Yeah, But Is It Flash?

Flash CS5 Public Beta Cancelled

December 18, 2009 · Comments Off

Bad news for anyone waiting to get their hands on the Flash CS5 public beta. Adobe have just announced that in order to deliver the final version of Flash CS5 as soon as possible they’ve cancelled the beta release that was to be made available at the end of the month.

Adobe’s announcement at Max in October that the latest release of Flash would allow developers to target the iPhone has helped generate a significant amount of buzz, making CS5 one of the most anticipated releases of Flash in some time.

More info can be found in this FAQ section on Adobe Labs.

WRT Woes

December 17, 2009 · Comments Off

I usually package my mobile projects into SIS files for deployment onto S60 devices. However, Nokia in their infinite wisdom have made the whole packaging and signing process as difficult and as expensive as possible for small independent developers or those wishing to simply create some freeware. You can skip the signing process and kindly ask users to change their phone’s permission settings to allow unsigned software, but as you can appreciate not many people are willing to take the risk.

So for the touch-screen version of my russian roulette game I thought I might try Nokia’s Web Runtime (WRT) mobile widget development platform. The nice thing about WRT widgets is that, unlike native applications, they don’t need to be signed since they run within the web browser sandbox. Widgets are also installed and launched the same as native S60 applications so from a users perspective it’s all good.

So basically all I needed to do was create an HTML page to house my Flash Lite SWF, bash together a simple CSS file, sprinkle a few lines of JavaScript on top and then archive everything into a WGZ file. Pretty damn easy eh? Well the creation of the widget was indeed trivial but the final result was far from what I had hoped.

After launching it from the Applications menu I tried touching one of the game’s menu options only for a horrible border to appear around my SWF. The touch also forced the native Symbian softkeys (which I’d disabled with JavaScript) to re-appear on screen too. But the final nail in the coffin has to be the delay between user interaction with the widget and the SWF actually receiving the event. It must be somewhere close to a second before my game picks-up the events from the touch screen compared to the instantaneous response when it’s packaged as a SIS file.

Now I’m new to WRT Widgets so I’m more than open to the possibility that I’m being a silly sausage and have accidentally omitting a few lines of JavaScript, but I did stumble upon some posts from other individuals with similar problems. Perhaps it’s a bug with my Nokia 5800’s firmware, I should check that I have the latest version. If I get some time I’ll jump onto the Nokia Remote Device Access site and spend some time trying it on a few other touch screen devices, just in case the problem is specific to the 5800.

In the meantime I’ll get back to the actual development of my game. Plenty of things to iron out before it’ll be in a fit state for users to play anyway.

Russian Roulette

December 16, 2009 · 1 Comment

I tend to undertake personal projects that are way too ambitious and almost always never get finished. However I think recently I’ve started to learn that if I ever want to do anything cool outside work I’m gonna have to be more realistic about what I can undertake in my limited spare time.

So last month I decided to make a fairly simple Flash Lite mobile phone game that was fun, a little edgy (please don’t sue me Tim Langdell), and would appeal to a crowd of people in say, the office or at a party. If you’re lucky enough to own a Nokia S60 3rd Edition phone you can now have a great time playing my russian roulette game. Ideal for parties, drinking games or making bets with friends. And if you’ve ever thought about playing russian roulette for real then this is a great way to get some practice in first!

So far the response has been positive and for Star Wars fans out there I couldn’t help but add the Wilhelm scream for when you eventually shoot yourself. The current version only works with non-touch screen Nokias but I’ve been itching to do something for the S60 5th Edition devices since I got my Nokia 5800, so work on a touch-screen version has already begun. I’ll keep you all posted on its progress.

Come to think of it, with the release of Flash CS5 on the horizon it might be something worth porting over to iPhone. Then again I think there are already a few similar apps available from the App Store, plus my list of iPhone game ideas is starting to get out of hand so adding another might not be wise.

You can get the S60 3rd Edition version of Russian Roulette from clickgamer. Enjoy!

Oh and a big thanks to MacDog for giving me a loan of The Deer Hunter, which was the inspiration for my game.

Flash Training for .net Developers

December 15, 2009 · Comments Off

At WeeWorld the majority of our projects are split evenly between Flash and .net, however very few developers are cross-trained in both. As part of our ongoing effort to be agile I was tasked with giving our .net developers some Flash training.

Spread over 6 weeks, the guys have been spending their Friday afternoons working through some tutorials I put together covering the drawing tools, timeline animation, and ActionScript 3 basics. It’s been interesting and as I thought, they mostly struggled with the timeline and Flash’s basic drawing concepts. Being C# developers however they were all up and running with ActionScript very quickly.

I tried to make the course material as interesting and fun as possible with the final exercise asking them to create an audio cassette that streamed an mp3 file when clicked. It’s been a while since I had to do any real timeline work myself so I thought I’d give the exercise a go. You can find my attempt embedded above – Just click the cassette to start streaming some audio.

Thanks to Brown Eye Superfly for letting me ‘borrow’ their song ‘Any Other Way’. Hopefully this iTunes link to their album will stop them coming round to my door to beat me up.

Now I’m thinking it might be quite cool to port the audio cassette to mobile. An iPhone version would be nice. Could even get it running on a few Nokia devices using Flash Lite.

XML Based FLA Files

December 14, 2009 · Comments Off

I’ve been quite impressed by the announced features for Flash CS5, with the ability to write apps for iPhone being the one that has gotten the Flash community most excited.

One upcoming feature that seems to have been overlooked by most people that I’m particularly looking forward to however is the new XML based FLA format. Anyone who uses source control will know what a pain it is trying to merge FLA files back to the trunk from a branch. You’ve basically got two options.

Open the two FLAs and attempt to manually copy the new changes from the branched version back onto the trunk.
Simply copy the branched version over the trunk version and hope that you don’t inadvertently destroy someone else’s changes that have already made it onto the trunk.

With FLA files now being saved out as XML we no longer need to worry about this, instead letting a merge tool do the work for us. The other added bonus is that this should theoretically allow multiple developers to concurrently edit the same FLA.

XML based FLA files open up a host of other interesting opportunities. For the first time you’ll be able to write code to dynamically create FLA files, or simply parse an existing XML FLA file before making changes to it. It’s all good stuff.

Hullo and Welcome

December 14, 2009 · 1 Comment

Welcome to my first ever blog. It’s something I’ve been threatening to do for some time now but never seemed to get round to it. I seem to have a bit more spare time on my hands so hopefully I’ll be able to keep updating it regularly.

It’s mostly going to be a development blog tracking whatever personal project I’m currently working on. Where appropriate I might also talk about the latest goings on at WeeWorld and you’ll also find my latest thoughts on the Adobe Flash platform.

I’ve been tinkering with Flash Lite over the last few years so don’t be surprised if my posts are heavily slanted towards Flash for mobile.