Archive for the ‘Actionscript’ Category

My app, Shottts, has been approved and is now available for free in the Blackberry App World! This is the first app I’ve developed and published to a store myself, so I’m pretty excited to see it out there.

I submitted the app as part of the free BlackBerry PlayBook offer for developers, but the app has only been tested on the simulator as I haven’t got my device yet. Perhaps there’s an argument for not making it available, but it ran well on the simulator so I took the decision to release it and it’s had quite a few downloads considering I haven’t advertised it at all! I’ve got lots of features planned for the app, I’m just waiting for my Playbook to be shipped so I can properly test the app before investing time on updates.

For those of you that are interested, the app was developed using StarDribbbleLib, which is available on Github, there’s also a blog post about it.

Anyway, if you’ve got a Playbook give it a shot, it’s free! And let me know what you think.

What is Dribbble?

Dribbble is show and tell for designers, developers and other creatives. Share sneak peeks of your work as “shots” – small screenshots of the designs and applications you’re working on.
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Background

The concept of making modular requests is one I’ve used in recent projects, and I thought it was time to standardise and release this as a library. Each request revolves around a simple interface:

The aim is to make each request modular, consistent, simple and for it to clean up after itself. By making each request implement an interface, and therefore consistent, it facilitates the creation of useful utilities. With this in mind I thought I’d put together a library of common requests and utilities.
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Robotlegs has been gaining a lot of ground over the last few months within the Flash community, and so I thought it was about time I gave it a shot. This post includes some of the resources I found really useful when getting started with the framework.
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I couldn’t resist sharing one of my recent experiments with the HYPE framework (it also uses the MinimalComps component set). The example makes use of the ObjectPool, ColorPool and ShapeLayout classes. It’s really cool that you can put stuff like this together in just a few hours. I will be adding the source to GitHub soon, which should hopefully make it more interesting!

Update: The source code is now available.
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Today I found out (the hard way) that there are several issues that can occur when trying to upload files using the FileReference class on MACs.

FileReference.type always returns null

It’s often that case that you want to restrict the file type the user can upload, or perform different processes depending on the type of file uploaded. However the type property of a FileReference object always returns null on MACs; to work around this you must get the file extension manually. To do this you can use the following code (it’s good practice to always convert the file extension to lower case before working with it).
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Tutorial Overview

This tutorial will build upon the Introduction to using the StatefulToolkit example; it will add the ability to utilize the Clipboard in our example. The example will use the ClipboardUtil, which is a utility class included in the toolkit that allows the user to copy and paste objects using the clipboard. The example application will build upon the last one; it will allow the user to position four circles, to save and load the state of the circles (i.e. where the circles are positioned) and to copy and paste the circles. The example can be seen here and source files are available.

Preparation

Before you being implementing this tutorial make sure you have the latest version of the StatefulToolkit SWC, and that you’re project is set to target Flash Player 10 (if you want to target FP9, simple replace the Vector with an array in the circle container) . This tutorial also uses Keith Peter’s Minimal Comps component set to create the buttons in the application so you may want to grab the SWC for that too, but you can use your own buttons if you prefer. Both SWC files are included in the available flex project.
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Branden Hall and Joshua Davis have collaborated on a new framework called HYPE. Their aim with HYPE is to help bring back the playfulness that once defined the Flash community.

Getting Started

The HYPE framework lowers the barrier for people to begin playing with Flash by offering a lot of functionality out-of-the-box. It’s really easy to get started with HYPE, just download the framework from the homepage. They’ve even put together a nice set of installation and setup instructions, which shows you everything from how to install the files to adding basic functionality. Branden has also posted a Halloween themed tutorial screencast that shows how to use some of the core functionality of HYPE.

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Recently I’ve been introduced to a code formatter for Flex Builder 3 and thought it was worth sharing. The plug-in formats, indents and rearranges both MXML and ActionScript code.

Downloading the plug-in

There is a version of the plug-in available here, but I haven’t installed it from there. Below I’ve included instructions on how to install the plug-in using the software updates feature in Flex Builder. Continue reading »