Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 5/24/11
Posted on May 24, 2011
Another busy week in the Flash Platform community. This week featured a number of authors who posted multiple tips and tutorials - some as many as six this week alone. I'm also excited to see that as things progress we're already seeing fewer and fewer mobile demos that are platform specific. Once the Flash Builder 4.5 update comes out I expect this will only accelerate which, hopefully, means that we're really getting close to the target of making code reusable across platforms, whether that is multiple devices or devices, desktop and the web.
Any of you that follow these weekly posts know that game development using the Flash Platform has been a hot topic this year, with more and more developers jumping in due to the availability of Flash on mobile and devices. In order to further assist and encourage those developers the ADC has launched a Flash Platform Game Developer Center that contains a long list of resources for either novice or advanced game developers on the Flash Platform.
Cool Mobile & Devices Stuff (AIR for Android, AIR on TV, Flash on Android, iPhone etc)
Now that Flash Builder 4.5 is available, Adobe evangelist Christophe Coenraets releases the source code for his MobileTrader Flex application for iOS, Android, and PlayBook with the caveat that Blackberry OS and iOS support are still forthcoming in the June update to Flash Builder 4.5.
Adobe evangelist Michaël Chaize walks you through how to recreate in Flex for mobile the pull down to refresh effect popularized by applications like the official Twitter App for mobile devices.
Adobe evangelist Serge Jespers points to Adobe documentation on how to display ads in your mobile AIR application and highlights the code necessary to get it to work with AdMob. He also shows how one might get the same item working in Flex for mobile.
Nahuel Foronda shows how to skin a toggle button in Flex for mobile so that it looks like an on/off switch commonly seen in Android and iOS UIs. Nahuel also completes his series on mobile ItemRenderers in ActionScript with part 5 focused on creating an ItemRenderer that mimics a grid.
Adobe's Jason San Jose compares CSS media queries and application scaling for scaling content across various devices with different DPIs. He shows an example of how you can accomplish this using media queries in CSS. Jason also had a second tutorial explaining how to style the ActionBar.
Holly Schinsky shows how to handle data in Flex 4.5 for mobile including how to manage the data property passed between views in a view-based application and how to use the built-in persistence mechanism to persist custom classes. Holly had a second tutorial this week demonstrating how to programmatically control the visibility of the ActionBar and Tabs in a Flex mobile application.
Adobe evangelist Paul Trani steps through in detail the design and development workflow for a mobile Flash project as it relates to a number of Adobe tools including Flash Professional and Flash Builder.
Android
Barbara Kaskosz of Flash and Math shares the source code for her PeekAMaze game for Android built with Flash and AIR. This game expands upon an earlier example by using the random maze generator but adding in some panning and mouse controls.
Raymond Camden puts some of the persistence topics covered by Holly Schinsky in her earlier post to work in a simple "real-time" Tamagochi-like game. He explains how he used the data object to persist the state of his character and determine how long it's been since he was last fed, even if the application was closed. Raymond also discusses some of the difficulties and workarounds he found for working with the Google Maps API in Flex mobile.
Blackberry
Adobe evangelist Duane Nickull demonstrates in a video how you get Flash Builder 4.5 set up for BlackBerry PlayBook Development.
Cool Flex, Flash Builder & Catalyst Stuff
Paul Robertson was a very busy individual. He released no less than six tutorials this week covering new developer productivity features in Flash Builder 4.5. The first walks you through sharing code templates via importing and exporting. The second discusses code hints and code completion. The third illustrates how to use code templates while the fourth details how to customize those templates or create your own. The fifth covers a small but useful feature for multi-line code block selection. Finally, the sixth tutorial shows how to use "selection" templates which are templates that act upon the currently highlighted line or lines of code.
Adobe's Hans Muller continues to crank out excellent tips and tutorials about Flex. This week he posted two, the first about modifying DataGrid row heights while the second shows how to control text wrapping in DataGrid ItemRenderers.
Cool ActionScript/Flash Stuff
The native JSON support in the Flash Builder Incubator build continues to generate positive discussion. This week Jan Van Coppenolle compares various JSON serialization/deserialization methods in ActionScript and finds that the native support blows everything else away.
Emanuele Feronato continues his demos for generating game maps with two more posts on the topic. The first demonstrates, with source code, using a model called cellular automata to generate random land and water maps with Flash. The second switches from the discussion of land/water maps to generating cave maps using ActionScript, including source code again of course.
Saravanan has posted several in depth Flash/ActionScript tutorials with source code this week. First he shows how to create a 3D image rotation effect in ActionScript. Next he demonstrates how to build a volume control knob in ActionScript. Lastly, he shows how to handle hit tests in ActionScript for two objects, the mouse pointer or a bitmap.
Cool ColdFusion Stuff
Sam Farmer released an extension for ColdFusion Builder called debugClean that will search your code for any debug code that could be a potential issue before you deploy that code.
Comments
Posted By Rich / Posted on 05/31/2011 at 3:21 PM