Mobile game contest

For the 2nd year actionscript.it community announced a mobile flash contest.
Another exciting new feature is the active participation of Jamba, which will be sitting in the jury panel, and will review all the games in the contest. If Jamba finds one or more games it considers interesting and fit for distribution through their network, they have agreed to offer a revenue sharing contract directly to the developers involved.

Prizes are

Flashlite category:
• 1st prize: Flash Studio 8
• 2nd prize: IRiver 2G
• 3rd: 3 O’Rilley Books

J2ME Category:
• 1st prize: Nokia N93
• 2nd prize: IRiver 2G
• 3rd prize: 3 O’Rilley Books

Go now to the actionscript.it contest page and submit now your game!
You have untl January 29th 2007 to submit your Game.

Ps. I’ll be in the jury too 🙂

From A to Web memories

Yesterday I attended the Italian Adobe conference, From A to Web, in Milan.
I like expecially the Mike Downey presentation, in which he showm us a sneak peak of the new Adobe project, codename “Apollo”.
A PDF+Flash+HTML plugin viewer for creating desktop applications (so, goodbye Zinc and similar?). Someone asked him which html engine was used in apollo, but without a precis answer, I think he was referring to Geko…
Also interesting the Mike’s explanation about the reason of the name “Apollo”.
That’s because the first Central codename was “Mercury” (early American program for launching humans into space) the second beta codename was “Gemini” (the second US manned spaceflight program), and Apollo was the first ship to land the Moon

Then he introduced also a preview of the new Flash9 IDE (currently in beta process, codename “Blaze”) and he shown some of the new IDE features. First of all the IDE has changed (like in almost new releases) and there are very cool workspace management cool features indeed.
A completely integrated Photoshop PSD import process. You can select which element of the psd file to be imported and how to do it, select one of the layers and import as movieclip, etc.. very nice for designers (There was a long applause).
Another features he presented was the Robert Penner export as ActionScript3 of timeline tweens. This should be for developers who need to transform the timeline motion tweens created by designer into code (Another long applause). For what I understand it creates an xml code which can be put into the timeline and which reproduce the original tween. But I also understand that the produced code can only be used into the same timeline (a timeline with the same number of frames)..,

FZip and Transform Tool

This post is just for pointing out a couple of very interesting tools for Flash9 I recently discovered.

  1. FZip: a little ActionScript3 class (Claus Wahlers and Max Herkender) which enable you to extract files from .zip files.
    Read the original post here
    Download and documentation are here: http://codeazur.com.br/lab/fzip/
  2. Transform Tool: a class (by About Trevor ) which allow to make every kind of transformations on flash display objects.
    See it here

Flex2 and namespaces extending components

I took 2 hours to find a solution for that and I decided to blog it..
I was creating my new Flex2 component extending the UIComponent class and I need to define new custom styles for my own component…
Ok, i opened the “create and extend components” PDF guide and found that I need to put this code to accomplish it:
private static function classConstruct():Boolean
{
if (!StyleManager.getStyleDeclaration("ResizeManager"))
{
var newStyleDeclaration:CSSStyleDeclaration = new CSSStyleDeclaration();
newStyleDeclaration.setStyle("boxSize", 4);
StyleManager.setStyleDeclaration("ResizeManager", newStyleDeclaration, true);
}
return true;
}

That’s all, but at this time the compiler die with that error message “1000: Riferimento ambiguo a setStyle”, which in english should be: “1000: Ambiguous reference to setStyle“.
I google for some time but without finding a solution, then I discovered the problem. I was using in my component the mx_internal namespace, that was the problem. Once changed namespace everything was ok.

Flex2 again: CheckBox 3state

I continue with Flex2 experiments and still fighting again the documentation..

Ok, does someone know where I can find an exhaustive documentation of all the compc command line arguments? I looked around but I had no luck.. only few words about them.
Second, I haven’t found anything really complete about create Flex2 components, styles and skins, setting default styles, embedding stc.. I had to search in many places and looking at the code of someone else already did.. fortunately I’ve found an example from Peter Ent.

Ok, this I created a checkbox which allows a ‘3rd state’ selection. Flex2 checkboxe allows only selected/unselected state, so I added the possibility to set a “middle” state.

Here a couple of example about it:

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”9.0.0″ movie=”http://blog.sephiroth.it/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/example.swf” width=”300″ height=”150″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

Get Adobe Flash player

[/kml_flashembed]

Download the source code here:

[attachments docid=856 force_saveas=”1″ logged_users=”0″]

From Web to Desktop

Yesterday Screenweaver HX was announced as part of the haxe framework.
With SWHX, you create an application by using two layers :

  • the System layer : written in haXe and using the Neko API, you can access the local filesystem, databases, network sockets… You can also easily extend its capabilities by writing your own DLL.
  • the Flash layer : written in haXe or any other technology capable of producing SWF, you can use this layer to display the graphical interface, handle user interactions, play sound and video…

Unfortunately I’m trying to install haxe/swhx on my Windows Vista but I’m not lucky at the moment 🙁

The second project is directly from Adobe labs, called Apollo (flash, html, and pdf together), and currently it’s only a long description of what it can do and a list of F.A.Q., but Adobe says it will be pre-released on Adobe labs in the second half of 2006..

I’ve also found a diagram which display makeup of an Apollo application.

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.