September 2006

Samorost2 is a game built in Flash that showcases an impressive array of sounds and visuals. The game storyline is quite inventive, and it engages you to think creatively in order to proceed from level to level. It's not surprising that it won an award at the Flashforward conference in Austin. Brilliant!

Wallop is a new social networking site with an interesting revenue opportunity for Flash developers. Wallop members can express themselves online by purchasing Flash-based interactive elements (called Wallop Mods) to characterize their digital presence. Flash developers can produce these Wallop Mods and sell them on the Wallop Modder Network.

This opportunity for making money in the Wallop digital universe reminds me of two articles I've read (Business Week | Wired) about people making a living by selling digital assets in the Second Life virtual world.

The concept of PostSecret is brilliant -- invite people to creatively depict a secret of theirs on a 4x6 postcard and anonymously submit it via mail, all in the name of an "ongoing community art project." Seeing a sampling of the postcards on the PostSecret Blog really struck a chord in me -- it's amazing to see such raw human emotion represented so creatively and how providing people with this outlet elicits such a resonant response. (A compilation of these postcards is also available in a book).

Here's a funny Flash animation called "Cinema Rules" which was created by ILLUSTREE. It was a finalist at the Austin 2006 Flashforward conference Film Festival.

Ben Stucki wrote a brief overview of object oriented programming which covers:

• objects, classes, properties, methods and instantiation
• access modifiers, constructors, fields, get and set methods, method signatures, overloading and encapsulation
• events
• inheritance, overriding and more access modifiers: protected, internal, abstract, virtual and static
• polymorphism and interfaces

Another Adobe Developer Week presentation that I viewed is called Building Flex Apps With Flex Builder by Ted Patrick. This presentation provided a useful example of building an application in Flex Builder and covered the following items:

• VBox and HBox containers automatically position controls within them. The Canvass container holds controls as well, but you specify the positioning (aided by automatic guides and snapping).
• Creation of an MXML component (project code | component code)
• Creation of a new ActionScript class (project code | class code)
• Illustration of the robust debugging capabilities
• Use of the [Bindable] directive to make data in a variable bindable to controls
• Deployment of the application in the bin folder along with "View Source" capability.
• You can specify a minimum size for the application by making the appropriate selections in the Flex project settings dialog box.

I wish that I had come across this posting by Grant Skinner a long time ago about the pros and (mostly) cons of using _root in your ActionScript code.

There are many presentations made available online from Adobe Developer Week. The first presentation I viewed was an Introduction to Developing with Flex by James Ward, which started with product overview slides from Adobe which describe the evolution of Rich Internet Applications over time.

The presentation then got into describing the Flex product offering and an overview of the technical architecture. And, there were several example applications displayed to illustrate the power of Flex.

One sample illustrated the basics of the code and the programming model. This sample application showed how quickly you can create a Flex application which reads data from an XML file via an HTTPService and then presents the data, including images (of cell phones) in a TileList using transitions between application states. The code is available in this screen shot.

This introductory presentation by Ted Patrick provided a basic overview of building a simple application in Flex Builder. It was interesting to learn about Layout Constraints, which position the main Flash content in the desired position within the browser window regardless of the window size.

There always has to be a first entry to a blog, and this is it for me. This blog was created because I wanted to document my journey up the learning curve of Adobe Flex technology. I already have a solid foundational understanding of Flash and other web technologies, but I'm eager to upgrade my skills to the amazingly robust Flex platform.

However, just focusing on Flex would be too narrow of a subject, so this blog is meant to record a broader journey that includes all things related to building engaging media experiences. Also, there will be interesting sidetracks noted along the way, but I'm expecting many of these to grow out of their initial characterization with the hindsight afforded by the passing of time.