Its a long post, but still I could not write everything.

Whatever it is, the same company is saying they are for Flash Player in Desktop. Though its hard to believe that they are saying correct information, but the fact is Flash community is about sheer talent, experiment and adventurous. It was, is and will be always like that.

Before jumping into any conclusion, lets see the landscape now.

Case 1 :
Flex Developer(as she said it) having 3 years of experience, named Fx and a senior developer who is using Flash platform tools and SDKs for more last 10 years named Fl have a conversation,
Fx : Can you tell me what is remoting?
Fl : ohh yes, sure. See when we are using Flash Remoting, ….
Fx : (stoping FL in middle of the sentence and with very disturbing angry voice) No, I am a Flex developer, tell me about Flex Remoting. I do not know Flash and thats not important.
Fl : (Trying to normalise the situation) ok, well then, can you tell me where exactly you need Remoting?
Fx : yes, an interviewer in xyz enterprise asked me about it.
Rest is not important.

Case 2 :
Flex Developer(as he said) having 3 years of experience, named Fx and a Flash developer who is using Flash platform tools and SDKs for more than last 10 years named Fl having a conversation,
Fl : Hey we need to draw a line at this place, can you do it?
Fx : yeah, I will just use VRule and thats it.
Fl : Its better if we use drawing APIs of Flash in this case.
Fx : We can do it in Flex in one line, I do not know Flash (with hesitation and no respect as if Fl is trying to do something very very wrong).

Well these are just two cases out of many, which everyday Flash platform community faces. Sometime very experienced people in Flash community, who have already talked in public meetings also talks likes this inside their corporate office just to favor their own pals and trying to show they are always right.

If you ask any of those guys to tell you what Flex is ? Can you please explain it to me, I want to learn. They will start asking questions like, do you know Java, or C++ ? If no, then Flex would be very difficult for you, instead go learn javascript as if its the end of the world to learn Flex!

Flash community was never like that, and is not like that and will never like that even. All the talented people in flash platform came to it for its simplicity and beauty. They enjoyed doing it for they love it. Slowly as Flash come to mainstream, there are a lot of talk and discussion in the community how to push the boundary of the Flash as a platform. The community is always open in mind and always co-operative to new ones who want to learn it. The community leaders are always pushing the platform further.
Look at some of the many awesome projects done by community,
MTASC
SWFObject
SWFAddress
SWX
SEPY
FlashDevelop
Red5

These people never asked Macromedia to do it. They did it for they love to do it and love to share it. On the contrary, if they were doing only Flash, was it possible to make these loving projects! Thing is Flash is not a platform. Its a community and that community does stuff for themselves not for some corporate or enterprise. All this community needed was a canvas to do some awesome work. The community is always doing cool stuff which they love, share it with the world and teach others how to do it. That has been broken once this technology platform entered the enterprise space. People became more like other platform community. Where, its always I can do it and its only possible in this way. No need to look at others code or no need to do any research.
When Flash entered the enterprise circle, it did it with Flex as a framework, SDK and compiler. That was a good move for a corporate to get some money flowing. But at the same time we flash developers also get in there easily with the knowledge we had beforehand. And all the talk about MVC, frameworks and coding standards had begun. People from Flash platform took the center stage, as other platforms rarely cared about all these in the past, they started to care about it now. People in other platforms came in as Flex framework, Flex IDE both look and behave similar to their own platform. And after all this, the community is diluted to do anything for the company not for passion. Now, people come to Flash platform just to do Data binding in Flex and using components in Flex, not even through code, they want to do it in design view only. These people do not even know, if there is a difference or similarity between a flex component initialised with “new” or a “xml tag”.
Look at the new age projects like,
MinimalComps
AS3 Signals
Robotlegs
Does Adobe told them to do it? No, its been done for they know the community requirement and they love to experiment.

On the contrary look at the beautiful people from Flash platform, moving to different other platforms doing very cool stuff. They are teaching people, doing workshops and sharing knowledge by any means they can, that is Flash platform spirit. They can do it, for Flash always has a diverse community not just some people who do not care others opinion and do not care to share their knowledge. Flash community was brilliant, is brilliant and will be like that, that does not mean they always work in Flex. They always worked in different technologies and they will do it in all those things they have access to.
So Flex SDK going to some other foundation may be matter of concern for the corporates, but Flash developers how does it matter ?! Flash is not there in mobile! So what ?! As we Flash developers do experiment with other technologies, let the company do it. And if it fails, thats ok, we still have Flash player in Desktops. Whether it will be there or not is a different matter and how this news is conveyed may be a wrong way. But they have already showed this wrong way of communication to some of the very best guys in our Flash community, that time everyone kept silence for that was not affecting major ones but a chosen few. Fact is if it can do the same thing to some of the brilliant Flash community members (despite today also these members love and respect Flash platform), it can be done to anyone.
The point is Flash community is always full of experiments. While I was talking to some of the flash platform community managers in last years Adobe summit India, they said they had hacked Flashlite during those days to run it in Nokia mobile. Is it possible only with Flash and actionscript knowledge?! Thing is community is always pushing it.
So the more restricted the runtime/player is more fun it gives to do stuffs for a Flash developer. Look at the HTML5 Canvas experiments done by some of the brilliant Flash folks. These are the guys who do not care if its corporate or enterprise, they just do it for experimentation and pleasure. Look at some of the folks who have mastered iOS development, look at people who have gone to Java world again but not doing traditional Java Application but picked up Play framework. The flash community is awesome and it will be. Just respect the community members who are doing the great stuff despite of all restrictions. And I think Flash on desktop may be a decision by Adobe, but community already knew what is possible. On another thought, let the enterprise think about Flex SDK. It matters to them, but for regular design shops, it does not matter, its a good thing for it will filter out the Flash community again. The people who want to push it will come and push it, those who need only and only money, position and power will have to go and learn a new stuff (which is difficult for them) not a Flash developer as Flash community is never about one technology.

All in all I see a silver lining. Whether Flash is going to be there or not in devices (or even in desktops) does not matter, what matters is what Flash is and what we can do with it. Thats what we were doing (before enterprises dilute the culture) and thats what it is going to be. There are still some nice individuals from age old flash platform community inside Adobe, if its going to be that bad, they might have come out too. Flash community is always about experimenting and giving respect to experiments, if it fails it fails, move on do some more experiment. Have the believe in the company, they did it wrong, they learn it and now they want to move on, help them do it. Despite of putting anger in one person, rather it should be for the Flash runtime. Should be fighting to opensource FlashPlayer, incase we want freedom.

If you read it fully, I love you Leave a comment.

Fortunately Starling-framework makes the life easier. Its a framework on top of Stage3D(codenamed Molehill). The best part of it is one can just use it as if using flash’s own API. It has movieclip, sprite, events and displaylist. While I was trying my first handson this framework, found some must to do things, which may save someone’s time.

Minimum requirement,

To run
1. First of all, it needs Flash Player 11.
2. It must be run inside a browser. Yeah, SWF must be embedded inside a HTML page.
3. Inside the embed code, “mode” must be set to “direct”.

<param name="wmode" value="direct">

4. Embeding the swf with SWFObjectdoes not work for me. So used the minimum default Object-embed method. To author 1. Need Flash Player 11 SDK 2. Overlap it on Flex SDK 4.5.1 , so that you got the compiler ready. 3. Compile with extra compiler argument as ” -swf-version=13 “.

The basic HTML boilerplate code to embed look as

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
        <title>HelloStarling</title>
        <meta name="google" value="notranslate">
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    </head>
    <body>
        <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="600" height="600" id="movie_name" align="middle">
    <param name="movie" value="Startup.swf"/>
    <param name="wmode" value="direct">
    <!--[if !IE]>-->
    <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="Startup.swf" width="600" height="600">
        <param name="wmode" value="direct">
    </object>
    <!--<![endif]-->
</object>
   </body>
</html>

Happy Flashing.

This throttling is best for mobile and other devices which can run FlashPlayer now. Throttling means saving of energy and increasing battery life of the device. So it seems its the best thing happened to Flashplayer, while we are making content for the devices.

The problem arises when we create stuffs for desktops or laptops, where FlashPlayer was running since a long time, conventionally. And we still think we can go on developing our applications and games with the same mind set as we used to do till now. While developing games, the most used event is ENTER_FRAME and when throttling happens, all of the logic of the application/game goes wrong!! While the logic of the game still holds good if the player is active all the time but once the player is invisible, the player starts to throttle and frame-rates and timer events start to fall. This will happen even our game is running in a browser tab and we are in another tab. This can happen if we scroll down a page and the game is on the top portion of the page! The tricky part is different browsers behave differently and there is no clear idea about when the player starts throttling. So there is no fix solution for the same too.

Well the try to fix thing would be to look for two events  Event.ACTIVATE and Event.DEACTIVATE and start tweaking the code. But then as its known, different browsers have got different implementations, these events are also not consistent !!

I am putting here a little test movie, where there is a SWF embedded in an HTML page, 3 times one after other just to make sure I can hide some SWFs on the page. The SWF is running an ENTER_FRAME based text output in a textfield. Scrolling down and scrolling up on the same page can show the difference in the event calls in the same SWF

package
{
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.text.TextField;
import flash.text.TextFormat;

public class Throtlling extends Sprite
{

private var enterFrameCounter:int=0;
private var logger:TextField=new TextField();


public function Throtlling()
{
this.init();
}
private function init():void
{
this.logger.width=600;
this.logger.height=200;

this.logger.multiline=true;

this.logger.wordWrap=true;

this.logger.text=’log: ‘;

this.addChild(this.logger);
//
this.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,onEachFrame);
//
this.addEventListener(Event.ACTIVATE,onActive);
this.addEventListener(Event.DEACTIVATE,onDeActive);
}

private function onEachFrame(e:Event):void

{
this.enterFrameCounter++;
this.logger.text=(this.enterFrameCounter.toString());

var tf:TextFormat=new TextFormat();

tf.size=100;
this.logger.setTextFormat(tf);
}

private function onActive():void
{
this.logger.text=('Active!');
}
private function onDeActive():void
{
this.logger.text=('Deactivated!!');
}
}
}

Hope that helps someone out there !

Happy Flashing

Well, the core feature of the IDE is updated to a significant level. The development and publish settings for AIR is now having a visual dialogue box. There is a project template for AIR for Android. These are some of the things apart from the whole list of features listed here.

Happy Flashing

The game is CatchthemAll v1

Its kind of kid’s education and entertainment game. Multitouch is the core of the game play here.

More about the game is here.

Hope you enjoy it as I enjoyed making it.

Well, it took me more than the time I expected it should for some unavoidable reasons, but finally its up.

More about the game is available here.

The link to appstore is this.

Thanks a lot to all of you, who helped me with developing, testing and pushing it to the Appstore, you all rock.

2. Open these 2 (developer and distribution) certificates through key-chain. Now inside keychain application these two keys should be visible.

3. Create provisioning profile. This is also possible through developer.apple.com portal. The confusion is, the first certificates and installing to keychain application install will happen only once. But the provisioning profiles will keep on adding to the profiles, as each profile may be targeted to one version of one application. To add to the confusion there are 2 types of provisioning profiles available. One is development and one is distribution. Inside distribution, we have option of adhoc and appstore. So to push your app to appstore, one must use the appstore option while creating the profile. If you are intended to test the app in other iOS devices, then create the certificate using ad-hoc as the selected option. This will allow to install the application into other devices. Well, all these were happening in the distribution tab. Now if we talk about the development tab, the new profile creation will help one test and debug the application in a connected device to a mac. So all in all there are 3 kinds of profiles available for 3 different uses.

4. Next, one has to download the profile and install in XCode.

5. Once installed you can see all the profiles, developer profiles and provisioning profiles in the “Organiser” application. This will give you details regarding the profile activation and expiration dates too.

Thats it, bundle your application and push it to the store / other devices / connected device as per the application provision profile you use / intend.

Appart from all these certificate creation, you need to follow some online instructions to do some stuffs as get a png/jpg file of certain size, name these images and put them on server.

Thats the bare minimum about the appstore and sending your app to it.

Hope that helps someone out there.

I set myself up for some real iphone game development and finished up 2 opensource games, MathIsFun2 and CatchThemAll . Must say making opensource games is fun, exciting and gives one a lot of satisfaction. Even one fail to make an impression of idea or implementation, its never too late, and the community always helps you and pushes you forward. Then there is responsibility upon the self to finish things up with the same amount of enthusiasm as when you started the project. A lot of times it will feel to just leave it, but then it teaches one to be focused, motivated and keep on going till the end. Not an easy task but once put into practice, there is no more satisfaction than giving back to community.

A little about the games. MathIsFun, is a game where the game play takes the device orientation into account. Rotating the device, gives the player to play a different mode or state of the game. There are 4 types of questions ( addition, subtraction, multiplication and division ) Each side of the device is a different mode. And the user has to choose from the three options displayed on screen. the second game is about multi-touch. There are different colours on the screen and one has to choose, which colour is displayed for the maximum time currently on the screen. Since there are only five colours to choose from, one can choose with a single touch for one type of colour, a two finger touch for another and a three finger touch for another and it goes till five finger touch. While I myself is quite excited about the games, the community itself is also helping me out in the process.

The approval process has got its own story. I am not having an appstore license yet. One of my friends’ helped me by taking the first game (MathIsFun2) and pushing it to the appstore. Now, after sending it for more than 25 days (almost a month) and waiting till date, the game is in the cue !! Thats such a long time ! I am not sure what and how to fix, if there are errors in my code or something else.  Anyway, this is just to make things in perspective for others, who might be preparing their apps for the store.

Hope that helps someone and wishing you all the best for your application approval on Apple’s Appstore.