The Starling Handbook
Isn’t the Starling framework awesome! It’s as much a part of the Flash/AIR platform as the native APIs themselves. In my opinion, it’s single handedly responsible for so many developers sticking with Adobe’s platform over the past few years. With Starling you can create 2D games that are every bit as impressive as games written […]
Migrating to Swift from Flash and ActionScript
Radoslava Leseva Adams at DiaDraw reached out to me recently. She’s the co-author of Migrating to Swift from Flash and ActionScript and wanted to know what I thought of the book. Well I must say it’s an essential piece of reading for any Flash and/or Adobe AIR developers looking to learn native iOS development with […]
Native Extension Development Revisited
Just over a year ago I took a stab at developing an iOS native extension for AIR. It was really just a learning exercise and I wasn’t actually trying to write anything specific. I certainly got a lot from it but having not revisited ANE development since, I recently found to my frustration that I’d […]
10 Steps to Learning ANE iOS Development
Over the past week or so I’ve been looking at Adobe AIR Native Extension (ANE) development. It’s something I’d been meaning to take a gander at for ages but never seemed to find the time. Plus on the surface, developing an ANE seemed a little intimidating. Well the good news is it’s not really that […]
ActionScript 3: The New Bottleneck?
NOTE: If you read this post then please also read the comment at the end from sHTiF (creator of Genome2D) who details some poor assumptions/misunderstandings on my part. When writing my Monster Dash clone, I opted to start by using Flash’s classic display list. Although my intention was to eventually swap over to the Starling […]
Zynga introduce PlayScript compiler and runtime
If you’re one of the many people aghast at Adobe’s decision to abandon ActionScript 4 then you might be very interested in PlayScript. Developed by Zynga, PlayScript is an open-source ActionScript 3 compatible compiler that targets a variety of runtimes to quickly build 3D games for both the web and mobile devices. In addition to […]
Adobe Abandon ActionScript Next
So Adobe made a series of announcements yesterday regarding changes to the Flash roadmap, and typically some of those decisions have had the Flash community up in arms again. Last year I made a conscious decision not to get involved in these often heated debates but I thought that one major piece of news from […]
Software Developer’s Journal
If you’ve noticed that my blogging has been less frequent the last few months, it’s because I was approached by Software Developer’s Journal magazine about taking on co-editing duties for their July issue. To be perfectly honest, I’d no previous experience as an editor but thought it would be a good opportunity to learn something […]
Learning Games for iOS
Frosby Design has just released its latest iOS kids educational app – Frosby Learning Games. It was developed using Adobe AIR and Flash Professional CS5.5, and has also been featured in Apple’s App Store in the US, UK, Australia and China. It’s a great little app for toddlers and young children, containing a collection of […]
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 […]