Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 09/08/2010
Posted on Sep 07, 2010
You
can tell MAX is around the corner since a significant portion of the
posts this week come from Adobe Platform Evangelists. This week included
tons of activity in the mobile space but also a quite a few great Flash
and ActionScript 3 posts. As always, if you have something you’d like
me to share in upcoming weeks, feel free to email me, post in he
comments or dm/reply to me on Twitter.
Cool Mobile Stuff
One
of my personal favorite posts this week came from Mark Doherty, an
Adobe Platform Evangelist. It is a follow-up post to a prior post that
demonstrates an AIR for Android application that allows peer to peer video calling integrated with geolocation and
an impressive use of maps. In his video he establishes a call between
his laptop and his mobile phone. He does share the code for his
application.
Adobe’s
Christophe Coenraets continues to deliver some exciting AIR for Android
sample applications, particularly focusing on the collaboration
possibilties opened up by the LiveCycle Collaboration Service. He offered two examples, one featuring a multi-player game (Tic-Tac-Toe in this example) featuring live video and another sharing GPS location data using Google Maps also featuring live video and audio
Daniel Koestler, also from Adobe posts a video showing an application he has built using Flex 4.5
(condenamed “Hero”) which accesses the camera API’s and accelerometer.
While he only shows the code via the video for the moment, he plans on
sharing code on his blog in the near future.
Finally, Jonathan Campos shares a good beginner’s tutorial for using AIR for Android and the geolocation API for accessing the user’s current geographic positon and heading.
Cool Flex Stuff
The big news this week was that an early build of Hero (i.e. Flex 4.5) was made available on Adobe Open Source. Deepa posted some details about what’s included in this release and what is driving the release of interim builds going forward.
Another important release this week was FlexUnit 4.1 RC1 which is available for download.
Jonothan Campos has another post, this time on FeedGrids,
that is a great post to send to anyone considering adopting Flex (or a
boss to whom you hope to sell on using Flex). My favorite part of this
post is a solid list of example sites that use Flex.
Devon Wolfgang talks about the Flex 4 undoManager component
(that personally I didn’t even know existed) and how to utilize this to
manage undo’s and redo’s of user actions. He includes code for a sample
drawing application that illustrates this in action.
Another
Adobe Platform Evangelist, Serge Jespers, shows how the US Open is not
only using Flash for video streaming but also for visualizations of match data, built by IBM using Flex.
Cool AIR Stuff
Tom Krcha, also a Platform Evangelist with Adobe, posts a video from his colleague Michael Chaize on how to use UDP in Adobe AIR 2.0.
This enables him to open up communication between AIR and his Java
Server. UDP is useful for video chat, audio chat, multiplayer games or
collaboration applications, for example.
Cool Flash & ActionScript Stuff
The tilt-shift effect is very popular among photographers lately, and Maikel Sibbald has recreated the tilt-shift effect using straight ActionScript.
While he only provides an live demo where you can adjust the settings,
it sounds like he plans on releasing code sometime soon.
While
the Nintendo Wii is very limited in its Flash support, Leonardo França
still thinks there are some unique possibilities for Flash developers on
the platform. He offers a simple sample application built with Flash for the Wii in his post.
Kevin Hoyt, also an Adobe Platform Evangelist, shows how to use the (user initiated) local file access features added in Flash Player 9
to do some very interesting things using JavaScript. For example, he
reads in a text file without uploading it and even saves an image
generated on an HTML canvas - all client-side.
The final post by an Adobe Platform Evangelist in a week dominated by them, Piotr Walczyszyn released a new open source project he call as3term which acts as a terminal for compiling and executing ActionScript 3 code. He even shares a that shows how it works.
Richard
Lord has an open source project called Flint which is a library for
mimicing particles which he updated (funny enough Google’s home page
this week featured a particle system as well using JavaScript). The new version enables collisions between particles and zones.
Last but not least, Ben Farrell gives us a walk-through of many of the issues he had to overcome to create the Codebass streaming radio player including integrating with ShoutCast. He offers up the code for this player for anyone interested in downloading.
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