Uza's Blog & More

Alchemist for Adobe AIR on Android

Paulius Uza — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:00:27 +0000

At this year’s Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona Adobe Systems Inc. officially announced the much anticipated Adobe AIR for Smartphones and Mobile Devices. Using Adobe AIR, developers and designers will be able to build standalone applications to target devices running the Google Android operating system.

Adobe’s own Michael Chou was kind to feature our “Alchemist” game in their technology announcement post which you can see here.

We at InRuntime Ltd. have been working closely with Adobe for the last couple of weeks to deliver our new games across a range of new platforms and devices using pre-release and lab versions of Adobe CS5 family products. As a result of that “Alchemist” game is currently available in three formats:

Adobe Flash 10.1 version for web (optimized for mobile) – play for free
Native app for iPhone and iPod Touch – info | purchase
Adobe AIR Mobile for Google Android (technology preview)

If you are attending MWC 2010 this year, make sure to stop by Adobe’s booth at Stand 1D45 in Hall 1 and see “Alchemist” running on a wide range of devices!

During the next few weeks I will be posting information on our company website and this blog about cross-device and cross-platform development using the exciting new tools available in Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Please follow us on Twitter @inruntime and @pauliusuza to get the latest updates!

Thanks!

How to market your iPhone app

Paulius Uza — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:12:50 +0000

When we were building our first application “Alchemist”, we have compiled a list of useful marketing resources that helped us push it out through the door with zero additional investment for marketing purposes. Today we want to share these resources with you:

Twitter

We have compiled a list of people who work with iPhone reviews, follow them, and @ them your application name. If you are lucky, you can get a pretty nice viral effect going on. Here’s our iPhone reviewers list on Twitter.

Microsite

Make a small one page website about your app and add Google Analytics. Focus on the visual appeal, describe your app in just a few sentences, put a list of features (by version if you have updates) and a clearly visible price tag with a link to iTunes Store. Think about this site as a “press kit” so that reviewers don’t need to email you to get information about your app, app screenshots and videos, company info and developer bios – it has to have it all in one place. Here’s an example site we have built for our Alchemist game

Youtube

Create an account on YouTube (if you don’t have one already), make a video of your app gameplay using screen capture software + iPhone simulator and post it on your channel. In the description or the comments section add a short text about what your app does and a link to iTunes store. It can generate a nice and steady flow of buyers. Make sure you encode the video as H.264 so it’s playable on iPhone and iPod too. Here’s our gameplay video for Alchemist.

SEO

If your app has a similar name to competitor’s, make sure you put a unique keyword next to it that will clearly distinguish it in the search results – your company name, or author’s name will do fine, ex.: “Appname by Your Name” or “Company’s Appname”. Use a short name for application if possible and avoid common words. When posting on Twitter, use #iPhone, #iPod, #App, #AppStore or #iTunes tags to channel the information and make it more discoverable.

Apply for Reviews

Here’s a list of review sites that we have gathered ourselves.
You can apply for review through a web form:

Or send emails directly to reviewers:

Check User Reviews

Most of the app tracking sites have their own user reviews, check them out from time to time to get a more complete picture.
Here’s the biggest app tracking sites:

Self Promotion in Forums

Here’s a couple of forums with high traffic that encourage developers to announce their new applications in specific sections.

Feedback

Collect user feedback. You can set up a forum in your site, use comment section in your blog or use a 3rd party feedback service like http://getsatisfaction.com

Ranking

Use software or web services to get reports about your app ranking on iTunes:

Track app sales:

Gather and track in-app analytics:

Once a day you can also download your daily sales report and process it with special software such as App Store Sales by PositiveTeam

Impact

Experiment with search engine queries until you found the one that returns links to your app most frequently and bookmark it. Check the bookmarked search query for changes in number of results every couple of hours. This will give you a good overview of how the information about your app is spreading all over the web. Here’s an example query that to track our Alchemist game.

Analytics

Check your Google Analytics at least every 24 hours and compare your website traffic with your sales data, look for spikes in sales coinciding with spikes in website traffic. Also check traffic sources section to know who’s linking to you and from where you get most of your traffic. Use the new Intelligence feature of Google Analytics to set up alerts for when your daily site traffic spikes above 25%. This might happen if your app gets featured in one of the bigger review sites.

If you have any questions / additions / suggestions please leave them in the comment section below!

Alchemist – building iPhone apps with Flash CS5

Paulius Uza — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:55:54 +0000

Alchemist

So here we are in year 2010 and it’s the fifth day since the launch of our first iPhone and iPod game called “Alchemist” ( official website / iTunes link ). During the two first days of it’s existence “Alchemist” was promoted as a free app and it managed to gain #4 in Spain, #5 in Argentina and #6 position in Italy in Family games category and bring in very good user reviews. We are very pleased with it’s performance.

If you own an iPhone or iPod touch, be sure to check it out!

The game was built with Adobe Flash CS5 and Flex Builder 4 from scratch to finish, here’s a little how and why we did it.

Prologue

We have to admit it – we are no mobile developers. Before doing “Alchemist” our team had little to none experience of building a mobile application. Most of you reading this will find yourself in more or less the same situation. Why? Because mobile as we web developers know it is slow, difficult, closed, incapable and highly segmented platform and thus there are very few of those who do try to enter mobile development world as indie developers.

Most of the mobile platforms like Nokia’s S60, Windows Mobile and iPhone offer SDKs and tools for developers, but the technology and programming language know-how required to use them are usually very different. If you were like us, looking for true “build once, use everywhere” solution with minimum investment you would be dissapointed to know that one did not exist… Until now.

What Has Changed?

First up, Adobe announced that Flash CS5 will ship sometime in 2010 with something called “Packager for iPhone” and you will be able to compile native iPhone applications with technology and tools that you know, love and use everyday. Flash CS5 Creative Suite will be optimized for creating mobile content out of the box and the workflow between design / coding / deployment will be much more integrated than before allowing you to cut down dramatically on total production time.

Second technology that popped up on our radar was ELIPS Studio 3 by Open Plug. When final version is released in 2010 (currently in beta) it will be able to generate source code for native mobile applications from Actionscript 3 and Flex 3 projects. It means that with a single click you will be able to convert your Actionscript 3 project to source code for Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian S60 and Android, and later build it for that target platform.

Third technology that we found out about recently is Haxe’s cpp target. When used with two additional libraries “nme” and “neash” it allows to compile Haxe code for iPhone directly from XCode! Geeky but very cool nevertheless.

And finally Adobe’s Open Screen Project recently got a boost of major industry players and newcomers like Google, which means that first new devices with Flash Player 10.1 will hit the market in Q1 2010.

We were lucky enough to be able to evaluate all aforementioned products and technologies before their public releases and as a result of that we decided to start up a mobile development branch withing our company and first to build one simple game for demonstration purposes and try our luck in a completely new but very promising market.

iPhone Development with AS3

We decided to launch our first application for iPhone only and later extend it to other platforms when technology is mature enough. We think that iPhone as a platform is the best for beginners, here’s 4 “why”:

It has it’s own smart and working distribution model with in-device content store.
iPhone / iPod market has highly capable devices (big and nice screen, multi touch, wifi, bluetooth, gps) with low segmentation.
Developer earns 70% from each sale.
Lots of devices already on the market and growing each day.

Making Choices

For us the most important thing was the ability to easily port our existing code to another platform sometime in the future and to be able to maintain simplicity in the production pipeline. Also we wanted to be sure that we will be able to get a return on our initial investment in a reasonable amount of time therefore we decided to write our game libraries in Actionscript 3. Even if we don’t get the possibility to compile a native application for all other platforms, we will be able to deploy for Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices inside the browser.

We know that there’s no ideal technology for every situation, therefore we have set up our company’s toolset like this:

Unity 3D for games that need 3D
Adobe Flash CS5 for 2D, isometric games and all applications with custom UI or rich media
Elips Studio 3 for cross-platform business applications
XCode for everything in-between

The current 3D solutions (Papervision, Sandy, Alternativa or even native 3D) in Flash Player are not optimized for iPhone development and are unusable. Also Flash Player on iPhone is using it’s own drawing API therefore drawing operations are extremely expensive and most of the UI and 3D libraries here are more or less useless. We see a huge opportunity for new products and libraries, open source and commercial alike to fill in this gap (hint hint).

Unity3D is great. It’s actually the best platform if you want to develop 3D for iPhone hands down. It also offers cross-platform and web compilation and you can write your entire game code in Javascript so you can make the transition from Actionscript 3 really easy, especially if you come from a web background.

We have left XCode development as a fallback option, but we are confident that at this point Flash, Elips and Unity3D can cover 95% of our development needs.

Working with Adobe Flash CS5

Adobe Flash CS5 will provide a lot of enhancements on the UI side that you will like and that will make your life much easier, however it will not impress you if you consider yourself a coder like we do. Although code completion got some improvements, it still sucks. Intentionally or not, Adobe will provide a solution to this problem allowing to write code and compile your Flash project from within Flash Builder 4. We have tested it and it works great!

The coolest features for us were:

You can now use embedded assets from Flash Builder inside Flash CS5 and you don’t have to mess with the library anymore
One click preview your app inside a iPhone (AIR) simulator from within Flash CS5 and Flash Builder
No messing with XCode, or re-compiling – Flash CS5 will compile a native *.ipa iPhone installer
Live debugging on device

We cannot compare our experience with same level mobile development on XCode, but the whole process on Flash CS5 felt like a breeze to us from start to finish. The suite actually allows anyone with Photoshop and basic Flash coding knowledge to build a fully functional iPhone app. Of course you can ‘go ahead and learn Obj-C’ anytime, but we think Adobe’s new toolkit focuses more on creative side of development, fast prototyping and giving artist the tools for creating a great user experience. One-man-army type of development will now be much easier and we will see a lot of new inspired apps very soon.

As for our game – “Alchemist” looks and performs great, just like any other native iPhone app. Adobe has done a terrific job on maxing out the performance without developer having to poke around the code too much. Once you get the bitmap caching sorted out, that’s pretty much it.

Epilogue

With Flash CS5 don’t expect to:
- Make an app with heavy frame animations
- Use Papervision3D in an app
- Port a web game without optimizing it for iPhone

Things to watch out for:
- No mobile UI element libraries
- No social gaming support (plus+, openfeint)
- No in-app purchases support

Most of the libraries for iPhone are available in C# and it will take some time to port them to AS3, we suggest to start thinking about what you could do to fill out these empty gaps maybe it will turn out to be a great business opportunity for you.

For now, thanks for reading, have a great new 2010 and please watch us at http://www.inruntime.com / follow on twitter @inruntime

Flash CS5 Beta Cancelled

Paulius Uza — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:01:08 +0000

Flash CS5 Beta Cancelled

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AS3 Global Object 2.0

Paulius Uza — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:35:51 +0000

Hello,

I’ve just refreshed AS3 Global Object to version 2.0 by refactoring and simplifying most of the code. The main change is that the classes now reside in new package com.inruntime.utils and there’s only two of them (down from four) which also solves some code conflicts.

Also, AS3 Global Object has got a new home at Github – http://github.com/inruntime/AS3-Global-Object. The download links in this blog were updated and are now pointing to the latest release in Github repository.

Enjoy!

MTV Stylesheet + Scale9 Bitmap

Paulius Uza — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 03:30:35 +0000

WIP
My team recently started working on the new MTV community site packed with social networking and new media features. The project concept is huge and we hope this time the design will gonna be top notch too.

As you might already know yesterday I released one of the new UI helper classes that we are using in this project – AS3 Scale9 Bitmap letting you create scalable, state aware UI elements from bitmap data. Today I will show you a very simple example how we are using this class in everyday work.

Stylesheet
So this is the stylesheet which I made in Photoshop while testing different design variations for the new MTV community website. Nothing fancy, just some components and sub-components displayed in all possible states (normal, hover, down):

Working Demo
And this is what I was able to achieve using the AS3 Scale9 Bitmap class in less than 30 minutes (including building the selectbox):

As you can see, I was able to make a very dynamic and flexible UI component with very little effort using the new helper class. Go ahead and download a copy, I would be happy to hear how you used it in one of your projects!

AS3 Scale9 Bitmap Documentation
Download Now: AS3 Scale9 Bitmap (3122)

AS3 Scale9 Bitmap – New In Codex

Paulius Uza — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:10:59 +0000

AS3 Scale9 Bitmap is helper class that lets you create scale9 sprites with bitmap data fill – originally this was not possible in Flash 9. The helper class creates a “fake” scale 9 sprite containing 9 shapes that scale according to user-defined scaling matrix. Extremely useful for user interface work (creating buttons, scalable UI elements etc.).

Read Documentation
Download AS3 Scale9 Bitmap (3122)

Demo:

Scale9SimpleStateButton (top left), Scale9SimpleBitmapSprite (top right) and original skin files (bottom row)

Stop Motion + Projection

Paulius Uza — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:22:25 +0000

This is simply amazing! Be sure to watch the whole thing!

SCINTILLATION from Xavier Chassaing on Vimeo.

MTV Web Radio

Paulius Uza — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:30:48 +0000

I want to share with you something very cool that we uploaded to www.mtvgreece.gr today. The new feature is called MTV Radio and it streams non stop music in stereo right to your browser through a little Flash widget in the sidebar. So far it’s totally ad-free and probably it will continue to be like that for time to come.

Streaming service is brought to you by Akamai so there should be little to none connectivity problems but in case you notice something weird happening with the stream in your location – please leave a shout.

Go check it out!

Adobe Captivate 4 + AS3 RightClick

Paulius Uza — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:52:44 +0000

I am very pleased to announce that my open source solution for capturing right click events in Actionscript 3 has been officially integrated into Adobe Captivate 4 software. I want to thank and congratulate all the people that contributed to the project with their ideas, code and feedback. Your input was invaluable!

Special thanks go to Dan Florio (aka PolyGeek) and Aarif Ali Saiyed.

Official Project Site
Demo Page