iOS Concurrency
The beta release of Adobe AIR 19 has landed and the big news is that we finally have the AS3 Workers API for iOS. So what are Workers? Well put simply, Workers lets us create multi-threaded AIR and Flash Player applications. This is significant because you can finally relegate CPU intensive tasks to a background […]
Integrated Native Physics in the Flash Runtime
Over the last year or so there’s been much talk from the community regarding the need for the integration of native physics within the Flash runtime. Adobe’s Flash product manager, Chris Campbell, has opened this up for further discussion on the Adobe Communities forum. Personally I think this might be a good thing as Adobe […]
Zynga: “With PlayScript we got AS4 for free”
Here’s an interesting presentation from Zynga’s Ben Cooley talking about their cross-platform endeavours with Flash and Adobe AIR. He spends some times exploring the benefits of AIR and the challenges of porting Flash-based browser games to mobile. A significant portion of his presentation is also given over to Zynga’s PlayScript language and compiler, which I’ve […]
AS3 Search Chrome Extension
Here’s a great little Chrome extension you might be interested in. The ActionScript 3.0 Search extension brings AS3.0 API documentation and auto-completion directly to Google Chrome. It lets you type a class name into the address bar before taking you directly to the relevant documentation. It’ll even provide you with search suggestions if a match […]
More Molehill Goodness
I must say, I’m pretty damn excited by Stage3D (AKA Molehill) and this demo written using the Alternativa 3D engine gives further indication as to we’ll be able to do with Flash and full 3D GPU support. It’s a work-in-progress demonstration of Tanki Online 2.0, and if you’re in any doubt about what Stage 3D […]
What Can You Do With Bytes?
So what can you do with bytes? Lots of things actually, and Thibault Imbert will prove it to you with chapters one and two of his book. Thibault has very kindly decided to make “WCYDWB?” available for free, with each new chapter being released as a PDF as soon as it’s finished. I remember reading […]
Graphics Management with Bitmap Sheets
Introduction This tutorial is a loose follow-up to an article I wrote detailing how to maximise render performance for the iPhone Packager. It outlined, with some simple examples, the use of bitmap sheets to load and render bitmap images as opposed to using Flash’s vector rendering engine. I had also written an ActionScript 3 library […]
Funky Flash Music Player Tutorial
I’m delighted to announce that my tutorial – Go Retro With a Funky Flash Music Player – was published on Activetuts+ today. It covers both Flash’s design tools and ActionScript 3 to build a retro audio cassette that streams music. So what are you waiting for? Jump on over to Activetuts+ and give it a […]
Local Variables and Garbage Collection
NOTE: I had originally used the Timer class in my example for this post but it seems the Timer class doesn’t follow the normal garbage collection rules as mentioned in BIT-101. Anyway code and description updated below. So what’s wrong with this code? package { import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.events.TimerEvent; import flash.sensors.Geolocation; public class Test extends […]
Masking the global trace function
Here’s a little trick I learned today regarding name spaces. I was writing a little custom debug class and decided to grace it with its own static trace() method that would ultimately make a call to ActionScript’s global trace() function. Basically I wanted all my tracing to go through this class but still maintain the […]