Flash

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! ...

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. ...

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!

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… ...

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). ...

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. ...

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.

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)! ...

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. ...

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. ...