Life of a Glasgow Flash Developer

So I have just got my hands on the new HTC Legend. It is an Android 2.1 handset featuring with 600 MHz processor.

It had to be an android phone. Being a flash developer it hardly seemed right to give Steve Jobs my money.
I am not going to write some long winded review about the phone. There are plenty of bloggers doing that already.

What I am talking about here today is my challenge to build an app/widget/something for this phone

It is good to see that there is already a strong community of android/phone developers out there pushing software, ideas and help to get people like me up and running. A couple of sites that I have been recommend have turned out to be gold mines

http://developer.android.com/
This site has it all from what is Android to what software I need to get building.
The developer guide that takes you through setting up your build environment using Eclipse and sdk’s is great!. I was able to run my first sample app after a few hours.
Though it would be good to see a single IDE like Flash where you can just build and publish.
The site also has a bunch of sample apps doing various things available to try out.

http://www.phonegap.com/
This site scared me off a bit. Initially the site looks impressive and seems to cover every type of phone out there but once you click on your particular phone the style of the site changes and I am then displayed a page that looks like something that was created in the 90′s. A list of software to install with no descriptive reasons as to why. That’s not to say that the design of the pages bares any relevance on the content they are displaying but it all seemed a bit thrown together. I don’t want to put phonegap down I’ve still to actually try it!.

From what I hear there is a whole load of others all trying to do the same thing. For the moment I will be working between http://developer.android.com/ and http://www.phonegap.com/ using eclipse java sdk and windows android sdk

I’ve still to talk about flash websites in the browser on the android. Initially tests of some flash sites do show flash working pretty well though some site’s don’t size properly. I was really surprised to see my old site and DopeAwards running well via the phone some issue’s but nothing that stopped the sites displaying the information I would normally see. I will come back to this at a later time.

Ok so I know what I want to build hush* hush*. I know I can build this in Flash and have done in the past.
Let’s see how long it takes me to get something out there on the android.

TBC…

A few months back I had a play around with the Google map flash api and built this guestbook, another example of it can been seen here.
Well I’ve not had a chance to go back and tie of some loss ends on the guestbook map though it works perfectly well.
There is 3 things that would make this complete
1. Marker clustering
2. Geocoder, some kind of quick find me button
3. Update marker position with the edit feature.

I think if you are proficient in flash AS3 you should be able to get these done in no time.
With so many other things to get on with I’ve decided to make the source available for download .

Included are:

• Flash 9 Flash File
• Caurina tweener classes
• kharon4a_mini font
• index.html
• guestbook.swf
• AC_RunActiveContent.js
• map.php
• common.php
• but.as
• gMapEntry.as
• gMapForm.as
• guestbook.sql
• help.html

Font(s) used:

• kharon4a_mini

http://www.orgdot.com/aliasfonts/

Features include:

1. Email notification upon someone signing the guestbook
2. http check for urls in comments and web address fields
3. badword filter check. Replaces bad word if found in an array of word to filter to ****
   $changeto = ‘****’;
   $message = str_replace ($badwords, $changeto, $message);
   return $message;
4. CMS Feature that allows you to edit/delete any of the submissions
5. Map will stretch to fit available screen size

All the information to get you setup and running can be found in the help file included.
The guestbook requires a server running php+mysql

It’s only taking just under a couple of years. A lot of start stop and restart. Finally I can say “Damn it I am done!”

Yes it was about this time 2 years ago that I decided I would take the leap and start learning/using AS3. I did have 8 years of prior code experience with AS1 and AS2 but AS3 would be a whole different ball game. As it turned out it wasn’t that bad. Once I discovered how things I took for granted in AS2 where done in AS3 things got a lot easier. I am now at the stage where if something doesn’t work then it usually doesn’t take long to figure it out or find some other way of doing it.

There is still so much to learn and I don’t doubt for a second that version 4 code have been coded better but hey it runs error free and dose what it is supposed to do.

Version 4 has lost some sections and gained some new features. I wont bother going through them all you can just visit the site and check it out.
I have to say a special thanks to Richard Leggett and Michael Lawrence (byteface). Both these guys where on hand to give help and advice when I asked  for it and without them I would not got to the point I am at now.

I do plan to continue adding new sections and features to the site. I’ve already started working on a new section when done will hopefully see a nice little shopping cart where i can sell my flash files from.

So go visit my new flash site and sign my guestbook and possibly leave some nice comments.

Using the ExternalInterface in AS3 it’s never been easier to trigger Javascript functions on your page that holds your swf.
Previously with AS2 and below We would have used the getURL(“javascript:yourFunction();”) or
fscommand(“messagebox”, “Message box called from within Flash.”)

I was asked on the forums today how this would be done in AS3.

After quickly looking up ExternalInterface in the flash Doc’s I was able to through together a quick working example.
A working example can be seen here.

Here is the code:

For the past couple of months I’ve been working very hard converting the current DOPE Awards.com flash site over to HTML. That’s not to say the Flash site is going to disappear this is more to improve SEO with the site. The main aspect of this project was to have the html version of the site as near identical of the flash site.  Looking at the DOPE Awards html version of the site i think it’s pretty close and I hope you think so to.

Coming from a flash background of 8+ years this certainly was going to be a challenge. Well a few months later and it is finished. The site fully conforms to W3C and is also cross browser compatible on most popular browsers and even IE8.

Dope Flash website awards

Be sure to check out DOPE Awards.com as there is some great new features coming it’s way soon.  Also if you think you have a site Dope Awards worthy then why not get it posted.