Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 3/25/11
Posted on Mar 25, 2011
This week included lots of posts and tutorials surrounding the AIR 2.6 release as well as the Flash Player 10.2 release for mobile devices. There were a couple of posts that garnered a good deal of attention across the web including Charles Schulze's "Comb Over Charlie" game built as a cross platform game for Android and iOS with AIR 2.6 as well as Christophe Coenraets sneak peak of Flex running on iOS.
Cool Mobile & Devices Stuff (AIR for Android, AIR on TV, Flash on Android, iPhone etc)
Adobe's Antonio Flores announces that Flash Player 10.2 is available for mobile devices. Along with the performance improvements, this was significant because it now supported Android 3.0 devices like the Motorola Xoom and was discussed on major technology news sites like Mashable.
In addition, the Adobe AIR 2.6 SDK was released with its most significant announcement being feature parity between Android and iOS. To highlight this, the AIR team featured a video of a game by Charles Schulze called "Comb Over Charlie" that was built for multiple platforms, including iOS, using the same codebase on AIR. Charles writes about his experiences developing the game including some tips and tricks for developing cross-platform mobile games using Flash.
Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart shares his slides and code from Adobe Refresh presentation including Flex "Hero" and LCCS sample applications with source code.
Marc Carmen details some of the look and feel changes you may notice when transitioning From AIR 2.5 to 2.6.
Adobe evangelist Mike Jones writes the first of two articles covering building virtual game controllers with Flash and ActionScript for touch-based devices including source code.
Android
Adobe's Christian Cantrell shares the steps required to make your AIR 2.6 Applications available for the Amazon Appstore.
Rich Tretola released a URL monitoring tool for Android to the Android Marketplace called URLTestr that is built with both Flex and AIR.
Michael Dobekidis shows how to add the OSMF Strobe Media Player into a Flex mobile project.
Blackberry
Adobe evangelist Mihai Corlan demonstrates how to use animations and transitions with QNX components on the Blackberry Playbook to improve the user experience. The tutorial includes a brief video and source code.
iOS
Adobe evangelist Christophe Coenraets gave us a sneak peak at Flex on the iPad and iPod Touch with a video of a sample application called Mobile Trader that includes real-time market data and video conferencing. Christophe admits this is currently an engineering build, so not available to the public but highlights the impressive performance of Flex on iOS as well as the ability to run the identical application on Android tablets.
Adobe evangelist Renaun Erickson shows how to develop for both retina and non-retina iOS screens using AIR 2.6, including a couple of approaches for handlig scaling of our application.
Adobe evangelist Piotr Walczyszyn posts the command line and ANT scripts necessary for packaging AIR applications for iOS devices with ADT, assuming you already have a certificate and provisioning profile from Apple.
Cool Flex, Flash Builder & Catalyst Stuff
Brian Riley posts a simple fix (expanding a bit upon Adobe's documentation with a real world example to ensure your CSS styles inherit when using a ModuleManager in Flex 4.x.
The Flashcats site had a couple of Flash Catalyst custom skinnable components they shared this week (with source code via FXP and FXPL) including drag and drop Lists and a drag and drop Canvas.
Speaking of Flash Catalyst, Chris Griffith posted the recording from his "Ask a CS Pro" session covering what's new In Flash Catalyst "Panini."
Cool ActionScript/Flash Stuff
Adobe evangelist Mike Jones continues a series of articles on game development in Flash using the Pushbutton engine with this edition focused on working with sprites including creating sprite sheets and using them to build animations in your games.
Emanuele Feronato starts a new series of recreating popular games in Flash with this series looking at creating a Flash prototype of "The Moops – Combos of Joy." He shares a lot of code samples and explanation to create the simple prototype of this physics game and provides source code. He also continues his series on building a game like Plants vs. Zombies with step 5 focusing on some bug fixes and getting "zombies" to attack the "plants."
A couple of good Molehill demos were posted this week including an example of Molehill with Away3D by Shane Johnson that includes code samples and source code. Also this YouTube video shows a car being rendered using a new 3D framework called Minko which is also for Molehill.
Barbara Kaskosz, Doug Ensley and Dan Gries of Flash and Math post three new text transition effects in ActionScript3 with Flash CS5 including source code.
Jake at Hook completes his ongoing series on using Alchemy with Flash with a "catch all" post to cover some topics not yet addressed in the series. He also provides source code.
Flanture continues a series of posts on orbiting objects in Flash with two more, the first focused on adding trails to your orbiting objects. The second takes it a step further by having these orbiting objects use the using drawing API to create shapes and patterns.
Cool AIR for Desktop Stuff
Adobe's Christian Cantrell had a number of posts focused on desktop features in the newly released AIR 2.6. The first actually lists everything new in AIR 2.6 with brief descriptions of each new feature. The next shows how to use the native cursors feature in AIR 2.6 including sample code and a video demo. Next, he covers the concept of owned Windows in AIR 2.6 which are lightweight windows owned by another window and useful for things like toolbars, for example.
Adobe's Thibault Imbert shows an improvement made in AIR 2.6 (that is also coming in a future Flash Player) that allows bitmap decoding to occur in a separate thread from the UI thereby dramatically improving the performance of your application when loading large images.
Adobe's Frank Jennings shows how you can easily build native installers for Adobe AIR using Flash Builder "Burrito."
Lastly, Lifehacker featured an Adobe AIR application called Stereoclip that hooks into iTunes and shows the video for whatever song you are currently playing via YouTube.
Cool ColdFusion Stuff
Chris shows how to allow your Android mobile web applications to scan barcodes using a library called ZXing and a ColdFusion back-end.
Comments
Posted By Michael / Posted on 03/28/2011 at 7:09 AM