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…

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.

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.

When I get the time I am trying to learn what I can of AS3. Over the past couple of months I’ve been messing around with the google flash maps api.

Initially I was a bit overwhelmed with it but I have stuck with it and built a simple guestbook system that use’s mysql+php on the back end.

Features include:

• Custom controls
• Custom icons
• Custom markers
• Custom infoWindow
• Email notification of someone signing the guestbook
• Bad word filter
• http check on submitted url’s
• Custom right click menu
• Fullscreen toggle

Newly added features :22/05/09

• Quick zoom //  Zoom in on point
• Map Settings panel
• Enable/Disable mouseWheel scroll
• Enabled/Disable map mouse click zoom
• Hide/Show map types panel
• Hide/Show map zoom panel

And to tie it off I have also added a simple admin feature that allows use to edit/delete submissions to the guestbook.
You can login to the admin system by pressing CTRL+SHIFT this will bring up the login window. username:admin, password:admin

I just have a couple of things I want to get done before I move onto my next map experiment. Please feel free to let me know your comments.

View/sign the simple guestbook system

The source for this guestbook is now available for download from here.

Forgive me if this is old news. So here i am working on html version of dopeawards.com So most of it is done and we’re just run through everything is set to make the most of Search engine optimization (SEO) and noticed that all alt tags on out images are not working in firefox but are in IE.
Not sure if this was common knowledge in the html circle with me being a flash developer .
It turns out IE should not be displaying alt messages in tooltips, that’s what the title attribute is for.
Don’t stop using the alt attribute, that’s required for accessibility. So your best bet is to include both an alt attribute, and a title attribute in your img tags if you want a tooltip.

An easy quick fix