As a Flash Developer, I rarely get to build whole web sites. When I do, I usually turn to Joomla and then go find a graphic artist to tell me what horrible mistakes I have made regarding aesthetics. But I already have a good feel for the teams “brand”, and had some good input from the major stakeholders regarding the appearance and functionality. So I took as stab at the graphic design myself, and managed to make it not suck.

Michael Shaffner was nice enough to invite me back for another presentation. Last Fall I spoke to the group about the GAIA Flash Framework. This time it’s all about physics in Flash. I had the opportunity to use the AS3 port of Box2D on a very recent project that is set to launch on 1/15/10. It was a tricky package to learn, but I was able to find some great tutorials on the Web. Hopefully I can put together some coherent thoughts on how to get a kick-start into coding this stuff, and present that to the group.

The best resources I found were some samples posted by Emmanualle Feronato. He was kind enough to provide demos and code samples for many of the basic concepts in Box2D. From there I was able to produce a few class files that are generic enough to jump start any Box2D project I might want to develop. The original C++ code was written by Erin Catto, and the AS3 port was made possible by Colin Northway.

So I am planning to put something together that I can post here as well. Maybe not another full-blown SLide_rocket presentation, but some samples and a link to the web site we hope to launch soon. The AUG meetup is on January 18th, downtown.

Flash gave me this error today and I was unable to find a suitable explanation of the reason online, though it looks like plenty of people have encountered this. Upon further examination I found a way to reproduce the problem. Basically I was sending the same argument twice in a rather lengthy method signature, combined with the fact that I was trying to set the values of an object using “with” improperly (setting the values to the method args out of scope) in the method itself. In the end, it was just sloppy coding, but it is something to look out for.

I will post the code example when I get my stupid blog to format the text correctly, arggghhh!

Adobe released a "preview" of their Flash Lite 2.1 for Windows Mobile 5 sometime around September 10th. What this means for Flash developers is we can start creating content for the Motorola Q and other "Smartphones", which are about to explode in popularity over the next few years. As a "Q" owner and Flash developer, I was eager to make my first mobile Flash app.

The plugin is currently in beta and they are targeting developers only in this release. What that means is that you will need to register with their mobile developer program to get it. No big deal. Just head over to labs.adobe.com, register, install, activate the plugin, and your ready to go.

You will want something to play with once you have this new capability on your phone, so feel free to download my Amazon book search tool : amazon_motoQ_v09.swf  (right-click and save to your desktop, then pass it to your phone via ActiveSync).

Here is what it looks like:
(embedded for traditional browsers, not phones)

It’s not the world’s most useful software, but I needed a proof of concept.  Specifically I wanted to know if I could access a Web Service and bring data to the phone from public APIs like we find at Google, eBay, Flickr, and of course Amazon.  The Flash application is not really grabbing the data from Amazon directly, but hitting a gateway on my own domain.  I think it would actually be easier to hit the Web Service on Amazon directly, but I already had this code from a tutorial that was graciously provided by Allesandro Crugnola.

You will want to download it to your phone and run it as a stand-alone app, not in the browser.  The Flash Player install will associate the SWF extension with the runtime player, so as long as you have installed the Flash Lite 2.1 preview, you will be able to launch the SWF from your WM5 phone’s file system.  I have created a page on the Web, which embeds this mobile Flash file in an HTML page so that phones can browse to it.  Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to get the D-pad on the phone to talk to the Flash content when its in the browser.  There is a special way to embed Flash Lite content for the IE version in Windows Mobile 5 phones.