Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 11/07/2011
Posted on Nov 07, 2011
A lot of great tutorials and projects in this week's update including: a discussion of orientation versus deviceOrientation from Adobe's Tom Kraikit, performance testing blitting versus frame assignment on AIR for iOS by Michel Wacker, a new isometric engine for Flash Player 11 and Starling from Jonathan Dunlap, and an extensive tutorial on encoding live video to H.264/AVC using Flash Player 11 from RealEyes Media - among many other outstanding entries.
Cool Mobile & Devices Stuff (Android, iOS, Blackberry, Television)
Age of Defenders, a tower defense game built with Flash, recently made the transition from a purely browser-based game to iOS, Android and Blackberry tablets thanks to AIR. Adobe evangelist Tom Krcha posts an interview with Tomas Botek who was the head of the development team behind Age of Defenders.
Another interesting looking application built with AIR comes from Zeh Fernando who recently released his Kana Mind app on Android which is designed to help you learn to read Japanese. Zeh plans some follow up posts on his experiences using AIR soon.
Adobe evangelist Holly Schinsky discusses the new Flex 4.6 ToggleSwitch component and shares an example application with source on how to use it and to add a custom skin to it.
Adobe's Tom Kraikit discusses the differences between orientation and deviceOrientation in Flex Mobile apps including example source on how to handle the various events within your app.
Dan Florio was trying to wrap his head around the data sent by the Orientation AIR Native Extension (ANE) by Patrick Kulling and the accelerometer, so he wrote an Orientation and Accelerometer Mobile App Explorer that outputs the data to the screen. You can download and install the app via the apk file and he shares most of the relevant code in the blog post. Dan also expands a bit on a topic I covered before about adding QR-code reading into your Flash/ActionScript app using the ZXing library, including a nice update on how to parse vcard data from the QR code results.
Adobe evangelist Andrew Trice compares and contrasts using AMF versus JSON for AIR mobile applications and shares some test suites he created to compare performance between the two serialization types for various data sets.
John Gorena shares some quick code samples on how to modify add a background color or image to your Flex mobile application.
iOS
Michel Wacker created a number of Flash/AIR on iOS performance tests using AIR 3, Flex 4.5.1 and testing on a first generation iPad. He specifically looks at the techniques of frame blitting versus frame assignment to get the best performance out of Flash games on AIR for iOS and comes to the conclusion that frame assignment works best.
Dan Florio shows how to use the Networkinfo ANE on iOS and Android and then asks for feedback on how to decode the results returned on iOS.
Blackberry
Joe Johnston posts the slides and presentation recording for his Blackberry Devcon presentation on lessons learned building a Fantasy Football App for the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet.
Cool Flex, Flash Builder & Catalyst Stuff
Tink posts the source of two Flex 4 primitives you can use in your applications. The first is an EllipticalPolygon primitive which draws a polygon around an ellipse of the size you specify. The second is an Annulus primitive that allows you to specify the dimensions of the ellipse and the contained hole as well as the offset for the hole.
Adobe's Matt Horn shares a zip of the Flex 3.x examples source code from the Adobe docs for anyone still maintaining Flex 3 applications (which, I know, is very common, especially in enterprises).
Cool ActionScript/Flash Stuff
Adobe evangelist Serge Jespers posts a teaser to a new Flash game called Muscle Jump that apparently manages to get 2 million polygons rendered within Flash Player 11 using Stage3D. Looks impressive!
Jonathan Dunlap released an early demo of a new, open source Flash 11 isometric engine called IsoHill built on top of the Starling framework. A beta release is planned for December.
Flash Player 11 introduced the ability to encode live video to H.264/AVC, and this extensive tutorial from RealEyes Media walks you through configuration, to project setup, to coding the application - including full source.
Ville Koskela discusses how to handle rendering "device loss" with Starling and Flash Player 11 when GPU becomes unavailable and all the buffers, textures and shader programs are disposed.
Lars Gerckens announces some new features in his ND2D framework including rotationX, rotationY, rotationZ properties on all nodes and new properties to change the appearance of textures.
Philipp Seifried continues his series on real-time audio processing in Flash by discussing comb filters, flangers and chorus effects which covers mostly the audio theory understanding necessary, independent on the ActionScript code.
Emanuele Feronato adds another entry into his tutorial series on developing a Flash game similar to Angry Birds using Box2D by showing how to create the predictive trajectory line for the object you are tossing.
Jackson Dunstan hosts a guest post by Tronster Hartley discussing various 2D array alternatives and the performance implications of each. While Jackson himself discusses the performance of AGAL instructions in Stage3D.
Cool AIR for Desktop Stuff
Nick Kwiatkowski posts part 3 of his ongoing tutorial covering creating a Windows AIR Native Extension with Eclipse, with this edition covering how to write the ActionScript portion of the ANE.
Cool ColdFusion Stuff
Adobe evangelist Raymond Camden shows how easy it is to use the new Face.com API to add facial recognition to your ColdFusion application.
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