The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) caught my eye this morning with the headline Flash on the iPhone, in demo form.  Intrigued, I clicked and was taken to a Github repository of what seems to be a JavaScript-powered Flash runtime named Gordon.  While the “player” itself only handles a few SWF capabilities, it is still a very interesting proof of concept.  I guess this just proves that there are some crazy lengths to which people will go to have their beloved Flash on the iPhone!  A lot of the iPhone community has been buzzing about Flash ever since the recent news that Flash CS5 will provide the ability for developers to natively export iPhone applications (native ipa files).  If you get the chance, check out the demos page on your iPhone or iPod Touch.  If you are too busy for that and want a really blurry video of Gordon in action that I shot with my webcam, you can view that below:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I had the chance to try out an upcoming iPhone/iPod Touch game today called Pro Zombie Soccer.  They didn’t ask me to write a review but I thought I would give them some coverage as I really enjoyed the game.  Also, I haven’t updated this blog in forever; I figure it’s about time for that.  If you like Zombies, and let’s be honest – who doesn’t, then you will likely enjoy this game.

Pro Zombie Soccer puts you in the role of a young and aspiring soccer player, Jax, who gets bitten by a zombie.  He then visits several locations where he fights the onslaught of zombies.

The demo I played only has about four levels in it and the music and graphics were excellent.  The controls are very basic and easy to use.

This is one to keep your eye on and to buy as soon as it is available! Check out the gameplay footage below:

I’ve been having many problems with Snow Leopard ranging from CS4 issues to Window Share access denials. My hopes are that the update 10.6.2 will help fix some of these. My pal Wayne installed the update this morning and got a scary message AFTER the install. Check out the attached screen shot. Apparently the installer finds some software which it doesn’t like and quarantines it. This didn’t happen to me so I guess my software is not old and lame hehe. The message also directs you to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3258 which lists software that is incompatible with the update as well as software such as the “Ratatouille” game from being allowed to run (random?). Just thought you guys might want a heads up. You may want to hold off on the whole Snow Leopard install for awhile if you need any of this software to work on your dev machine.

Anyway, I designed and developed an AIR App for those of you attending the conference this year. The App will allow you to view the schedule (which will update should there be changes), allow you to email session information to a friend and allow you to schedule a reminder for sessions of your choice. In addition to the schedule, the App will load Flashpitt related Tweets from Twitter into the Banter tab as well as allowing users to view pictures taken at Flashpitt 2008 and 2009 on the Flickr tab.

We are currently in private beta 2 for the App, if you are interested and are attending the conference you can shoot me an email at ben at pixelfumes.com to apply as a beta tester. Hope you like the App and find it useful!

Schedule View

Session Detail and Reminder

Banter

Flickr

Quite some time ago I posted that Flashpitt was running again this year. Time has really flown because now Flashpitt 2009 is only a month away. It’s coming up on October 15th and 16th.

It’s looking like it’s going to be a great event again this year. They’ll have a full day of sessions again this year and they’ve added a full day of workshops right before the conference as well. So there’s a chance to get some more indepth knowledge before jumping in to the full day of session. The speakers list is pretty impressive, too!

This year I’ll be an attendee instead of a speaker which means I’ll get to check out a lot more sessions than last year. I’m especially looking forward to checking out Jer Thorp’s and Seb Lee-Delisle’s sessions. Both of them do does some amazing, yet totally different, work. On the more technical side Scott Janousek’s mobile session is also one I want to catch.

Check out Flashpitt.com for all the sessions and speakers.

This variation takes in to account varying heights for the items in each row. You can configure the number of columns to display as well. This code can easily be modified to change these parameters or to set number of rows as the primary setting instead of columns. You will notice in this example I use little boxes, you would swap out the “item” (sprite, movie clip, etc.) that you would want in the grid in place of this. Hope this proves useful for some of you.

/************************************/
//Pixelfumes 2009 - Ben Pritchard
//AS3 Quick Grid Layout - Fluid Row Height
/************************************/
//items in the grid
var nItems:uint = 10;
//number of columns desired
var nCols:uint = 4;
//col and row padding
var padding:uint = 3;
//loop vars
var nCreated:uint = 0;
var tallestItem:Number = 0;
var lastItem:Object;

for(var i:uint=0;i<nItems;i++){
	//swap this block for whatever item is
	//being used in the grid
	var item:Sprite = new Sprite();
		item.graphics.beginFill(0xCCCCCC);
		item.graphics.drawRect(0,0,30,30);
		item.graphics.endFill();

	//add the item to the grid
	addChild(item);

	//keep track of the tallest item in this row
	if(item.height > tallestItem){
		tallestItem = item.height;
	}

	//if we are not on the very first item
	if(nCreated != 0){
		//have we reached the max col for this row
		if(nCreated % nCols == 0){
			item.x = 0;
			item.y = lastItem.y + tallestItem + padding;
			tallestItem = 0;
		}else{
			item.x = lastItem.x + lastItem.width + padding;
			item.y = lastItem.y;
		}
	}

	nCreated++;
	//update last item
	lastItem = item;
}

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch odds are you have seen or even played Pocket God. Pocket God is a neat little game that let’s you do whatever you like to a little group of pygmies. Most of the time this consists of tossing them to sharks or volcanoes though.

I was interested today by a great article over at Macenstein that talked a little bit about the Flash roots of the art. Apparently event the initial concept of the game was created in flash (albeit 1’s and 0’s for learning binary instead of pygmies).

Dave had the initial idea of pygmies on an island. It was loosely based on an educational flash project we had done a a few years ago. The objective was to pick up cute little ones and zeroes with googly eyes and put them in order to create a binary number. If you dropped them in the wrong place, they looked panicked and yelled “whoa” and dropped off the screen.

Head on over to Macenstein to read more about the process Allan Dye uses within Flash and the processes that lead to the release of the game.

I had a great time traveling out to Ohio for this year’s Spring <br /> Conference. Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions as well! My slides from my presentations are available for download here:

Intro to Flash CS4:
Presentation slides (swf – use left and right arrow keys to change slides)

Intro to Adobe AIR 1.5:
Presentation slides (swf – use left and right arrow keys to change slides)
ThemeSong AIR Application

Great Information Gleaned From Sessions I Attended
My favorite session of the day was Eric Meyer’s “JavaScript Will Save Us All”. He had some really great links in the presentation to a lot of different frameworks and I thought I would share them with you all:

280 Slides
http://280slides.com/
Think of it as a free Keynote Presentation tool that is web based!

Mozilla Bespin
https://bespin.mozilla.com/
An extensible web-based web-code editor using HTML5!

ie7-.js and ie-8.js
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
A JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser.

Mozilla Jetpack
https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/tutorial.html
Extend Firefox using JavaScript instead of XUL – very quick and awesome!

O3D
http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/docs/samplesdirectory.html
Google’s 3D JavaScript – shaders, environments, etc. Let the “craziness” ensue.

Processing.js
http://processingjs.org/
Processing ported to JavaScript!

Raphaël
http://raphaeljs.com/
A small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web

JQueryUI and JSBin I also attended Richard Worth’s JQueryUI: Hands On session. I didn’t even know that JQueryUI existed – I am very excited to try it out! Here are some related links that I found beneficial from his session:

JQueryUI
http://www.jqueryui.com/
UI Widgets for use with JQuery

JSBin
http://jsbin.com/
Edit HTML and JavaScript online in a virtual environment.

Thanks again to OU for having me at Spring <br /> this year! Hope some of these links benefit you as well.

Though a big fan of the Flash IDE, I do use Flex as my ActionScript editor from time to time. So, when I heard about Flash Builder coming out I became very interested in the direction that Adobe was taking.  I just downloaded the Flash Builder beta in order to check this bad boy out.

Have no clue as to what I am talking about? Check out Lee’s post on the subject and then head over to labs to see what Adobe cooked up for us this time.

You can visit the tutorials section for Flash Builder 4 and watch an introductory video over at Labs as well.  If you want more details you can visit the Developer Center.  Adobe recently posted in depth articles on some of the new features in the Flex Developer Center.  I’m still slightly confused as this version of Flash Builder still has MXML options in it and I thought they were making the product previously know as Flex the MXML editor and FlashBuilder the ActionScript 3 editor.  Also, we know there will be another version of the Flash Professional IDE, according to Lee Brimelow, containing an updated ActionsPanel as well.  Anyway…  Let me know what you guys think!