Improving Starling’s Performance with Blend Modes
I’ve been impressed by the Starling framework but like many I’ve struggled to get a solid 60fps on some of the older mobile devices out there. For example, my recent parallax scrolling demo was capped at 30fps on iPad 1 whereas the iPad 2 was easily capable of running it at a full 60fps without […]
Starling Bubbles
If you’ve been working your way through my book then you may find the content in the following video familiar. As part of a series of articles I’m writing for Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine, I decided to revisit the underwater bubbles scene from my Flash iOS Apps Cookbook. However, whereas the cookbook focusses on […]
JavaScript Parallax Scrolling
My Starling parallax scrolling demo that I showed off running on iPad seems to have gotten quite a lot of attention recently. So I thought I’d strike while the iron was hot and quickly throw together a JavaScript version, which you can hopefully see below. I’d originally been working with the graphics from Halfbricks’s excellent […]
Some Great Flash Announcements
The last few weeks have seen a series of great announcements for the Flash platform and I thought I’d take some time to cover some of my favourites. Stage3D and Unreal Engine The most recent, was the availability of Epic Citadel, which demonstrated the Unreal Engine running within the desktop Flash Player. Using Stage3D to […]
Creating Particle Effects with Starling
I was asked by Flash & Flex Developer’s magazine to write a tutorial covering Starling and its particle system extension. So if you fancy seeing just how easy it is to get really great particle effects up and running using Starling then head on over to the magazine’s official website and grab yourself a copy […]
60fps scrolling using Starling
I really do love the simplicity of one-touch mobile games. They’re just so much more accessible to a casual audience compared to modern console games that typically require you to mash a thousand different buttons. However, their apparent simplicity may mislead many to think that such games are easy to make. They’re actually anything but. […]
Launch Image Bug on Landscape iPad Apps
I had a conversation with interactive designer Chris Gannon the other day regarding a screen flicker he’d noticed when his iPad app was transitioning from its launch image to the first frame of its SWF. Of course the transition between the two should actually be seamless but Chris had noticed that an intermediate black screen […]
Flash Roadmap Whitepaper
Adobe released its eagerly anticipated whitepaper outlining the future direction of Flash and AIR. With the desktop Flash Player fighting a losing battle against HTML5, and the mobile player dead, it’s no real surprise that Adobe has decided to focus on gaming and the deployment of premium video. Personally I think this is a good […]
Kinect Native Extension for AIR
My brother was telling me how much fun he’d had over the weekend playing with a Microsoft’s Kinect he’d borrowed from a friend. It prompted me to dig out a blog post I’d seen not too long ago showing Kinect integration within Adobe AIR. The post was by Adobe Platform Evangelist Serge Jespers, and showed […]
Default Deployment Settings in Flash Pro CS5.5
If you’re working your way through the code samples provided with Flash iOS Apps Cookbook then you may receive the following error when trying to publish each of the FLAs: It seems that when working with FLA files that were authored by someone else, your own copy of Flash Professional won’t try to use the […]