel!!”

Today’s question is very easy, and the prizes look great, so find out more and enter over at Andrew Shorten’s blog.

Opera Mini v4 Beta 2 Available for Download

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:57:50 +0000

Opera have just released beta 2 of their Opera Mini 4 mobile browser. Considered by many the best mobile browser out there. They’ve also published an article on the dev center on designing sites for mobile. There is also a video of Opera Mini 4 in action.

Download the beta here.
View the article here.
Play with a live simulator here.

Base64 Encoding in Flash (using MIME)

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:31:49 +0000

Base64 encoding is a very useful technique that allows for the sending of binary data, such as an image file, over the wire using plain-text. This means it can be embedded in XML (plain, SOAP or XML-RPC), it also means the binary data can be stored very easily in a database. It works by reading in data in packs of 6 bits, and turning each one of those into a character in a simple 64 character alphabet. This input data can be text, but it can also be binary data stored in a ByteArray; perhaps the contents of a file, or an MP3 your Flash application has constructed in memory.

Apple Selling 1 in 6 Laptops

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:04:23 +0000

“You do computers don’t you?”. That’s the phrase I and no doubt many of you have heard from family members or friends of the family over the last however-many years. Any time anyone bought a new computer, had computer problems, setup a new WiFi router (what am I up to now, 20?), or even problems with a VCR it was my job to fix it because “I do computers”. Let me tell you, for a cup of tea and a few biscuits the daily rate you are missing out on fades into insignificance.

Incredible Content Aware Image Resizing at SIGGRAPH 2007

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 14:04:21 +0000

This demonstration is pretty incredible. The software performs calculations on the entropy of an image (amongst other things), to allow you to resize it whilst maintaining key visual entities. Some examples include mountains, tree-lines or people.

Other features include the ability to assign positive and negative weights to areas to make sure they are not distorted too much, or drop them out of existence entirely.

View the video here (or hi-res version here).

Join the Team at AKQA London/SF/DC/NY

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:55:27 +0000

Update:

Just a quick update to say that we are also recruiting for New York, San Fran and DC, so if you are interested please feel free to get in touch via the email to the right.

(original post as follows…)

Some good news, we have a lot of exciting projects coming up and are currently looking to expand the team some more with fresh talent. So if you are interested in working for clients such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Fiat and XBox as part of a great team please read on.

New Technologies from Sun and NASA

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 01:58:26 +0000

NASA have released a Java component called World Wind that enables developers to build something that includes Google Earth-like 3D map data. This component can be added to for example a Swing application and the developer can create a mashup in any way they see fit.

These applications can be launched via Java web start (an app that launches from a web page as long as the Java JRE is installed, they state 1.4 onwards with some minor trepidation) or distributed as a standalone desktop app (again JRE required).

Join the Team at AKQA London

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:59:54 +0000

Our team is known as CRD (Creative Research and Development) and we use technologies including Flash, Flex, AIR, Silverlight and WPF on a daily basis as well as real-world pieces for integrated campaigns and tacticals. Anything cutting edge, we’ll be the ones to use it. Feel free to check out the latest work over at AKQA.com and drop me a mail at the address over on the right.

Tasty new Nokia Prism Collection

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 02:27:15 +0000

There was a time when Nokia was the style icon in the mobile industry, the 3210 widely considered one of the best phones of all time (I can’t substantiate that claim), it was good looking, worked flawlessly and was as tough as old boots (if I remember it was also the first with Snake). In particular the foray into smartphones has left them looking a little bit… purely functional, leaving the Samsungs and the LGs to take the crown for best looking in the last few years.

Flash 9 (only) XML Class Gotcha

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 05:09:26 +0000

Possible gotcha with the XML class, but I’d like to get this confirmed if anyone has a second to try this out.

It seems that the XML class is converting " to its literal ASCII representation (i.e. the quote mark “) when converting a String into a new XML object. I’m sending this data over XML-RPC and I cannot have quotes being sent as plain-text, they need to be XML/HTML encoded.

Flash Lite Digital Personal Assistant for Jonnie Walker

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 06:21:43 +0000

Here’s a fantastic execution of an idea for mobile, using Flash Lite. For those up and coming Asian businessmen without a PA of their own, BreakDesign (makers of Dawn of the Fly) have created a digital PA that has a calendar, finds bars, taxis and other information.

I’m a big fan of giving a consumer something useful and then branding it. As opposed to giving a consumer something that does something associated with the brand (brand self-love I think they call it). In this case they hit the old golden “sweet spot” and did both. Some brands lend themselves to this naturally, such as Nike with Nike+, sometimes its harder to create something of real value.

Experimenting? Try an Interactive Brainwave Device

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 11:07:41 +0000

We were lucky enough to have Luciana Haill from IVBA (Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyser) come in to work the other day and demonstrate the bluetooth enabled brainwave monitoring hardware and software on offer. To summarise what it is, this device monitors in realtime the frequency and range of brainwaves in the pre-frontal cortex and pumps that data wirelessly to a computer for many uses.

Here’s a video that shows the data it captures being rendered in 3D:

Review of Buzzword Beta

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 05:48:36 +0000

I’ve had access to Buzzword for a while now, so I think it’s just about time for a review. First of all thanks to the guys at Virtual Ubiquity for the invite and the permission to post this.

Disclaimer: This post speaks only of the preview version of Buzzword, so things may have already been added that might be considered missing at present and it doesn’t reflect the final product.

I think the easiest way to do this is to break things down into some topics to see how it measures up and also what I like about it. But first, a screenshot (click to view fullsize).

Another ExternalInterface Bug – Affects ASP.NET Sites in IE6/7

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 03:59:51 +0000

There appears to be a bug with ExternalInterface when your Flash movie is inside a FORM tag, which is what ASP.NET does by default.

You will get a “null has no properties” type error because the JavaScript that ExternalInterface generates at runtime is unable to reference the Flash movie.

It appears to be due to IE not putting the form in the same place as other browsers’ DOMs (specifically the window object).

New Review of Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices Book

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 07:03:56 +0000

Thanks to Jesse over at ActionScript.org, another review has been posted of our book Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (Friends of ED). Great review thanks indeed to the author, Nathan Daniel.

Read the review here.

AIR (Apollo) Derby – Open to the World!

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:16:50 +0000

This doesn’t usually happen. The AIR derby is open to people all over the world. So if you are a fellow Brit, or European, have a good look at the prizes.

Just about perfect if you ask me, the perfect developer setup, headed up by the insane 8 Core Mac Pro (you can’t even break these things into a sweat), as well as a $100,000 travel certificate, I could really use that with all the holiday time I’ve accumulated working too hard 😉

Living the Future?

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 03:52:37 +0000

Science doesn’t progress smoothly, it makes huge ugly leaps and bounds. But recently a couple of articles really sparked my attention.

The first was that they have managed to create a life form artificially. That is, creating life where previously there was none… not just allowing bacteria to enter a given environment as it naturally does. This is a huge step for us all I think; luckily I am not a religious person because I would hate to have to deal with the personal and community-wide ramifications of that “little feat”, it might just open up a lot of questions for someone that may have previously been content in their views. We are already seeing articles with sensational titles such as “Does God have competition?” springing up all over. But this is not a bad thing, the ability to question something you have been told by people you trust is an admirable skill, whether they turn out to be right or wrong. On the negative side, they are trying to patent it which has the potential to raise a bigger moral question on the world stage.

The Popularity of Music Videos on Mobile Devices

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:20:15 +0000

No one can really doubt the success of MTV up until now. People like music videos. But I’m left confused when I look at music videos being sold for download on mobile devices such as phones and iPods, and sold at a premium.

Watching music videos on TV is something I only do if I’m doing something else at the same time and just want some background (I don’t say background “noise” because I think it’s safe enough to say many people now look for background sound and video at the same time, strange as it may sound). As for actually spending money and downloading a music video to my phone or iPod, with those tiny little screens and in the case of mobile phones, horrible sound quality- is surely the worst possible way you could watch a music video?

Google Gears on Google Reader

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:11:08 +0000

I use Google Reader along with the Firefox notifier plugin extensively. It’s one of the best RSS aggregators I’ve ever used, not because it is the slickest in terms of the UI, but because it does its job pretty well and fits in nicely with how I browse the web (unobtrusive, integrates well with Firefox and so on).

I clicked on the Firefox notifier for it today and when the page opened I was presented with the soon to be familiar request to use Google Gears for offline storage.

Runtime Shared Assets and Load Order

Wed, 23 May 2007 04:55:59 +0000

This affects projects that make use of FLAs and runtime shared assets, commonly sharing things like fonts or components amongst several SWFs to prevent embedding them several times in the various files that might make up a project.

The first thing to note is the “Load Order” in the settings panel in Flash. It defaults to “bottom up”, and this means it streams in the contents of the bottom-most layer first, before loading and executing code that lives on any layers above it.

Possibly the Most Impressive RIA Yet (Screencast)

Sat, 19 May 2007 05:57:21 +0000

I’ve posted about Buzzword before, the upcoming online (/offline with Apollo?) word processor. To me Buzzword really illustrates why I continue to back Flash and Flex over AJAX. I don’t care what people use if it’s a good experience, but the limitations are definitely becoming more and more apparent, and perhaps in 2007 we will begin to see the Flash apps just accelerating away from the current kings of the RIA scene, not just in demos and prototypes, but in the real world. The great thing about this game is that you don’t have to compete by spreading FUD, you can just build users by building better experiences, they (/we) are a fickle bunch!

Updated: Flash, Flex, Silverlight… and now JavaFX

Tue, 08 May 2007 03:27:30 +0000

Fantastic, something else to learn 😉 Sun bloggers have been dropping hints to look toward the JavaOne conference in and around all of the Silverlight posts that have clogged up the aggregators the last week or so, and it appears the announcement for their new AJAX/RIA alternative comes in the form of “JavaFX”.

JavaFX makes use of a new scripting language and utilises the Swing APIs for UI. This probably comes as no suprise, I have drummed on to my poor colleagues the last year how AJAX’s days are numbered in terms of the popularity it currently enjoys, it simply cannot keep up because HTML and JS were never intended to build this “new” breed of online app, too much reliance on the browser itself naturally brings with it serious yet fully justified limitations. We’re reaching the top of that particular bell-curve now. For an example of this you just need to compare Google Docs (Google being the absolute cream of the crop in AJAX scene, yes I know they use GWT), with early pre-alpha screens of Buzzword. The potential benefits of using the Flash Player are limitless in terms of real-time document editing (binary data transfer over XML refreshes, bitmap editing, video embedding, animation creation etc). Microsoft, Sun and Adobe of course are all providing better tools to craft future of the web.

BBC Silverlight App – Demo’d at MIX

Wed, 02 May 2007 16:25:12 +0000

Just watched the video of the BBC Silverlight app we created being presented at the day 2 keynote for MIX 07. There’s been a lot of traffic in the last couple of days with regards to Flash/Silverlight etc, and I’m not going to get into any of that here. The feature-sets and SDKs/players for the two products are out there for you to decide yourself as a professional whether it suits your needs. I just enjoy working at a place that throws so many new challenges my way, keeps things exciting!

Data Exchange Efficiency (AJAX, JSON, E4X, Flex Remoting/AMF)

Tue, 01 May 2007 17:47:23 +0000

I just got sent a very interesting link to a Flex app from James Ward that runs tests on a variety of different data exchange formats. The tests include results for:

1. Server processing time
2. Data transmission time
3. Parsing time and…
4. Rendering time

Of course no real suprises that Flex/Flash Remoting performs the best in all cases (the Dojo example appears to transfer quicker, but it is actually only dealing with 500 rows instead of 5000 in the Flex tests, maybe because it is sadly let down by the incredibly long render time), “classic” AJAX performs fairly badly, with JSON and Dojo falling somewhere in between.

Amiga Releasing Two New Computers

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 04:25:14 +0000

I know there are a lot of Amiga fans out there with you Flashers (that includes you Ralph), so imagine the suprise when I read today that Amiga are releasing a budget and a high-end computer using the PowerPC architecture and running AmigaOS4.

I’d like to say I’m going to get one, but let’s just have a little play first and see how it feels. 🙂

Read the press release.

Mmm Flash Physics Experiment – Acrobots

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:05:06 +0000

Just got sent this by a colleague, great fun and well executed, reminds me somewhat of LocoRoco….

http://www.acrobots.net/

New TED Site

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:38:21 +0000

I’m a huge fan of TED talks. If you read New Scientist or Scientific American and you’ve never seen a TED talk you may be missing out as the topics covered are generally very similar. And if you don’t, you’re still missing out! You may have seen the now famous multi-touch display, first demo’d (I do believe) at TED.

TED talks are on a variety of topics ranging from “Is there a God?” and “What makes us happy?”, and their new website reflects on these themes with a nice new Flash theme-based visualisation of the (now over) 100 talks, along with some other great new features.

AJAX Exploit

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:57:55 +0000

Just got sent this by Rick Williams…

Security researchers have found what they say is an entirely new kind of web-based attack, and it only targets the Ajax applications so beloved of the ‘Web 2.0’ movement.

Vulnerable frameworks include: Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (aka. Atlas), XAJAX and Google Web Toolkit, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Dojo, Moo.fx, jQuery, Yahoo! UI, Rico, and MochiKit.

Read the full story here.

Bedale Group – Summary

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:58:40 +0000

Yesterday saw the first meeting of the Bedale group, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank James for organising it, and for the wine, there were a great deal of top quality bottles had over the course of the night along with some excellent cheese.

I’d recommend anyone using Adobe products in an organisation to come along, many topics were discussed. From LiveCycle to Apollo to Flex, we covered a lot of ground regarding the products in terms of positioning, functionality, and in particular relationships with Adobe and the ISV outreach and support programme. It was interesting for me personally to talk to the guys from Arch Consulting who specialise in SAP R/3 and LiveCycle. In particular it was great to get a better picture on how Adobe fits in with the enterprise, I feel fortunate that I can pick up a beta and pretty much start using it in production, however at the other end of the spectrum there is a huge amount of proof needed before making leaps into new technologies.

Inaugural Meeting of the Bedale Group

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:27:59 +0000

Tuesday the 20th of March sees the first meeting of the Bedale Group set up by James Governor of RedMonk:

The Bedale Group is…

“An unassociation for the UK Adobe ecosystem. If you’re a software or services company that specialises in Adobe platforms I would be very interested to hear from you. The idea is to create an occasional forum to drink wine and discuss what Adobe needs to do to sustain and improve its engagement with the local corporate developer community.”

PaperVision3D Tron Lightcycles – Sneaky Screenshot

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:19:13 +0000

So I’m on day 2 of a project I’m un-imaginatively calling “PaperTron”, my first foray into making a game with PV3D, and I thought I’d post up a little screenshot of what we have so far:

I hope this shouldn’t take too long, but considering it’s taken well over 2 weeks to make myself spend the time I have, it could take a while ultimately ;). Either way, it’s a lot of fun, and PaperVision 3D makes it pretty easy, let’s face it, if you’ve ever done any 3D in Flash before, it’s not easy, so anything that helps you do just the fun stuff is great in my books.

Adobe Viral: What Is In the Box?

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:31:26 +0000

Adobe rocks 🙂 Everyone has a plan, of course, but I will get the box by any means!

WhatIsInTheBox.co.uk

Nice 3D box on the website too.

Adobe Seminar Feedback – (Curse of WiFi)

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:17:37 +0000

To all of those that just joined us in the Adobe Seminar, I must apologize for losing connection 3 times, I can’t remember the last time I lost connection in my house, and I haven’t lost it since, but for those 20 minutes it was cursed. Also note to self, Dual Screen on Windows means issues.

What we are going to do however is record the whole thing for you to play back at your leisure, the slides and source are up in the forums of http://www.flashmobilebook.com (at the bottom), for you to get familiar with the code, and I’ll post on here as well as the Adobe Seminar web page as soon as we have the full recording, hopefully this time with Weyert in there for completeness.

Adobe Seminar (“3 Briefs”) Feb 07 – Source code

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:23:18 +0000

I’m just uploading the source code for part 2 of the “3 Briefs” Adobe Seminar which is taking place today 3PM EST (8PM GMT) Feb 28th, 2007.

Download them from here.

Slides are also included. The FLA requires the AS2 classes that ship with SUSHI Multi-user server (free version available).

Link to original post.

Gfx Benchmarking: Flash/Flex vs. WPF vs. WPF/E vs DHTML

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 07:56:06 +0000

I’m afraid to say I got different [relative] results to those published on the site (the Flex cache as bitmap version was by far the highest FPS on my machine), but I’d have to dig into the source to see how these have been put together…

Link to the examples

Link to the results and discussion.

Some personal notes. I tend to think a Flash only (non-Flex framework) example would be a better option to a Flex app. Also the Flex example uses a Timer, he probably should try making use of the ENTER_FRAME event to see what results that gets. Also worth trying the fullscreen-then-back trick the Papervision3D guys are using to get a perf boost. Any other tests out there? Something like this would be interesting 😉

Update: Flash 9 Experiment – Fireworks Alpha Mask + Webcam

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:36:38 +0000

I’ve just fixed my last Flash 9 experiment, I hadn’t built it in such a way as to not error if you don’t have a webcam installed at all. Also I developed this on an intel mac, and it runs smoothly at 60FPS, with over 200 firework particles at once, for some reason my pretty good PC is only running at around 5-10FPS with only 25 particles, but this may just be the PC here so please feel free to try it out.

Flash 9 Experiment – Fireworks Alpha Mask + Webcam

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:37:11 +0000

I went to see Alias’ presentation at LFPUG the other night, and it made me keen to get back to some experimenting in Flash, in particular with Flash Player 9. You may have seen my last example which used Flash 8 alpha video as a mask. This kind of extends that, in that we are using an alpha mask again, this time we have some fireworks. Before the SWF, here’s a screenshot:

Flash Lite 2 – Online Seminar – Feb 28

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:23:31 +0000

Please join us in an online seminar at the end of this month (Feb 28th). Scott Janousek, Weyert de Boer and myself will be covering topics from our book Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (Friends of ED).

The seminar will be broken into 3, with questions at the end and a raffle with some great prizes. Topics will include:

Part 1: Cool Flash Lite™ Wallpaper and Screen saver content – Scott Janousek
Join me as we do a quick overview on how to design, develop, and deploy cool wallpaper and screen savers for the latest devices supporting these Flash Lite multimedia content types. Note: We’ll cover Nokia Series 40 and Series 60 devices in particular.

Get 23% off Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices!

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:59:21 +0000

Bookpool are doing a nice deal where you can get 23% off Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices.

You can find out more info here (click the book cover on the right of this blog to visit the book’s website).

New Techniques with Flash Video – Paint Filled Car

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 15:10:22 +0000

I’ve been thinking about video quite a bit recently. One thing that really bugs me is how people tend to treat video as this thing that sits in a box and plays from start to finish. When Flash 8 introduced alpha in video it opened up a whole new range of techniques, and I’ve just spent a little bit of time roughing out a simple (and rather crude) example:

This example is seemingly simple, but there are quite a few steps involved which I will explain below. What happens here is that you can click a colour, and the car’s surface will fill with that colour as it rotates, as if paint were splashing into its existing finish.

Windows Vista Emulated in WPF/E

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 03:28:14 +0000

Apart from the speed here (it’s very slow). This is a very impressive emulation, showing images, videos, text and search works too. Click through the icons to see the app. Knowing that this would have been very difficult to do using JavaScript as it currently does, my hat goes off to whoever made this (via Mike Harsh).

http://www.vista.si/main.htm

Plugin for windows

Plugin for mac

Flash Lite Book – Free Chapter No. 2 – Application Development

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:29:44 +0000

I’ve just been informed we have another free full chapter from Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (FoED) online on Adobe DevNet. This one is on Application Development using Flash Lite. If you are new to Flash or coding with ActionScript, I’d suggest first reading chapters 2 and 3 which cover in depth the nitty gritty of Flash Lite 1.1 – 2.1 and a primer on ActionScript 2.0 to boot.

Read the article and download the chapter.

Papervision3D – Preliminary Tests

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:37:39 +0000

What can I say? I’m blown away by Papervision3D. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve used Sandy (enter via UK/Europe), and although it wasn’t me who tried it personally I can see it is a fantastically full featured engine. However, for me, I wanna see enough polys for a full on game, and that’s the sort of speed you can expect with PV3D as it grows.

So here are some pretty basic initial tests I made to see just how fast it is. These examples are NOT optimized, nor are the models really. The Delorean car for example has over 800 polys.

“Microsoft HTML Viewer” plugin – for Internet Explorer?

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:55:20 +0000

There used to be a time when everything tech wasn’t so “meta”, and things (mostly) worked in the way they were designed.

Whilst browsing the web just now using Internet Explorer 7 (normally I use Firefox 2), I get the following request for an ActiveX control to be installed:

This website wants to run the following add-on: ‘Microsoft HTML Viewer’ from ‘Microsoft Corporation’

(Click pic to enlarge)

Finally – New Slimline Nokia Smartphones

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 04:59:13 +0000

I’m a big fan of Nokia’s smartphones and have stuck to them for my last 3 handsets because I love that I don’t have any compatibility issues with files, programs or syncing to Outlook et al, they just work flawlessly. But I’ve been dissappointed that they just keep getting bigger and bigger (and slower!), so I almost decided to switch to Sony Ericsson as a result, no-one wants a slow chunk of silicon in their pocket.

My First Flash Wii Game – Balloons

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 15:45:22 +0000

Well today I had a play at making a Flash game for the Wii using some rudimentary gesture recognition for the wand style of input. You can see a sneak peek of how the gesture recognition works here:

http://richardleggett.co.uk/wii/gestureRecogDemo.html

So Aral and Mario together have un-earthed some real gems the last couple of days, I think there could be a lot of fun to be had making some Wii games. It’s like Flash Lite, even simple games are much more fun when put on another type of device, and with the “wand” style input, it’s even more fun.

FLV’d – Competition from Friends of ED

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:52:02 +0000

Friends of ED is holding a competition where you could grab the top prize of an Apple Mac Book, 3 FoED books, Camtasia and SnagIT software and a copy of gProject (from gskinner.com). There are also runners up prizes so it’s worth having some fun here.

You just need to produce something cool that uses some of the provided assets, it looks pretty open to interpretation, just stick to the rules of coming under 2.5 minutes and 10mb.

Reflecting on WPF/E

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:39:02 +0000

Introduction:

I’m going to keep this very factual. I’ve been developing Flash for the last 6 years and intend to carry on doing so, as a result I’ve learned to accept a lot of criticism and be open to review all things new, in effect I’m opening by saying I have not been “bought” as you will no doubt see in this article I aim to give an entirely balanced perspective, the politics interest me not, just the tech. With that in mind, I’ve been able to get very deep into WPF/E for the last week or so, I’ve always enjoyed dipping into a brand new tech and getting fully engrossed in it, so it was a nice experience to be given the opportunity (thanks). You may find me making a lot of comparisons to Flash, this is only natural for obvious reasons.

Hey Ma, I’m on BBC Radio ;)

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 20:52:31 +0000

It’s been a week since I was at Flash on the Beach but whilst I was there Rami Tzabar from the BBC (Digital Planet on Radio 4) asked me a few questions about Flash Lite just after my presentation. You can listen online and download the podcast at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4849402.stm

Direct link to mp3

Skip to 20 mins 30 seconds for the piece on 10 years of Flash (and Flash on the Beach). The show talks about the evolution of Flash and its expansion into various forms of media. There’s also an insightful discussion from Geoff Stearns on the abuse of Flash. 10 years, wow.

Flash Mobile Book – Free Sample Chapter (Game Programming)

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:11:42 +0000

Now that the site is live for our book on Flash Lite (thanks to Scott) I’d also like to take the chance to point you to one of the chapters I wrote which is online for free download, available immediately:

Visit the page (PDF on the right)

This chapter contains a variety of concepts involved with game programming on limited devices; including math, physics, collision detection, keypad input, graphics and sound.

Flash on the Beach Slides and Source

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 17:53:55 +0000

Finally got round to uploading my slides, source and the source for the FOTB Flash Lite Pocket Guide, so my apologies for the delay… I had to take a flight straight from Brighton to Seattle on the last day of the conference and it’s been pretty busy since I arrived. I also want to take this chance to thank John, as many others have. It was a fantastic conference and extremely slick, I hope he invites me back next time. Without further ado, here are the zips!

Flash on the Beach Flash Lite Guide

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 07:42:18 +0000

I’m pleased to finally announce the Flash Lite Pocket Guide for Flash on the Beach 2006. I had some problems embedding so many images and a large amount of XML parsing required for something like an event guide in Flash Lite 2, the RAM limitation is something you never totally get used to, but on the flip side I believe that limitations can lead to happiness. There are several tricks and tips required to get this working well, but after some effort here we have it:

Casting Fails – Flash 8 – Follow Up

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:04:38 +0000

A while ago I posted about casting failing if you cast the result of attachMovie() but only in certain cases.

I had the same thing happen today, so I opened it up in FLASM, and I think I can see what is happening:

push 'sp'
getVariable
trace
push 'sb', 0.0, 'getNextHighestDepth'
callFunction
push 'sb', 'com'
getVariable
push 'domain'
getMember
push 'controls'
getMember
push 'ScrollBar'
getMember
push 'LINKAGE'
getMember
push 3, 'attachMovie'
callFunction
push 1, 'com'
getVariable
push 'domain'
getMember
push 'controls'
getMember
push 'ScrollBar'
callMethod
varEquals

As you can see here, it seems instead of performing a cast operation (and “cast” is a keyword you do see in the FLASM output), it actually tries to perform a conversion (as you see with Array or Boolean), treating com.domain.controls.ScrollPane as a function, and applying it to the result from the attachMovie() operation. This results in the undefined/null value we are experiencing because in itself, this function has no return value unless used with the new keyword as a constructor.

Flash on the Beach ’06 Wishlist

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 06:42:20 +0000

Well I’ve seen Tink’s and Peter’s wishlists, so I think it’s time I put up my own, and this was really tricky, too many sessions I’m going to have to sacrifice.

Day 1:

11:00 Craig Swann – ..and now for something completely different..

13:30 Branden Hall – Explorations with ActionScript 3

15:00 Aral Balkan – Memo to the CEO

16:30 Erik Natzke – Keep Interest(ed)

Day 2:

9:30 Brendan Dawes – Contains one scene of sheep skinning

WPF from a Flash Dev’s Perspective

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 07:51:43 +0000

Aral just had an interesting post on XAML, the markup language used for presentation and layout in Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). He touches upon a fact that it is sometimes quite a shock to see some real abominations when it comes to some of the XAML out there on the web. But there’s more to it than meets the eye when digging deeper. I’d like to post my reply on here also, and make it clear, I am not evangelising for either side in this post, but I find it fascinating comparing these two technologies which are making modern creative development very satisfying….

Tutorial: Building Version Numbers into SWFs using ANT and SVN

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 03:05:01 +0000

A colleague suggested it would be useful to build in version numbers into SWFs so that you could simply right click and see just what version you were looking at. Think in terms of QA or a client on the phone. With continuous integration it is useful to be able to say “hey just right click… so it says r12345?”. The r12345 here would refer to the revision number in Subversion. This makes bug tracking say using Trac much more integrated.

LFPUG: Visual Interfaces for the Human Brain and Flex 2 for Flashers

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:53:11 +0000

Next Wednesday (25th Oct ’06) my colleague Rob Bateman and buddy Tink will be hosting another LFPUG (London Flash Platform Usergroup). They will be speaking on Visual Interfaces for the Human Brain and Flex 2 for Flash Developers respectively. Tasty stuff. Last time was a lot of fun even though I had to rush off after my preso, but the venue was really nice so hopefully see you there. Remember to sign up to make sure you get in:

HD Fullscreen Flash Video – Demanding More

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:23:21 +0000

So I saw the full-screen video examples the other week using the new Flash 9 update, but the example at the end of this post really pricked my attention.

I went out and got a HD TV a couple of months ago because I figured it was time to make “the leap”. As yet I don’t think I’ve made any sort of decent use out of that particular feature apart from watching some Lost s3 over the wifi via a ye olde xbox-1 with media center (convergence is beautiful). Now I’m a firm believer that this whole Blu-Ray, HD-DVD thing is a flash in the pan; a very temporary stop-gap. The last time I bought a physical CD was probably 5 years ago. The last time I bought a DVD, probably a couple of weeks. Why? Because until now only Apple and two companies in the U.S. only have offered full movie downloads in any sort of reasonable, legal manner.

Flash Lite Contest

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 14:08:08 +0000

Take part in a Flash Lite (and J2ME) contest courtesy of the Mobile & Devices Adobe User Group of Rome and Jamba…

Flashlite category:
• 1st prize: Flash Studio 8
• 2nd prize: IRiver 2G
• 3rd: 3 O’Rilley Books

J2ME Category:
• 1st prize: Nokia N93
• 2nd prize: IRiver 2G
• 3rd prize: 3 O’Rilley Books

Enter the contest here

FlashFoward Slides and Source

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:41:10 +0000

Just to announce I’ve uploaded my FlashFoward Austin 2006 slides and source.

You can download the zip here.

As soon as time allows it… a mini-tutorial that goes a little more in depth as to how the multi-user example works and how you can set up SUSHI on your machine (the docs that come with it are great though, so get downloading!

In the meantime, to enable HTTP support in SUSHI, you need to follow the instructions supplied with the SUSHI manual, for example, all I had to do was uncomment this line in my Apache httpd.conf config file:

Using Flash in Installations – Nike Festival of Air

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:40:43 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we launched several installations in Nike Town, Oxford St., London as part of Nike’s Festival of Air, along with the accompanying website. It all kicked off with a fantastic launch party and there was a lot to see and do, I got to meet someone I consider an inspiration in UK hip hop and grime, Dizzy Rascal, and a good time was had all round. But down to the technology…

MovieClip Casting Fails with attachMovie()? Flash 8

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 04:50:58 +0000

I seem to be getting casting failing (returning null) when I have a class that extends a class that extends MovieClip. Here’s an example…

MyWidget extends SimpleButton
SimpleButton extends View
View extends MovieClip

That’s the inheritance chain, SimpleButton and View are some base classes I have written for use in various projects and are not part of the v2 components. Here’s what happens when I try to cast an attachMovie():

Homebrew for PSP 2.0 – 2.8

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 07:03:24 +0000

I was a bit gutted when I upgraded the firmware on my PSP to 2.71 in order to get the Flash Player on there. I had a lot of useful homebrew like a PDF reader and some open source games like Tetris, and its always good to have the choice to try out some demos/games of your own (for example with LUAScript). Anyway some good news and probably the smoothest hack yet. You can now navigate to a special tif image on your memory stick and the preview icon alone will cause the PSP to run in User/Kernal mode all ready for homebrew.

Expansive Flash Lite 1.1 Game – Fantasy Quest

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 14:20:26 +0000

“beginner_lite” has been going all out in his spare time adding more and more to the rather expansive Fantasy Quest Flash Lite 1.1 game. Not only is it a role playing game utilizing Final Fantasy graphics if I’m not wrong, but there’s also Tetris, Tic Tac Toe, racing, a labrynth, weapon upgrades and a whole lot more packed into this mammoth Flash Lite game.

You can see lots of screens the last few updates to this game over at the Flash Mobile Forum.

Simple BitmapData.getPixels() / ByteArray Example

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 04:54:29 +0000

I found the Flex 2 docs didn’t really contain an example of using the pixel data getPixels() puts into a ByteArray. I wanted to take the pixels in that ByteArray and have them explode or move around in a controlled fashion not obtainable with a simple Convolution Matrix or DisplacementMap.

I’m not going to go through all of that, but just a quick example of getting data back out of a ByteArray and displaying it again as a copy. Normally copyPixels() would be the better option for this specific task, but this as I say gives the opportunity to move the pixels around indepentently in 3D for example.

Y Design Awards launched in UK

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 07:57:43 +0000

The aim of the Y design awards is to recognise leading creative talent demonstrated through the use of digital technology. This year the awards are focussed on the recognition of great design with the use of Flash technology – in celebration of Flash’s 10 year anniversary. The competition is aimed specifically at the Uk design/agency community and already there is great interest from some the likes of Saatchi and Tribal DDB. The grand prize, which is a people choice award voted for online, is a trip for the lead designer to the next international Flash conference.

Thanks for the Cake!

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 04:09:30 +0000

What an awesome suprise when I got to work. For any Little Britain fans out there… “I looove the cake” 😉 Thanks to Robin and to Adobe!

Only problem is it’s too nice to eat.

ActionScript – a Prototype vs. Class based language

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 04:31:53 +0000

I was just asked by a friend, “if code on the timeline in Flash 8 is no different from AS1 because it isn’t inside a class file [therefore not type-checked or anything else that typically differentiates AS2 from AS1], what is AS3 code on the timeline in Flash 9?”.

I didn’t have a simple answer. That code will still be runtime checked etc, it certainly isn’t AS1 or AS2. The reason we can’t define what it is exactly is probably due to the nature of the language.

London Flash Platform Usergroup Meeting July

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 05:48:07 +0000

Come and join us this time at my place of work for the July London Flash Platform Usergroup (LFPUG) meeting for some really great presentations, and of course free beer and pizza. Covered this month:

Development Techniques for Localizing Flash (19:00 – 20:00) – Dave Williamson

There is no avoiding it. More and more projects require some level of localisation. Clients want their micro site deployed across Europe, banners to support the whole of EMEA, and global intranet applications that take in the whole of the planet. Not only that they want them built to the same timelines as their HTML emails. Find out the easiest tricks to make those hellish localisation issues…… not so hellish.

Catch Up and Site Launch – NikeRunning.com

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:15:09 +0000

Time to catch up. I’ve been at AKQA for a little while now and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly so far and I really feel a strong commitment to the team. My first project went live the other day, www.nikerunning.com, even though it’s aimed at runners (of course!) I hope you enjoy it even if you are not. My favourite sections are the shoe selector and technology section. I’m no photographer, but after this I’ve started to appreciate good photos; you can hit the home button to get 3 different scenes for the home page, I wish I’d gone on shoot for the coastal one!

Zinc 2.5 Now Supports Flex 2 / AS3 / FP9

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 07:49:28 +0000

Well, I’ve been using Zinc for quite some time now so I know it pretty well and I’m very keen to give the new version a test run and see that any old bugs have been quashed forever, so here’s a thank you to MDM for the free copy. 🙂

Zinc 2.5 now supports Flash 9 (which includes AS3 and Flex 2 apps), I’m yet to look into how this is implemented, but with 2.5 we saw the commands becoming synchronous, which was a big relief from the asynchronous commands we had in all the swf wrappers a little while back. Also bundled for the first time is an SWC, this should also mean intrinsics for all of the classes (previously intrinsics were downloadable seperately and were a lone effort by one of the team in the forum), this should ultimately keep FDT/Flex Builder 2 happy.

ExternalInterface bug (Firefox)

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:52:01 +0000

Just a quick warning to people using ExternalInterface. When you are calling Javascript functions that open new windows your Flash movie will lose all mouse interaction (no rollovers etc) and the button you pressed to open the popup will stick on its “over” state. This is only in Firefox, (and possibly only when the popup contains a Flash movie, tbc).

Other than that ExternalInterface has been performing superbly, it greatly simplifies the communication between Flash and Javascript and works very well with unFocus HistoryKeeper (for back/forward button nav in browser).

Presenting at Flash on the Beach, Brighton

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 09:13:17 +0000

Hot on the heels of my last post (it’s been a busy month so my lack of posts is showing!) I’d like to announce I’ll be presenting at the first Flash on the Beach, I believe this is the first UK exclusive Flash event in 6 years, and it’s high time so thanks to John Davey for organising it. Flash on the Beach runs from Dec 4,5 & 6th and takes place of course in what seems to be the place to be right now, Brighton! I’ve actually never been to Brighton but it definitely has its fair share of great Flash devs so what better place. My topic is yet to be confirmed but you can be sure the words mobile and Flash are in there!

Presenting at FlashForward

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 02:11:42 +0000

I’m very pleased to announce I’ll be presenting at Flash Forward Austin in September. I’ve only been across the Atlantic once to visit Chicago, so I cannot wait to check out Austin especially with the City Limits festival straight after the conference. I will be presenting on my favourite topic, Flash Lite (2). Hopefully you’ve already clicked the link above to check out the lineup, all I can say is that I’m going to enjoy going to the other presentations as much as giving mine 🙂 and the conference runs from the 16th to the 18th.

PSP Flash Game of the Week

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:32:47 +0000

This is cool, Hayden Porter on the Flash Lite Yahoo Group just posted the following link to a blog that is reviewing Flash games for PSP on a weekly basis. PSP Homebrew has been seriously hampered by the last few updates, with no real mod-chip out there yet, it’s been the case that homebrew is for the hardcore (even I upgraded so I could play the latest games). Either way, Flash for PSP fills some of that void with free games to download:

First London Flash Platform User Group Meeting

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 07:31:00 +0000

Tink has just posted the details on the first meeting of the London Flash Platform User Group. This is a group in addition (and not a replacement for) to the LMMUG, focussing on Flash Platform technologies exclusively, including Flash, Flex, Apollo, Flash Lite and more!

Topics will include Flash Media Server, with FlashCommGuru Stefan Richter, and Ruby On Rails for the Flex Developer, with Stuart Eccles. Both of which are fantastic topics to start with and I’m sure of interest to you as a Flash Developer!

Backup Options

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 09:17:00 +0000

Do you regularly back up your computer files, code etc? I used to do the usual, which involved sporadically dumping what I thought was important to DVD once a month maybe. Thankfully I’ve only encountered a real problem where I lost work that I hadn’t backed up just once, SVN came to the rescue in this case, but I vowed never to lose work again because of poor backup procedures.

So a couple of months back I put together an external HD, from a 200gig internal 3.5″ drive and a USB 2.0 fan assisted cradle from eBay. This seemed to be to be not only a low cost approach but also hot-swappable when it comes to backing up the backups onto more than 1 drive. So with the hardware sorted I shopped around for a software backup solution to replace my not-so-great xcopy batch file.

Adobe Live Tonight

Wed, 24 May 2006 02:17:35 +0000

Just a quick shout out to those of you going to Adobe Live tonight at Olympia 2 in London. I’ll be there, somewhere about the London MMUG stand most likely so please do say hi. Our creative development director Andy Hood will be on the panel on “The future of the Internet as an Applications Platform” along with Aral, Ben Watson and Andrew Shorten (Adobe), Bola Rotibi (Ovum) and James Govenor (Redmonk). Hopefully the web-site is still accepting registrations for the event.

First Week at AKQA London

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:11:10 +0000

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank some people, and let anyone interested know what I’m up to (so I don’t have to keep explaining on the phone) :). So thanks to both Tink and Peter whome I’ve spent the last year working with, suffice to say they are great guys and it’s been good to work with people that are just bloomin’ good at what they do.

So I accepted a senior creative developer role at AKQA and I’ve just completed my first week (well 4 day week). I can say hand on heart I couldn’t have had a better time, straight into work and the people there are great too and have lots of fun. So here’s to the next year and whatever it may bring. My plan is not to go sub-radar with this blog, so there will still be plenty of Flash news and Flash Lite examples coming this way of course!

London MMUG April 20th

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 16:07:08 +0000

Don’t forget that there is yet another great MMUG lined up for this month, 20th April:

Session: Developing Flash 8 Components (Mike Jones)

Components are part and parcel of RIA development on the Flash Platform, not only do they give you consistency of look and feel but they also allow for the rapid creation of data driven applications. However, what do you do if you need to alter / extend a component, or further still want to actually create new ones? If the answer is ‘I don’t know’ come along and find out how…

Creating Stricter Singletons and Abstracts in AS3 [fixed]

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:54:28 +0000

So we know that ActionScript 3.0 at present doesn’t allow for private constructors in order to conform to ECMA standards, which in turn means that when we write our Singletons we aren’t really getting the real deal.

Tink and I experimented with a little idea last night that might help with this. Very simple code as follows:

package ...
{
class SomeSingleton
{
 private static var instance:SomeBusinessDelegate;
 private static var instantiatingSingleton:Boolean = false;

 public SomeSingleton()
 {
  if( !instantiatingSingleton )
  {
    throw new Error( "SomeSingletonis a Singleton and must be accessed through the getInstance() static method" );
  }
 }

 public static function getInstance() : SomeSingleton
 {
  if( !instance)
  {
   instantiatingSingleton = true;
   instance = new SomeSingleton();
   instantiatingSingleton = false;
  }

   return instance;
  }
 }
}

So this gives us one extra layer of security when it comes to someone accidentally instantiating an instance of our Singleton. On a different note, I’d like to see “throws” added to ECMA too so that the programmer is forced to catch these errors or at least expects them without digging through the code (if at all available).

London MMUG Flash Lite App Download

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 03:03:23 +0000

Last night’s London MMUG went very well, I’m sure any photo’s/video’s will make it online shortly. Congratulations to Niqui Merret who won the prize of Adobe Production Studio. For those of you that weren’t there, the winner was randomly selected and called from my mobile phone with a very simple little Flash Lite 1.1 app at the end of the night.

Even though this little app was never destined to be seen (god it’s ugly) I thought I’d upload it for anyone starting out in Flash Lite, and for those that would like to see how you can emulate arrays or call phone numbers. There’s not much in there at all, so it should be fairly self explanitory.

PSP Update to Include Official Flash Player

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 02:27:47 +0000

Just reading the latest Sony news following the press conference in Tokyo. It mentions a major firmware upgrade this spring including support for GPS, Camera and VoIP modules/addons, and… Flash in the web browser!

Read the article here.

Flash Lite Emulator Speed vs. Real-world Handset Speed

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 13:38:12 +0000

Eric D. threw up a very interesting point in his latest blog post. Asking whether there is a way to accurately emulate the performance of a lower powered, slower device such as a mobile phone.

I did a quick couple of tests using the latest Flash Lite emulator and a combination of an FPS speedometer, capabilities test, and a couple of apps designed to slow down your computer’s CPU for emulating old DOS games. Check out the results, posted in the comments on Eric’s blog.

Flash Lite 2.0 Inline TextField

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 11:58:17 +0000

Something I forgot to upload a while back.

This “component” allows the user to enter text with T9 (non-predictive) text input without having to use the cursor keys and select to give focus to the textfield, i.e. tapping the 2 key will cycle through “a”, “b”, “c”, “2” and wait a second for it to advance to the next character in the string. Simple concept that we now take for granted on phones, Macromedia created a Flash Lite 1.1 version which did the same thing although this one was a lot easier to make having to modify that for an FL1.1 app just recently (kudos for the major effort that must have been put in there)!

Flash Lite and Flex and Other Server Apps

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 09:20:50 +0000

First up, eagle eyed Scott has just caught a job vacancy on Monster for a “Senior Product Manager, Flex Mobile Development at Adobe”. Well there’s been some suspicion regarding this matter since Flash Lite 1.1 came out, I asked Mike Chambers this when he came over for the 8-Ball London MMUG special in Sep with a very understandable no comment, but now it looks like the final piece of the puzzle is fitting into place.

Motorola and Flash Lite – News from 3GSM

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 03:05:30 +0000

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to 3GSM, but I’ve just been informed that the chief integrator of Motorola has said that we will see Flash Lite on their phones such as the Rokr within 3 months! Motorola were the last of the major manufacturers to cave, but now we have the whole set 🙂

Series 60 news – As we know the new Series 6 v3 SDK contains the Flash Lite player as a standalone and web plug-in. It looks like the greatly anticipated N91 (4gig, wifi, I want one) will have it installed, as well as the lovely looking E-Series business phones, the E60 is my personal favourite.

Adobe Launch Party Thanks

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 07:50:23 +0000

Big thanks to Adobe for last night’s party in London, we had a good time and it was great to catch up with everyone. Here’s a bit of fun with one of the photos just before we got there, it’s called spot the Tink. Guy seems to be concentrating on some white dots that happened to be floating in front of him. Mike has some good ones too.

Flash Lite App – Adobe Product Certification Practice

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 03:58:17 +0000

I’ve just received an email from Fabio over at elastech.it letting me know that they have just uploaded a new Flash Lite application to the freeware section at flashmobile.it. QuizAndPass aims to test you on several Adobe products including -of course- Flash Lite. This is yet another nicely styled app that is polished throughout, following on from their previous app LitePoker, which also looks and runs great.

Head on over to flashmobile.it to download it now. (Please note that my download link email arrived in my spam folder when using a gmail address).

Creating Trials for Flash Lite Apps (Part II)

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:00:56 +0000

So following on from the first part of this discussion I was asked to look at creating a 10 day trial Flash Lite application. The theory is sound, you either contact a server and pass it the IMEI (best option), or work out a way of storing some information on how many uses have taken place locally on the phone, either using plain-text, a hash or some real encryption.

In Flash Lite 2.0, we can do this with Local Shared Objects, this is also great to keep the information from prying eyes as you have to know where to look for the SO’s in order to try and crack them, the down side is that a little bit of digging a while back showed they look fairly similar (if not the same) as desktop Flash Player SO’s and therefore there are already tools available to read them. Either way, they are a boon to Flash Lite development for many other reasons.

London MMUG – Tink and Aral on the Alphas

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 10:39:24 +0000

This month’s LMMUG will see Tink and Aral give an introduction to ActionScript 3, and an introduction to Flex 2. So if you’ve downloaded the alphas or not and want to get up to speed drop on by on the 19th.

See you there.

Flash Lite 2 Player for Free

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 10:31:46 +0000

Naz on the Flash Lite Yahoo Group just noted that there is a time limited offer on the Flash Lite 2 player right now. When you go to checkout, the cost gets deducted, totalling 0.

I just tested this out and can confirm. So get over to the store and see if you are lucky.

Note: You must visit through the above updated URL.

Flash Lite 2 Beats Expectations

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 02:28:49 +0000

I don’t normally like to post something that has already been covered, but there are a couple of new bits to get to grips with.

First of all, the default location the Flash Lite 2 Player looks for SWF files in has changed. To be good Symbian citizens, SWFs should now be placed in c:nokiaothers or e:others.

Secondly, you have to check out Jesse’s FlickrMobile app which uses the Flash Lite 2 component set we began work on -and something I think I’d like to fire up again. Flash Lite 2 just opens up some really amazing avenues for mobile dev. It simply gives you so much more, including some more familiar objects, LoadVars, XML, SharedObjects and even some things that we have previously taken for granted, like attachMovie() and the drawing API. Add to that brand new features that the desktop player finds hard to compete with, loading in gif, png, 3gp, mp4*.

Flash Lite Device Cap’s Table On Its Way?

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 22:15:46 +0000

Just a note to Flash Lite devs out there to head over to the Adobe Flash Lite forum to provide feedback to Laura who is working on an application to provide developers with device information for Flash Lite capable handsets.

A while ago a few of us set about creating a table of which devices were supported and how they performed, created through developers’ testing out a SWF on their handsets. Something more official from Adobe would be great and I’m looking forward to it.

Mobile Cameras Improve

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:16:28 +0000

Just got back from a quick break in Spain and I realised I don’t actually own a camera so I just went with my phone, a Nokia N70. Now I’ve had a “mega-pixel” camera phone before, the 7610, and I was pretty impressed at the time with the quality, and strange lomographic quality it burns into the photos. But the 2meg camera that the N70 has really suprised me. I thought I’d upload a couple of bland scenery photos to show how much camera phones have really improved, and this isn’t even the latest and greatest 7 megapixel phone you might see in Japan. The camera is great in macro- but the lense isn’t much good for anything else. These photos are straight off the phone but shrunk from 1600×1200 down to 1024×768, you can even produce some really nice effects by flipping the phone into both night, and negative mode.

Flash Lite 2 Player Officially Available (quick start tip at end)

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:16:11 +0000

First of all Bill Perry has just confirmed that the Flash Lite 2 player is now available from the Adobe Store. Not wanting to re-iterate what he has said you can read the full post on his blog.

Secondly, you may be thinking it’s a little strange to release a player without a way of developing content for it. Well there are a couple of things you can do; the first is to wait just a little while until the IDE update, docs and samples are released in January on Labs. But if you really can’t wait to get coding, remember that the Flash Lite 2 player is based on the Flash 7 player and can therefore read SWF7 bytecode, so those itching to get AS2 on their phones can get publishing some Flash 7 files and you can immediately start playing with your existing library of classes on your handsets. But that does of course mean that there is no gaurentee that all SWF7 bytecodes/functions/objects are supported, and it also means you won’t have access to any possible Flash Lite 2 specific objects and functionality until January, but it’s a nice way to get into mobile dev over the holidays.

Unable to install Flash Lite on newer Nokias? Instructions here.

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 14:12:35 +0000

Just had an email from a friend regarding the Nokia N70 and Flash Lite. Great phone, but there is something that had me googling for a few minutes. That is installing certain un-signed apps onto the phone. Newer series 60 phones do not allow this by default, that includes the Flash Lite 1.1 player. You receive the following message: “installation security error”.

To cut a long story short simply go to ‘Tools > Manager > Options > Settings’ and turn Software installation’ > “On”.

Spark 2005 Slides and Files

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:17:00 +0000

I’ve uploaded my presentation and accompanying files to:

http://richardleggett.co.uk/downloads/presentations/spark/spark2005presentation.zip

I’ve made sure all of the server calls now point to localhost, so for the SUSHI multi-user example you’ll have to do some configuring on your server, and enable HTTP Tunneling (see the included snippet from httpd.conf for how to do this).

What can I say, Spark was incredible. I won’t even try to list the great flashers I met and would like to shout out to, but you know who you are and it was very nice meeting you all.

Speaking at Spark – Watch Live

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 13:00:37 +0000

I’ll be speaking on creating content for Flash Lite (games, applications, multi-user) on Thursday in the Cinema, de Balie. If you are attending the event, please download the mobile guide for speaker bios, detailed schedule for the three days, and to create and attend dynamic meets.

FabChannel will also be live streaming a lot of the event, kicking off with Kevin Lynch’s keynote at 19:00 (GMT+1). Head on over to http://spark.fabchannel.com to view it.

ActionScript and SVN (Syntax error line 1)

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 15:20:20 +0000

Just a quick note for people experiencing this same problem in frustration. After updating files using Subversion you might encounter an error like this in the Flash IDE:

<em>**Error** C:some_foldertrunksrcascomdomainprojectSomeClass.as: Line 1: Syntax error.
     import com.domain.AnyClassHere;
Total ActionScript Errors: 1 	 Reported Errors: 1</em>

This isn’t the same problem as you can encounter when working with AS files over a network (where deleting ASO files and adjusting your clock will fix it), this is caused by Subversion changing the encoding of the file. To fix it I usually open the file in Notepad2, and choose File > Encoding > UTF8. (Note: Do not pick UTF8 with Signature.) You can of course pick ANSI, too.

Macromedia Aquires Mobile Innovation

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 11:46:53 +0000

Another aquisition for the books. I think this snippet sums it up:

Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Mobile Innovation, a leading user interface (UI) designer, developer, and integrator for mobile devices. With extensive relationships throughout the mobile industry and an impressive track record of innovation, Mobile Innovation has deep expertise in the world of mobile UI design and implementation

You can read the full press release here.

XBox 360 Viral Marketing (168)

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:08:01 +0000

Time for the hype to go up a gear, XBox 360 is out very soon and strange signs have started to appear…

Read and see.

(Let’s all remember our base 16 hey – 168 ;)) Spoiler – link

ITV offers Flash Lite client

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:59:47 +0000

Big thanks to David Mannl for pointing this out just now.

I’ve just signed up for the new ITV Mobizines service (see flash demo here). When you text “MOBILE” to 63330, you receive a link to download the client (if your phone is up to it, mine is an old 7610 and it worked no problems). The client will install the standalone Flash Lite player along with the main application and a skinned media player (just the 2 icons on the main menu, the media player is invoked by the client). When the client is installed via Symbian installer you should see the unmistakeable vector UI and bitmap fonts of Flash Lite 1.1 being used to offer a TV Guide, weather, news and entertainment with the option to download more “Mobizines”, or mobile magazines – similar to the channels concept pushed elsewhere. Prime candidate for a FlashCast server hey :).

[Flash 8] Text to/from Bitmap “Encryption”

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 11:56:41 +0000

From the “why bother?” department, I’ve created a little app that converts between ASCII text and BitmapData.

Here is a sample .bmp file that I took a screenshot of and imported into my FLA’s library.

Now it may look like a miniature Magic Eye, but it does actually have a message hidden in it. To read the message you need the salt which is used in the conversion of ASCII to hex colours, and of course this little Flash 8 app.

Flash Lite AI Character – Retch, a Chat-eBot

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:31:39 +0000

A few weeks ago I started speaking to one David Williams who was interested in taking his artifical intelligence “chat-eBots”, which are sold as virtual hosts for sites, and putting them on mobile phones in an altered form. We discussed a few technologies and a few ideas but unfortunately I had to dip out of the project due to commitments. Anyway, David has gone ahead and produced the entire thing in Flash Lite, and you can demo the first of these eBots, “Retch”, on the companion site, as well as purchase a copy for your handset.

AS2 Documentation Generation and UML for Free – Eclipse Friendly

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:30:27 +0000

My buddy Johan has posted a tutorial on setting up Doxygen with Eclipse. I’m posting it here as it was pretty late when he posted, for US and most of Europe. It’s very easy to set up, and the docs it produces are fully featured.

You even get things like “this method is re-implemented in SubclassA, ..B etc”, with links of course. You can use a few documentation styles, personally I favour JavaDoc, so it’s picking up everything correctly, including {@code MyClass} etc. My favourite feature is the little inheritance diagrams at the top of the doc pages. See a screenshot below for an example of this. Overall, A++.

Seriously well made Flash Lite app – “theTube”

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 16:11:22 +0000

This is one of the best made Flash Lite apps I’ve seen to date, and also one I’m going to use very often.

“The Tube” allows you to navigate (with easing tweens) the London Underground map, search for a station in a rolodex fashion (this is one of my favourite features), and view individual lines. The application is very well polished, the animation is clean and one final nice addition was a little history of the Underground.

Charles (proxy/throttle tool), now reads AMF data

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 22:16:11 +0000

It seems Charles now has some excellent Flash features. Just got this from Darren over at flashgroup.net.

The exciting new features in this release are:

Firefox proxy settings auto configuration!
Improved display of POST and GET form data.
Improved display of SWF movies (shows some basic stats.)
Improved display of AMF (Flash Remoting), now parses and shows the
structure of the AMF message.
Many other improvements listed on the website.

Of course the main reason for using it is to simulate modem speeds when viewing your sites on localhost. Utterly essential unless you are happy to configure a mod for Apache or similar.

Mobile Features in Flash 8 – Presentation on the 15th

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:43:21 +0000

Just a quick note to say I’ll be presenting some of the brand new mobile features packed into the Flash 8 IDE at the London MMUG on the 15th of September.

I plan on showing several things including the emulator, the excellent docs, and also some things you may not associate with Flash Lite programming now enabled by the new IDE. If you have any requests, please post below.

Of course there’s a whole evening planned with talks from Mike Downey, Ian Turner, Aral Balkan and Guy Watson, so there’s definitely something for everyone. I hope to see you there!

SUSHI MultiUser Server for Flash, Flash Lite, J2SE & J2ME

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:02:05 +0000

There aren’t a lack of mutli-user servers out there that work with Flash, but this one has some great features:

Supports Flash MX AS1.0 & 2.0, FlashLite, J2SE, J2ME.
Extend the SUSHI server with Java or Actionscript.
SUSHI supports socket and HTTP connections (HTTP tunneling.)
SUSHI provides a web based, graphical administration.
Free 30 user license edition.
Hosting.

What really caught my eye of course is that they have included a Flash Lite API, it uses a polling solution to keep the connection open, but it appears very flexible and neat.

MXNA Flash Lite App

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 02:02:38 +0000

Ok, so this is my first attempt at using the new MXNA Flash Lite services. I must say, apart from the initial problem with the feed, now fixed thanks for Christian and Mike, it all went very smoothly.

You can run the app in the regular Flash player here (remember the key mappings, PageUp and PageDown are your phones softkeys).

You can download it for your phone here (including source code!)

Finally, here’s a quick screenshot:

Flash Lite in a Nutshell

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 07:47:13 +0000

Just a quick post to say this Thursday I’ll be doing a presentation on Flash Lite at the London MMUG and would love to see anyone interested down there. Also presenting is Rob Bateman of the BBC on best practices for developing components and the upcoming SMX component set, so there should be something for everybody from designers to hardcore coders, just click link at the bottom of the site to attend for free.

BlueSkyNorth SWF2SIS (Flash Lite)

Tue, 31 May 2005 13:16:31 +0000

Hot off the press, BlueskyNorth have just announced SWF2SIS is now officially released.

“In short, SWF2SIS provides a way to package your application .swf file with any extra files (sfws, txt files etc.) and attach an icon which will appear on the handset’s menu, then save it all in a single installer file.”

Very good news for Flash Lite developers, and at $40(Ã‚£20), a great deal for those without the time or knowledge to mess around creating multiple config files that compile into another intermediary file and so on, when using the Symbian SDK. This is a new alternative to the packaging service offered by Silk Mobile, but this appears to be a standalone app / wizard.

“The Wild” – Prototype Flash Mobile Pet

Mon, 09 May 2005 17:54:43 +0000

I spent the last week working on something I wanted to try in Flash Lite. The result is a prototype for a virtual pet that will run on any Flash Lite enabled mobile phone.

I’ve created a very quick (and pretty rubbish) mini-site where you can download the app, play an online emulated version and find out how to care for your creature. I still need to tweak the logic so that it is actually fun and addictive to play, but still, this is just a test app.

Flash Lite Device Capabilities Database

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:24:39 +0000

It’s pretty essential that we understand which devices/handsets support which Flash Lite features. So following this discussion, I created a Flash app to collect and display the data. Onur Tekin and myself also set about adapting capabilities.swf (comes with the FL CDK) to automatically send the data from your handset and have it recorded. (Thanks for kick starting that Onur I would have been too lazy without the push.)

Flash Lite TV Guide: 8 Hours and 9k

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 15:27:18 +0000

I set myself a little challenge yesterday, I wanted to see just how quick it was to develop in Flash Lite, that being a major selling point. My chosen project was a (greatly simplified) version of Jermain Andersons TV Guide application. I’m not sure exactly how he put his together, but I can talk about how I went about it. I’ve also provided all source code and a demo at the end.

Flash Mobile Community

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 15:26:58 +0000

I guess this is as good a time as any to announce the Flash Mobile Community site. The original aim was to allow developers to share SWF’s for testing on a variety of devices, but it now aggregates relevant news feeds, members can publish their own blogs and discuss anything Flashy. All made possible with Drupal (which I am seriously impressed with).

Flash Mobile Community can be found at: www.flashmobileforum.org

NaturalGUI for AS (Java ed.)

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 20:46:35 +0000

For those using Natural Docs, after the barrage of related posts on MXNA, FullAsAGoog and today’s great news. I’ve just finished a quick GUI in Java for those on Mac/Linux (using MTASC! ;)) and Windows of course. I haven’t got a Mac machine so if anyone cares to try it, please let me know how it goes!

More info and download/source here.

AMFPHP still kicking!

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 12:56:24 +0000

Thankyou… thankyou… Patrick for your efforts and Alessandro for pointing this out!

http://www.sephiroth.it/blog/2004_12_10_weekly.html#110267803977774175

p.s. Looking at the CVS, Mr Mineault has also added Service Browser functionality (from the IDE?).

Flash Level 9876

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 00:44:16 +0000

Oh dear 🙁 This one really can mess up a game or application if you are publishing for Flash 6 player (or 7 in depending on coding restrictions), or at least have you stumped for a few minutes…..

Your mx.transitions.Tween’s can simply stop responding, or even better, your sprites dissappear (depending on the order the following occurs).
Here’s an illustrated problem:

This can occur in a purely AS2 (class based app), but I’m going to simplify it for now and put in some timeline based code. If you are using the Tween class to perform some animation, for example, I have a “ball_mc” on stage. I use the following on the timeline:

Using Yamago Upload Component in Flash Player 7

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 01:32:45 +0000

For anyone wishing to use the Yamago File upload component in a Flash 7 movie, it requires a little bit of tweaking. I wrote about how to do this in this FlashCoders thread:

http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?1:sss:123252

Update:

Ok so Chattyfig password protected the archives, which is completely understandable, so I’m pasting my replies here:

…case sensitivity in MX2004 strikes again
🙂

Just change the Object.registerClass from:

Object.registerClass(“idYamzbrowser”, Yamzbrowser);
to
Object.registerClass(“idYamzBrowser”, Yamzbrowser);

and…

Ok I dug into it a little, and found a few things to get it started…

Component/sub-movieclips initialization in AS2

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 01:26:44 +0000

Here’s a thing. You attach some MovieClip to the stage and try to style or set a components properties that resides within it, only to find your efforts are ignored. Imagine you have a library symbol containing a button, and with the following AS2 class bound to it:

import mx.controls.*;

class App extends MovieClip
{
  var a_button:Button;

  public function App()
  {
    a_button.enabled = false;  // ignored
  }
}

The reason the setting of .enabled is ignored, according to EAS2 is that Flash works from the outside in, so a child movie can see it’s parent upon creation, but not the other way around. Now this doesn’t apply to intrinsic properties, such as _rotation or _alpha, just properties and methods you have attached to a MovieClip sub-class/component through a class.