Flex

Actionscript / Flash / Flash Games / Flex — No Comments
19
Oct 09

Adobe Max-at-Home continues

So today is the theoretical “Day Two” of my watching max videos at home. To give myself the true conference-like experience, I bought a new actionscript book from the max-at-home bookstore. I’m hoping adobe will give me a copy of Coldfusion 9 to give away to myself. I should go outside or something…nah, on with the un-conference!

Building Great Games With Flash

This was an interesting session in that the demands for innovative are presented as being very high and the power of Flash being able to deliver is also very high. I know that sounds like a schmaltzy pro-adobe marketing milkshake but it just seems like Adobe is really the place to make fun stuff happen when it comes to casual gaming. Two really great notes to take away from this session is the need to rapidly prototype idea’s before going crazy with the implementation AND that the best games are made great by the amazing amount of polish they receive. Couldn’t agree more on that last point…

Oh quick note – fast forward to the 15 minute mark or you’ll be listening to 8-bit music mixed with background noise…

Flash Platform Gaming Showcase

This session had a fair amount of interesting stuff in it – namely – that gaming is now being seen as one of the top 3 use cases for Flash. Apparently before it was video and something to do with cupcakes but now…NOW…it’s gaming! It was cool to hear that adobe actually has an arcade team and are looking to post some game-related content to the ADC in the next few weeks. Other cool tidbits – Pixel Bender apparently has some cool stuff on the horizon that doesn’t involve just manipulating images and Three Melons has a game development tool? Very interesting…

Building Browser-Based MMO’s

This was an engaging session on the business-side of building MMO’s and was really interesting to get an insight to what kind of topics need to be considered when taking on something like an MMO…Here are the standout notes on this one:

  • “…Casual gamers play just as long as hardcore games but they need to think they can stop at any moment…”
  • Figure out what you can automate early and do it.
  • You’re app is just going to break, you can’t plan for it. Build,Test,Fix.
  • The whole concept of cliffs and the funnel.

So now I’m a little brain-fried but definitely got some useful information from tonight’s session. I’m done with the Max-at-Home gaming track so I’ll probably finish up tomorrow with some of the dev sessions. It’s still a little hard to watch videos for any length of time on the internet – maybe it’s just me but it’s just too darn easy to hop over to another site the second there is a lull in the session. It’s worth it though – but it does bring home the true value in paying for the conference and seeing these folks live.

Ok, after a proofreading of this post it looks like I’m an adobe squawk box in some area’s…I’ll buy that but I really just don’t see any other technology really able to deliver like flash is right now (yes, I’m looking at you silverlight, don’t turn away from me!)

Actionscript / Flash / Flex / awesomeness — No Comments
18
Oct 09

Things Every Flash Developer Should Know

So last year after Adobe Max (it’s a big Adobe conference where they get everybody together and give them candy in the flavor of awesome new tools) they put all of the sessions online which I thought was really spectacular but despite having hours of content available, I failed to watch a single one. I found that, well, it’s kinda hard to sit there for an hour and listen to a session. But this year, I certainly didn’t plan to repeat that mistake. So, short of stapling my hands to the table so I wouldn’t get distracted and head over to digg or reddit or some other site peddling delicious but useless time-wasting information I queued up the first video in my library and proceeded to fill my head with actionscript erudition. Over the next few days I’ll be watching sessions so I’ll try to give a brief synopsis of each…

First up – “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know” by Grant Skinner. This was a great session – I was totally interested from start to finish and there were definitely more than a few gems to grab onto here. From new ways to think about OOP and the pragmatic declaration to “love the timeline” -(when was the last time you heard that advice?)- I found a lot to takeaway. One thing I didn’t think about was using custom tweens on simpler things and eschewing using a tweening engine (despite that fact that his company wrote one) for every single animation (like I’ve been doing ever since I found out you could abstract that chore to a separate library.) Grant has all of his talks located on one page and they’re kinda interesting to look at, highly recommended.

All in all, a very illuminating way to spend an hour – here is the video followed by my favorite slides:

Actionscript / Flash / Flex / design — No Comments
15
Oct 09

Did Flex really make (my) life better?

I remember when I first got my hands on Flex (not the dev version of 1.5 that would never be anything that I could deploy to production because of the insane COST) – it was game changing. I could finally stop worrying about all of the annoying things (like laying out controls and giving data to components…and even dealing with components themselves) and could really focus on making truly awesome and polished apps (with all this new time I found!) I remember the absolute joy of coding actionscript in eclipse and what it was like to finally have things like code completion and decent formatting. I thought, “Man, the things I’m going to do with this new found tech…I can finally change the world! Finally!”

But something changed. I don’t know if it was me, I’m not sure if was the tooling or if anyone else even feels this way but…I lost something when I started using flex. I lost something and I want it back.

I was looking through my collection of old fla’s on my hard drive…some of them are quite crude but they have something that it seems that none of my flex apps have. They’re fun. They look nicer, they’re simpler…it’s almost like I’m looking back at a time of creativity and glee. Seriously, “G-L-E-E.” I used to try and design things. I had to, I couldn’t just throw a whole bunch of controls and MovieClips on the stage and leave it as it was. I think the change is that Flex encourages you to look at your code. In the flash IDE, you tried to make the code look “nice” but really, who cared? I wasn’t building enterprise grade apps back in the day…I was building widgets, I was making cool things, I was having fun. I used to think about motion, I used to think about really doing something cool, coming up with things that people hadn’t seen before. Now I think about libraries, and class structure and frameworks. I care about memory optimization and say things like “I wish I could overload methods in actionscript, mang” when I used to say things like “I love Flash, it makes me feel like I can do anything.” I was one of those people that defended the presence of the drawing toolbar in the IDE and I got really good at using my tablet to make all kinds of crazy art with the tool.

But Flex changed that. Yes I could still use Flash and make swc’s and go to “Commands” and “Convert to Flex Component” but in reality…I dunno…it seems to make the magic feel far away. I’m realizing that the last time I made something that I actually wanted to show to people was when I created Dropping Joes which brought me back to the creative suite and closer to “designing an experience” rather than “crafting some code.”

I don’t know where I’m at with it all yet…I do know that I’m probably going to start spending more time in CS4 and less time in Flex (Flash) Builder. I’m trying to find something witty to say to end this post of whinging about Flex but I got nothin. I’m just looking forward to having fun again.

Actionscript / Adobe AIR / Flex — 1 Comment
9
Apr 09

FogBugz API Explorer thing…

I moved everything about the fogbugz api explorer over to this page…sorry for the run around. :(

Actionscript / Adobe AIR / Flash / Flex / awesomeness — No Comments
9
Mar 09

Max 2008 Sessions are on Adobe TV

max_on_adobe_tv

I may be the last or next to last person to know about this but all (maybe all? What do I know, I wasn’t there) of the MAX 2008 sessions are available at Adobe TV. Gotta say, this is very cool and I’m very excited to sit down and try to watch some of these.

Adobe TV MAX channel

Actionscript / Adobe AIR / Flash / Flex — No Comments
27
Feb 09

Actionscript Timer is more of a guideline really…

I use a fair amount of Timers in my Flash/Flex code – they are just so darn handy. So imagine my surprise when I read this post that states and shows that Timer tick at an interval based on the swfs framerate which is variable depending on the persons machine. Arg! That explains so much and helps me with a nasty bug I was dealing with months ago. Needless to say, I fired up wordpress and got ready to lay the smack down on Adobe for the .000453% of folks that actually read the stuff I throw up here. I mean come on – how dare I be inconvienced in such an inconcievable way – I don’t have time for all of this – let me look at the livedocs, I’m sure there is no mention of this…this…injustice…this calamity…this outright assault on my productivity…this…this…

You can create Timer objects to run once or repeat at specified intervals to execute code on a schedule. Depending on the SWF file’s framerate or Flash Player’s environment (available memory and other factors), Flash Player or Adobe AIR may dispatch events at slightly offset intervals. For example, if a SWF file is set to play at 10 frames per second (fps), which is 100 millisecond intervals, but your timer is set to fire an event at 80 milliseconds, the event will be dispatched close to the 100 millisecond interval. Memory-intensive scripts may also offset the events.

oh snapz!

Adobe AIR / Flex — No Comments
21
Jan 09

Coding jigs…

I think like most developers I have a problem…that is, whenever a problem of most any situation arises I mentally develop a software solution for it. That’s not to say that they are all brilliant designs, in fact, they are largely better left to die in the empty void that occupies the space between my ears. But recently, I’ve needed a way to keep track of the various passwords that I use on a day to day to basis and that is something that could might probably possibly be a candidate for using some software to create a better way. Certainly a better way than using the same password for everything.

Enter the jig (this jig, not the irish folk dance). What a great way to solve a small problem I have (and yes I know it has been solved before) without having to worry about the usual pressure of deployment and client requirements and all that other stuff that makes me carry a solution from 0 to 50% where it stagnates and eventually becomes that “great project that I wish I had more time for.” Anyway, I’ll keep you posted but I whipped out this little app in Flex and AIR in a couple hours to start me down this path of actually solving this little password issue that I’ve been having. It’s ugly, but most jigs are right?

picture-16

I was going to call it swAIRwords but that seems kinda lame…although the possibilities for icons is almost limitless…