Flash

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. ...

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++. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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! ...

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. ...

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: ...

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(£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. ...

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. ...

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.) ...