Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 1/17/2012
Posted on Jan 17, 2012
Some really interesting posts this week including a lot of Stage3D including a free Starling book, new Stage3D powered site for the Grammys, new Stage3D games and more. Also, several posts covering mobile performance and a new in-app purchase native extension for iOS.
Cool Stage3D Stuff
Adobe's Thibault Imbert announces the release of a new and totally free Starling book from O'Reilly and available as a PDF. If you are interested in building 2D games using Stage3D for GPU acceleration, you should check it out.
Adobe's Jens Loeffler posts that the new and impressive looking 54th Grammy's site is powered by Flash and Stage3D. All the effects are generated in real-time and are interactive.
Flash Daily posts a link to a new game being developed using Flash, Stage3D and Minka. The Black Sun game released a playable technical preview that shows off some of the excellent graphic capabilities of Flash Player 11 and Stage3D.
Adobe evangelist Lee Brimelow shares a new video tutorial on how to use the Flare3D library to create an animated 3D character scene using Stage3D.
Speaking of Flare3D Michael Ivanov wrote a Flare3D FLSL online editor that allows you to write shaders,compile them in real time and save locally or to the database.
Jozef Chutka created a new Github project called YCanvas for Stage3D that enabled overlapping grid-based zooming for projects like world maps.
Nicolas Barradeau shares some samples with source and videos on geometry, dynamic mesh generation and manipulation using Away3D and Stage3D for Flash Player 11.
Cool ActionScript/Flash Stuff
Klas shares some experiments generating massive amounts of pixel particles to create 3D images that, according to the post, support Flash Player 10 (i.e. not Stage3D).
Barbara Kaskosz shows how you can draw DisplayObjects as Bitmaps, for example when trying to optimize for mobile, and shares the source of an example project.
Jackson Dunston follows up on his serialize anything post by covering the same topic but this time comparing JSON serialization.
Emanuele Feronato continues his series on creating real explosions with Box2D by adding textures to the objects that are exploded.
Cool Mobile & Devices Stuff (Android, iOS, Blackberry, Television)
Shawn at esDot follows up an earlier post about fast rendering in AIR by showing how to use cached SpriteSheets to get huge performance boosts out of your MovieClip animations. Shawn also shows how to use Stage.quality = LOW to boost your performance without compromising image quality at all.
Adobe's Jens Loeffler created the "Ultimate Guide to Understanding Advanced Video Delivery with AIR for Mobile." Jens also shares the source code for achieving 720p video on iOS and Android tablets with Adobe AIR.
Bill Sanders says his mobile AIR applications were faster and more responsive by using the TouchEvent rather than ClickEvent despite noting a suggestion for quite the opposite from the Adobe documentation. Bill also discusses having a single class for handling all events.
Daniel Freeman shows how to extend the MadComponents library of mobile components.
Android
Adobe evangelist Piotr Walczyszyn shares a video showing how to use his as3c2dm native extension for the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework.
iOS
Alex Liebert announces the availability of his iOS In-App Purchase native extension for Adobe AIR.
Cool Flex, Flash Builder & Catalyst Stuff
Adobe's Alan Greenblatt discusses all the available Flex mapping options.
Deepa Subramaniam announces the cities and dates of the Flex User Group 2012 Tour for North America.
If you cannot keep up with the volume on the Apache Flex mailing list, I highly recommend following Michael Schmalle's mailing list summaries in which he boils down all the day's discussion into an easy to read blog post summary.
Comments
Posted By Danny Coltri / Posted on 01/18/2012 at 2:29 PM