The future of Flash brighter than ever

Posted by on Feb 28, 2011 in Flash | 3 comments

Yesterday at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco Adobe launched the Adobe AIR and Flash Player Incubator program. The Incubator is a technology preview program for more adventurous developers who are willing to experiment with Flash Platform runtime features that are in early development stages.

One of those features is the Molehill API for 3D. Molehill is a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that enable advanced 3D experiences across devices through the Flash Platform runtimes. Adobe worked closely with the most popular ActionScript 3D frameworks so that not only advanced 3D developers can take advantage of these new APIs. These 3D frameworks already have Molehill enabled versions available today:

But Molehill does not just offer high performance 3D APIs but can also be used for 2D graphics! Flash Player Product Manager Thibault Imbert has more information and an example on his blog.

Unity added the cherry on top of yesterday’s news. They announced that an upcoming version of Unity (the very popular game development tool) will allow developers to target Flash Player. I can’t wait to play around with it!

These are very exciting times for Flash developers! Check out Tinic Uro’s blog to see how you can start playing with Molehill today!

Flash on!

flKinect: Socket server + AS3 library for Microsoft Kinect

Posted by on Dec 10, 2010 in Cool stuff, Flash Platform | 7 comments

Well… Now I may just have to get myself a Microsoft Kinect! I saw on Saqoosha’s blog that he was playing around with this and thought I would post this here. Koji Kimura wrote a Cocoa application to allow communication between the Microsoft Kinect and Flash. It looks amazing and opens up a whole new world of possibilities and it looks like the AS3 API is also very easy to use!

More info and downloads on Koji’s site.

As you may have guessed it is Mac only. If you know of any similar projects for Windows or Linux don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!

Update: Here’s another AS3 library + socket server app for Mac.
Update 2: Also check out as3kinect.org.

Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK updated

Posted by on Oct 5, 2010 in ActionScript | 4 comments

The new Adobe ActionScript 3 SDK for Facebook Platform API, fully supported by Facebook and Adobe, makes it really easy to build applications that combine the strengths of the Flash Platform and the Facebook Platform. Millions of people use Facebook every day and it’s the ideal platform to build interactive and social applications for. This new library is developed by the very talented team at gskinner.com and facilitates the development of Flash Platform applications that communicate with Facebook using the OpenGraph API.

In addition to this new SDK we’ve also added a bunch of tutorials to help you get started with this new library on the Adobe Developer Connection.

What will you build with it?

Introducing: Package Assistant (AIR 2 package utility built with AIR 2)

Posted by on Dec 17, 2009 in AIR | 7 comments

Update: A brand new version of Package Assistant is available. Check out this page for more info.

Two of the most requested features for AIR were the ability to create native installers and to launch/talk to native applications. Among other new features, AIR 2 allows you to do that. To build these native installers you have to use the command line compiler.

A while back I was thinking if it would be possible to write an AIR application that would talk to ADT (the command line compiler) and that would make it easier to compile a native installer. And here it is… Well… It’s not quite finished yet but it’s very close. I just couldn’t wait sharing this screencap with you guys because I think it’s a great example of how powerful AIR has become.

The wizard style application allows you to easily identify the files it needs and after just 4 steps you simply
hit the compile button. A lot easier than fiddling around with the command line ;-)

I should have this finished before the holidays so stay tuned!

Building Flash applications for Facebook just became a whole lot easier

Posted by on Mar 31, 2009 in ActionScript, api, Flash | Comments Off

facebook.jpgFacebook and Adobe have just released an ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for the Facebook Platform API. This will make it a whole lot easier for Flash developers to build applications for the Facebook Platform using Flash, Flex and AIR.

If you have already built a Flash based application for Facebook in the past, you’re probably wondering what is so new about this release. While there are some unofficial libraries out there, many of these struggle to stay up to date with the rapidly evolving Facebook Platform. Today’s release makes ActionScript one of three officially supported languages of the Facebook Platform. The new AS3.0 Client Library is fully supported by Facebook and Adobe. Both Facebook and Adobe are committed to making sure that this library is kept up to date and provides the best experience for developers building on both platforms.

Danny Dura published a quick start video tutorial that will get you building Flash apps for the Facebook Platform in no time. We’ve also created a dedicated area on the Adobe Developer Connection that has everything you need to get inspired and get started.

Flash on!