Archive for the ‘Flash Platform’ 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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I’ve been using Robotlegs and Signals recently and they really are awesome to work with however I still had to create a Signal for each Signal that was dispatched through the application, which is more times than you would need to create a custom event. I was thinking about an approach to get around this problem when I saw some tweets from Jonnie Hallman about an Application Signal Bus. Luckily he was kind enough to post the following gist to demonstrate.
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In light of my recent post about why Robotlegs benefits from AS3-Signals I thought it was only fitting that I updated my Twitter Search demo! This was really easy to do; partly because the demo is so small. It also allowed me to use interfaces to reference view components in the mediators (one of the advantages of using Signals). The use of interfaces makes it really easy to swap out the view for something different, like a mobile version, without changing any core functionality. Anyway, click the image below to view the demo; view source is enabled and I’ve included the libs and html-template folders this time so it should be easier for you to compile!

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My problem with using the Event Model and Robotlegs

One of the things that bugs me about the use of the event model with Robotlegs is that Mediators are tightly coupled with the views. Take my Twitter Search Demo for example, the SearchEntryMediator class expects an instance of the SearchEntry class as its view, see below.

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I’ve had chance to play with Robotlegs this weekend and have really enjoyed it. It’s really lightweight and you find that you spend more time coding rather than repeating the same tasks like you would do in other frameworks.

The first demo I put together was a simple Twitter Search application, using the Twitter Search API. You can see the demo in all it’s glory by clicking the image below! View Source is enabled so you can download the source and have a play; you will need the Robotlegs SWC to compile though, you’ll find this on the Robotlegs website. If you have any feedback or questions please leave a comment below!
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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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