New AS3 Contest by Mike Chambers - Nov 10

Source: Phlashers by Carlos Nazareno

Hey all!

Mike Chambers, the Flash Platform Developer Relations Product Manager at Adobe, is running an AS3 contest that ends Friday.

What: ActionScript 3 Development Task Contest (AS3DTC) When: Submissions must be received by Mike Chambers (mesh@adobe.com) by 12 Noon, PST, Friday, November 13th. Who: Anyone is eligible (see details below) Prizes: Copy of Flex Builder 3, choice of a T-shirt from threadless.org, lots of random swag, and the admiration and adulation of your ActionScript developer peers.

For more details, head on over to Mike’s blog.

Good luck to all entrants!

Adobe MAX goodness - Oct 12

Source: Phlashers by Carlos Nazareno

Well, Adobe MAX just finished last week and there were quite a few exciting announcements made. Oh and off-topic, you can see our Phlashers logo in the montage above It’s great to see Adobe’s support for its user communities!

• One of the most awesome things unveiled was that Flash CS5 will be able to export to native iPhone apps. 7 sample iPhone apps have already been built using a pre-release version of Flash CS5 and are available at the App Store. The beta of Flash CS5 will be available later this year and you can read up on features at its its Adobe Labs page.
• Another great technology discussed was Adobe AIR 2.0 (codenamed “Athena”) which will have raw access to the user’s microphone and USB drive mounting/unmounting detection + file reading.
• Also, we there’s the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 which will be available on most major smartphones via the Adobe Open Screen Project. An exciting part of the announcement was that Google & RIM is joining the Open Screen Project, which means you can expect Flash to run on future Android and Blackberry devices aside from Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.
• Check out Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch and SVP John Loiacono in their MythBusters spoof, “MythHackers” where they tackle the subject of running Flash on the iPhone
• Finally, 250 hours of Adobe MAX 2009 sessions are now available online for FREE and without geo-limits! View the MAX 2009 developer sessions here.

FlashLite Developer Challenge - Mar 28

Source: Phlashers by Mj Mendoza IV

Anyone here who still writes FlashLite Apps/Games? Err, none? Not even for US$15,000? That’s around P700,000 we’re talking about here.

That price could have already given you the boost to start your contest piece.

Now here are the categories as posted from the FlashLite Developer Challenge website:

1. Game — Enter into this category if your Flash Lite application is fun, interactive, and addictive and vaguely looks like one of the nominees or winners of the International Mobile gaming Awards. If you have an addictive cross platform game, allowing people to play from OC to phone, this is the category for you. You can also check out our sponsors’ websites for examples of games: Thumbplay or GetJar

2. Infotainment — Infotainment is a combination of Information and Entertainment. It therefore refers to Entertaining Information, but it can also refer to Entertainment News. Or even entertaining entertainment news! So if your application is an entertaining information service for mobile, this is your category. The more entertaining the service and the higher the information value the better.

3. Lifestyle — If you provide a service that helps people to decide what to wear, where to hang out, what to eat how to decorate their homes, what music to listen to and which movie or play to go see, this is your category. The more fun the user interface the better!

4. Sports — Any information service on any type of sports or any application for consumers doing sports or fitness enters into this category. Think also about applications that may enrich the experience of watching sports on TV in a stadium or outdoors.

5. Social Networking — Allow users to keep in touch and to interact with their social networks in an attractive way, using the device they always carry with them.

Can’t choose which category to join in? Well, you better pick now before the May 31, 2009 deadline.

FlashDevelop 3.0 RC2 released - Mar 15

Source: Phlashers by Mj Mendoza IV

This tool doesn’t need introduction. Go get the latest FlashDevelop now.

Here’s the official list of changes:

• New events and comments added for plugin developers.
• New installable filetype (*.fdz) to deploy files in FD world.
• Slightly revised snippet editor and now it’s directly included in FD.
• New FlashLogViewer plugin which basicly is an extended version of Andrew Lucking’s FDTracer plugin.
• New dynamic arguments and a dialog to fill them just prior to template creation (was Enhanced Arguments plugin by Mike McMullin).
• Added an option to save UTF-8 files without BOM. To get this fully working like FB set the callback encoding to UTF-8.
• Many new options to the UI and processes in FlashDevelop.
• Newly generated fixed completion intrisic files.
• Updated AIR 1.5 templates.
• Lots of bug fixes and other small improvements.

Compiling ActionScript from your browser - Mar 12

Source: Phlashers by Mj Mendoza IV

WonderFL is starting to gain popularity among Flash developer communities. It’s providing online service to compile your ActionScript 3 codes — yes, right from the browser.

What about external Flash APIs? Well, they have quite a few — including 3D APIs like Sandy and Papervision3D.

WonderFL does not just provide this online AS3 compiling, it also hosts a place for users/coders to exchange codes by “forking” someone else’s script.