Life of a Glasgow Flash Developer

I’ve just added an example youtube chromeless player to my site. I have to say I was really surprised at how easy it was to convert one of my existing players that used netstream and convert it over to play youtube stream instead. You can see my example here: http://www.innovativedesigns.org.uk/#/Video gallery/

The chromeless youtube player comes without any controls but the options are there to go ahead and add your own controls as I did.  I am using the AS3 API for this. I will also be making a sample source available very soon.

More information about the chromeless player can be found here: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/flash_api_reference.html

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

I had to create a function where by I could avoid the button being pressed to quickly as some clicks where not being registered.

Some people will click a button as quickly as they can to see if they can break it lol.

We’ve received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we’ve greatly improved our ability to index Flash.

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Read more