Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 5/2/11
Posted on May 02, 2011
Another great week of updates this week and I expect things will pick up with the official release of Flex 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5 imminent and the FITC Toronto conference going on as we speak. While there is tons of great content, some particularly key items this week, in my own opinion, include Greg Wilson's post on convincing skeptical developers about Flex on mobile, not one but two libraries released for runtime bytecode modification in Flash (Mixing Loom and AS3-Mixins) and Jesse Warden's discussion of his Flash Player 11 wishlist (which includes feedback directly from the Flash Player product team in the comments).
Cool Mobile & Devices Stuff (AIR for Android, AIR on TV, Flash on Android, iPhone etc)
Adobe's Mark Hopper announces the availability of an update to Flash Player on devices that specifically brings the Honeycomb version of the player out of beta.
Adobe evangelist Greg Wilson came out with an awesome reference post to help you convince developers that Adobe Flex rocks on Android, iOS, and PlayBook. It features a number of common questions that he answers honestly as well as a ton of videos showing off the upcoming iOS support in Flex.
Nahuel Foronda of ASFusion was one of the developers working on their Conqu for Android tablets, built with Adobe Flex and AIR, and he discusses their "design first" development process for building the application and what they learned from it. Nahuel starts a two part series covering how to build mobile ItemRenderers in ActionScript, which is the suggested practice for best performance.
Adobe evangelist Mihai Corlan offers this tutorial on using the Flex framework and the Capabilities API to manage scaling content depending on the screen resolution.
Adobe evangelist Michaël Chaize created this tutorial that includes code samples and a sample project to show how to implement the swipe on mobile list items to show context sensitive actions. He did this by creating a custom mobile item renderer in Flex.
Android
Fabio Biondi recently released his Flash Developer Planet Android application and in this post he discusses a technique used in that application to YouTube ActionScript 3.0 Player API to create a chromeless video player for Android devices using Flash Builder 4.5.
Joseph Labrecque creates a video recording to demonstrate how to create a splash screen with Flex 4.5 on Android.
Blackberry
Julian Dolce discusses debug tokens and signing for the Blackberry Playbook using Flash Builder 4 now that you can deploy to an actual device
iOS
Adobe evangelist Greg Wilson demonstrates how easy it is to convert a Flex app from Android to iOS via a 10 minute video demonstrating him porting a coworkers Android application to iOS.
Television
Jens Loeffler shares a video of EpixHD running on Samsung and Google TV? on top of AIR for TV and using a common codebase.
Cool Flex, Flash Builder & Catalyst Stuff
If you wrote applications using the Flash Builder preview release from MAX, Holly Shinsky shows how to update Flash Builder "Burrito" applications to Flash Builder 4.5, noting all API and component changes you need to be aware of.
Mirko Bordjoski updated an application he created several years ago and released the source as an image editor component in Flex 4.5. This example uses a framework called CMVC.
Nick Schneble shares a code sample on how to clone a Flex DataGrid via an ExportableDataGrid class he created to prepare DataGrid data for export to Excel.
Chris Griffith discusses the Flash Catalyst CS5.5 release announcement and specifically highlights its ability to create resizable applications.
Cool ActionScript/Flash Stuff
Adobe evangelist James Ward announces the release of the Mixing Loom project which was first discussed in his and Mike Labriola's presentation at 360|Flex. The project is intended for enabling AOP using runtime ActionScript bytecode modification. Interestingly, another project for runtime bytecode modification to create mixins was released this week called AS3-Mixins and available on GitHub. Clearly this is a hot topic...even if it's a bit over my head. ;)
Lars Gerckens does a more "serious" game demo using his 2D framework for Molehill which demonstrates a sidescroller using ND2D.
Emanuele Feronato follows up his Flare3D example of a Flash ball game with a version built with Box2D and including the source code.
Krasimir Tsonev shows how to embed fonts in swf's using Flash Pro for runtime font loading in ActionScript.
Petri Leskinen released several Pixel Bender samples this week including source code for each, using the Flex framework, such as Cairo tiling, Floret pentagonal tiling and circle pattern.
Jesse Warden had some interesting feature requests for Flash Player 11 which generated a good conversation in the comments including feedback from Adobe's Thibault Imbert on what the team is currently working on.
Cool ColdFusion Stuff
Tony Nelson released a framework on Github that provides the ability advanced INI file parsing in ColdFusion similar to what he had seen in Zend for PHP.
Comments
Posted By devu / Posted on 05/05/2011 at 1:28 PM