Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • mProjector 3 Released

    mProjector, a Flash Player projector creator has just released version 3. This is a me too post, but just had to blog it since mProjector is my favorite out compared to Zinc and SWFStudio. If you can’t wait for Apollo, and/or want to create applications using Flex or Flash on the desktop today, mProjector 3 is definately something you should check out. Here’s what I did using Flex 1.5 over a year ago using mProjector 2.

    Having problems getting a working example up using a Flex 2 SWF; if someone beats me to it, let me know!

    Via Flashmagazine.

    Disclaimer: I typically do not do get projector paying gigs. Therefore, my opinion on what is the best projector tool is framed by testing them all out over 2 years ago. I highly suggest if you are serious about doing desktop work using one of these tools, you investigate for yourself the options, and build a demo with each to get a feel for the API.

  • Dynamic Flash Example – 3 of 3: Yahoo Maps + FlightAware Mashup

    Yahoo Maps provides a component that you can use in your Flash and Flex applications. FlightAware provides an API (you have to pay, not free) that allows you to get tracking information about air traffic. Together, you get a mashup of tracking the progress of an airplane currently in flight over the USA via an animated map.

    This example shows how to get dynamic data onto a YahooMap component from FlightAware’s DirectFlight API using Flash 8, AS2, and PHP. PHP converts FlightAware’s XML to a smaller, more Flash friendly, JSON format.

    Yahoo Maps & FlightAware Mashup – Source ZIP

    You can get more plane ID’s for Atlanta here, or choose a state & airport here.

  • Dynamic Flash Example – 2 of 3: Twitter

    Twitter.com is a website where people post what they are doing, when they are doing it. It is like a 1 sentence blog entry, where you succinctly say what you are currently doing. You post an update to your situation whenever you can. The public and your friends can see what you are doing and receive updates to this via RSS feeds, your phone via SMS (text messages), and your IM client. You can even embed a Twitter badge on your website to show the world what you are currently doing.

    They’ve made it really easy for Flash developers by providing public XML and JSON feeds for both the general public, and your friends specifically. This example reads in the public feed via PHP proxy so you don’t need to login or anything. It also shows how easy it is to work with JSON compared to XML when compared to the Amazon example.

    Twitter Example – Source ZIP

  • Dynamic Flash Example – 1 of 3: Amazon

    For those that attended Tuesday night’s Adobe Flash Platform User Group meeting, here are the 3 examples I promised to post. Sorry took so long.

    If you didn’t attend, these are 3 examples that show how to use just a little code to access dynamic data in Flash using AS1 and AS2. A significant amount of companies have started releasing data to be used via public API’s. This data can be used by Flash to create cool, quick little widgets or even mini-applications. Hopefully these small examples will show you how you can access this data without being a programmer.

    Amazon.com has a great developer API. Using just a little ActionScript 1 code, you can quickly create Flash widgets that access their swath of services. This example shows how to utilize Amazon’s API via loading variables via LoadVars and then parsing just a bit of the XML that comes back. This particular example gets a list of books that relate to “cows”.

    Amazon Dynamic Flash 8, AS1 – Source ZIP