Hullo 2012!

In my last post I recapped what I’d been up to last year, so I guess it’s only fair to go over my plans for the next twelve months. After all, the reason I started this blog was to force myself to learn new things and to share my findings. Hopefully by posting this it’ll force me to commit to at least some of them. I don’t think I’ll realistically find the time to do them all and my plans may change as the year unfolds but here goes anyway.

My Reading List

I really didn’t have that much time last year and ended up with a pile of books that I’m now looking forward to reading. I won’t list them all but hopefully I’ll find the time for the following three:

Adobe Flash 11 Stage3D (Molehill) Game Programming
HTML5 Canvas Cookbook
Learning HTML5 Game Programming

I also have Canvas Pocket Reference and jQuery Pocket Reference, which I’ll dip in and out of rather than reading from cover to cover.

Two books I did manage to get through were JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, and Joseph Labrecque’s Flash Development for Android Cookbook. Both of which I highly recommend. I’m also partly through Unreal Development Kit 3 Beginner’s Guide, which I’m looking forward to finishing, but first I need to get through The Han Solo Adventures for Dave T at work – he gave me a loan of it like two years ago.

There are also a few other Flash books from O’Reilly, which I’m going to talk about in another post. That way I’ll be able to give them the attention they deserve.

HTML5

I know what you’re thinking, there sure is a lot of HTML5 reading on that list. Well for some time now I’ve been wanting to spend more time with JavaScript and all those other fancy gubbins that go with it. As I said in my previous post, I’ve already ported my Android Speedometer app to HTML5 and I think I’ll do the same with a few other things I’ve written over the years. I might take a look at PhoneGap too, and I also ran through a few Adobe Edge tutorials and will probably keep an eye on its progress.

3D or Not 3D

You’ve no doubt noticed that Stage 3D is top of my list (excluding ‘The Han Solo Adventures’). I’ve been threatening to get into 3D games programming for years but never seem to find the time. Fingers crossed this will be my year. I’m not restricting myself to Flash either. I’ve spent some time with Unreal Development Kit and hope to carry on with that too, as well as taking a look at WegGL – there’s a really great community building up around three.js and some of the demos I’ve seen have been really fantastic.

AIR for iOS

I’m looking forward to seeing how things unfold with AIR for iOS this year. Fingers crossed that Stage 3D and Starling do the business on mobile. Both have amazing potential but Adobe really need to get these things right first time. And while I’m on the subject, it would be nice to see some more iOS and Android specific APIs from Adobe.

Hopefully I’ll find the time to look more at Stage 3D, and AIR for iOS in general, and write some more tutorials. I’ll also be supporting my book throughout the year with tutorials and links to relevant URLs.

Phew! That’s a Lot!

Yeah, reading all this back has made me realise how ambitious this all sounds 🙂 Well let’s see what I manage to get through. Maybe I’ll make it a two year plan rather than one.