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....

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....

At my last job I met a software architect who, for a Flash project, jumped in and learned ActionScript in what must have been a few hours so he could work on the domain logic for a complex application. Just for background, I believe he primarily worked with .NET but you know how programming works… hours spent * natural ability = language independent skill. 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#....

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....

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....

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)....

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!...

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()....

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....

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)....