This is my first post of what I suspect will be many on the subject of SWFt.
What is SWFt I hear you cry? Well in a nut shell SWFt is an Entity-Component based game framework powered by Dependency Injection. Still confused? Well basically its a really nice neat method for making flash games. Still interested? Read on!
Well its been a while since I have made a new mix, but I have been collecting tracks for it for a while. This one came together fairly quickly actually, about two days worth of composition and then a few variations until I was happy with it. I decided not to add any movie samples to this one to keep it nice and simple, got alot of other projects on at the moment! Im not even sure if people actually like those movie samples tho, let me know if you do!
I have called it Harmonics (Part 3) as the third instalment in my Harmonics series is long overdue and I felt that it just kinda felt like a Harmonics Mix.
Anyways, I have uploaded the mix to SoundCloud and used the last remaining hour that the free account gives you Give it a listen or download below:
Well as you can probably tell from my last few posts, I have been loving the simple browser drawing app called Harmony. Well, while playing with it I thought to myself, “Is there a reason this cant be done in Flash?”. Well this is the answer to my question.
I have called it Scribble and its very basic at the moment, not containing even many of the simple features in Harmony, I do however intend to keep adding to it. So over the course of several weeks I hope to add bit by bit till it becomes a fun little place to Scribble!
A while back, I had an idea for a very simple application that would sit in your taskbar and give you at-a-glance performance info about your system, similar to iStat Pro for OSX. This weekend I finally had time to clean up the code up for release.
The problem is that while looking for a couple of images for the app I happened to stumble across Taskbar Meters, which is pretty much the exact same idea I had. Looks like he has made a better job out of it that me too
Ah well, I have decided to release my version of the app nonetheless:
You can open the app multiple times and set each one to monitor a different value:
Thought I would share this little ditty. Been working in AIR recently and decided to make the window “chromeless” which means there are no controls so no resizing.
Thankfully however adobe provide the tools to allow for resizing the native window. So I produced this little mxml component to let you resize the window:
The coloured edges indicate where the application is draggable, including the white corner areas.
The component that lets you do this is pretty simple:
Well it thought it was about time I did some posting about my personal project im working on at the moment as I havent spoken about my coding for a while.
For a while now (alot longer than I had hoped for) I have been working on a project that falls outside the realms of my usual kind of games-related projects. Im not ready do describe exactly what it is yet but im excited about it.
For months I have been struggling with the techinal challenges the project has entailed and I have dabbled with many new and highly diverse technologies including JavaFX (Java), Qt (C++) and Mono (C#). I have been looking for a cross-platform technology that will get the job done that I need and doing it in an elegant manner.
I thought I had found it with a combination of JavaFX and straight Java using the PureMVC framework. I however was plagued with problems throughout with Bonjour, jGroups, JmDNS, JNI and JNA.
So after months of work, hardship and struggles I read a very interesting article on the up-and-coming Adobe AIR 2.0 that was opened for beta in December. With 2.0 Adobe are bringing NativeProcess to Air. What this means is that you can you can execute native code (.dlls, .so, .jar etc) from Air. To me this was bloody brilliant as I had been playing with Air reccently and my day-job heavily involves Flex and I simply love the power and beauty of Flex.
So what this meant to me was that I could write the bulk of my project including its interface in my much preferred Adobe Flex (Air) and then use Native Process to communicate with a small kernel of Java that would do all the dirty work that Air itself cant do.
So after a little playing with Flerry for Air->Java bridge I started to think about the structure of the code and the framework I would use. For my initial few runs at this project I had been using the Java version of PureMVC. I really like some aspects of PureMVC but I think its can be so overly cumbersome in some circumstances (ill write another post on this in the future I think). So instead I looked at the alternatives.
I have been using Mate alot recently at work and on my own mini-project the Audio Book Organiser. However as this project is partly for my own learning and personal growth I decided to look at what else there was out there. From the videos by Jessie Warden I had heard about Robot Legs. Apparently this framework has been around for a while, but it was the first I had heard of it. Taking at look at it I immediately became very excited as it looks like it offers all the things that make PureMVC great but without the extra coding-baggage that goes with it.
To add to my interest it appears another very interesting, very new action-script technology has been introduced into Robot Legs called Signals by Robert Penner. Signals is an alternative to the standard events dispatching method found throughout flash (more on this in another post).
So why have I called this post “the bleeding edge?”. Well Adobe Air 2.0 is still in beta and has only been for a month or so. Its so new that some parts still havent been documented atall and the only way to find out how they work is to post a msg to the devs on the forums. Signals is also new and its integration into Robot Legs is very new indeed (last coupple of weeks). So at the moment I feel as if im at the forefront of some very new, very exciting technology, a stark contrast to my fiddlings with the ancient Java.
I realise this post is very text and tech-heavy but I needed to post about it before I forgot all the pain I have gone through with this project to get where I am at the moment. Future posts ill be delving a little deeper into some of my experiments with these new technologies
Well I was just doing some audio book organising and realised that it would be great if I could drag and drop a folder straight from my AIR into iTunes ready for upload to my iPhone.
Anyways after a little searching through the docs I came up with this little ditty:
var cp : Clipboard = new Clipboard();
cp.setData(ClipboardFormats.FILE_LIST_FORMAT, [new File(book.url)], false);
NativeDragManager.doDrag(null,cp);
Just did a quick update to the audio book organiser. Added the ability to move the storage database file. This was so that I can put my storage file on Dropbox and it will then be backedup and synced between machines.
New version and sources:
Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.
Well its been a fun Christmas, I have eaten and drunk to the point that im going to be running it off in the gym till next christmas.
Although there has been merryment abound, the keyboard couldn’t keep me away. Its probably okay to say this now as im not under any secrecy act; I have decided to leave Massively Multimedia in Manchester to join a new startup called Ideas Pad in Wilmslow (just south of Manchester).
I cant say too much about exactly what I will be working on just yet but I can say that it will involve my experience in the Flash world. Specifically, I will be working in Adobe Flex again on some fairly sizeable projects. For this reason I wanted to brush up on my Flex as there has been a new release of the IDE (now named Flash Builder) and the SDK.
In addition I wanted to look at the various frameworks in use for Flex these days. I have used the usual Cairngorm, PureMVC before however I stumbled accross a new one called Mate (pronounced mah-tay, like the drink). Mate looked very interesting to me so before I jumped two feet in and used it in a commercial project I wanted to give it a spin in a simple project first.
Finally we get to the point of this post. I have developed a simple Adobe AIR application that allows you to organise audio books. The basic idea is simple you give the application a selection of ‘source’ directories where your audiobooks belong then you can tick off whether you have listened to each one, and what rating you would give them.
The data is persisted to a file that is saved to your hard drive, so when you open the application up again next time it remembers which audio books you have listened to and what ratings you gave them.
I havent tested it very much atall so there is a very high likelyhood of being some strange bugs in there. I am also releasing all the source code for this project for all to see, use and study if they so wish.
Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.
For the past several months I have been working on a little project completely different to anything I have done before. Its a desktop application that uses a number of novel technologies to do something I think is pretty cool. Ill talk more about what it actually is and does in the coming weeks, but for this post I just want to talk about the struggles and discoveries I have been through and made with the technology.
One of the basic tenants of the app is that it needs to work cross-platform, so on mac, windows, linux, etc. As my previous experience with any sort of cross-platform coding involves using Java that was my natural first choice.
It has been a while since I have coding anything substantial in Java, infact my university project Chain Reaction was my last serious foray into the language:
I knew that I wanted a nice rich interface for the project as it was intended to be sold to non-technical users. My first choice with Java was naturally with Swing. This, however, soon brought back various memories of ‘JPanels’, ‘Layouts’ and ‘Look and Feels’ and the headaches of trying to make simple things look attractive (tho some cool advances have been made with substance look and feel).
After having worked for years with Flash / Flex I had grown used to the ease of drawing graphics and manipulating Display Objects in the display hierarchy. I was dismayed at how difficult it was to do what I considered ‘simple graphic tasks’ using Java! A simple google search for the terms “Java 2d graphics” demonstrates how old some of the concepts and documentation is on the subject.
I ended up writing and rewriting my view using different libraries like G:
I found them all to be unwieldy and too inflexible for what I had in-mind. It all just seemed so archaic and old-hat.
So I was becoming more and more frustrated with myself for not progressing with the project and becoming hung up on something I had taken for granted in the Flash world. It was then that I happened to stumble across (this is after weeks of struggling) the JavaFX project. Now I had heard about this many months back but had dismissed it as Suns rather lame attempt to steal some of Adobe’s dominance of the Flash player market (much like Microsoft’s attempt with Silverlight).
As I was at the end of my line with Java I thought, hell why not give it a little look. Well it took me by surprise. It turns out that JavaFX is rather neat!
For those who havent heard f JavaFX; taken from Wikipeda:
JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications that can run across a wide variety of connected devices. The current release (JavaFX 1.2, June 2009) enables building applications for desktop, browser and mobile phones.
TV set-top boxes, gaming consoles, Blu-ray players and other platforms are planned.JavaFX is fully integrated with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) – JavaFX applications will run on any desktop and browser that runs the JRE and on top of mobile phones running Java ME.
What this means is that you can (with a little jiggery pokery) use JavaFX with normal Java. This is great as I had already written a whole load of code in Java which I didn’t want to get rid of.
The language JavaFX Script is great. It took a little getting used to as it is a declarative language (much like Flex’s MXML except that instead of using XML as the language it uses a Java Script like notation) but once I was used to it I could immediately see the awesome power it brings.
A little sample of code to give you a feel of how its declarative approach works:
This is your standard “Hello World” (but with a British twist):
The simplicity of rendering things to the screen was just what I was looking for as the for this project, it was a double bonus that the language is powerful.
I love some of the features of the language like the natively build in binding, the sequence manipulations, but Ill talk more about some of these features in another post as I have rambled enough in this one as it is.
avaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications that can run across a wide variety of connected devices. The current release (JavaFX 1.2, June 2009) enables building applications for desktop, browser and mobile phones. TV set-top boxes, gaming consoles, Blu-ray players and other platforms are planned.
JavaFX is fully integrated with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) – JavaFX applications will run on any desktop and browser that runs the JRE and on top of mobile phones running Java ME.
JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications that can run across a wide variety of connected devices. The current release (JavaFX 1.2, June 2009) enables building applications for desktop, browser and mobile phones. TV set-top boxes, gaming consoles, Blu-ray players and other platforms are planned.
JavaFX is fully integrated with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) – JavaFX applications will run on any desktop and browser that runs the JRE and on top of mobile phones running Java ME.
Give it a listen or download below:
Michael is a Professional Flash Developer currently based in Manchester UK. His passion is all things programming, particularly Games and Particle Systems.