December 2, 2011
by Aaron
WHAT IS A NATIVE EXTENSION?
One of the great new features of AIR 3.0 is native extensions. These extensions allow you to build hooks into the native OS that lets you do some things that AIR doesn’t support on its own. One of the best things about AIR is the fact that it can run on so many platforms, E.G. Android, IOS and the Playbook. However, one drawback to this is that AIR must cater to the lowest common denominator and cannot really focus on device specific features. This is where the native extensions come in. They let you write code native to the device that can tap into the cool features that make each device unique. This means, for iOS you would write the extension in Objective C. For Android you could write it in Java. On Android, this could let you push things to the notification drawer and maybe on a Blackberry you could get access to BBM messages and features. You can find a great tutorial for building your own AIR native extensions for Android at Adobe.
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_Posted in AIR, Android, flash
_Tagged actionscript, AIR, flash, java, native extension
November 2, 2011
by Mikko
When I first heard of PixelBender I was so stoked.
PixelBender is a shader language built for Adobe products. You notice I say Adobe products and not just Flash. Pixel Bender can be used with Photoshop and After Effects also. (probably other products too)
Basically a shader is a “filter” that can be run over an image or data. To get started with PixelBender it’s best to start out with images rather than with data cause it will be easier to get the hang of things.
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_Posted in PixelBender, Tutorial, flash
_Tagged flash, PixelBender, Tutorial
October 19, 2011
by Mikko
The first time you open up Unity3D it might be SUPER intimidating. You have an entire 3d “modeler” in front of you and you think “where do I go from here?”.
So you’ve watched some videos on Unity’s site and you have sort of a grasp on creating scenes.
But now… It’s time… To code! Where do you even begin?
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_Posted in Unity3D
Load times are a Flash Developer’s nemesis. Even today with download speeds measured in megabits per second, a good developer has to be wary of how slow things are loading. A popular way of speeding up load times are to use a CDN like Cachefly or Amazon. However, these services do cost money and often charge by bandwidth used. An alternative way to speed up loading is to compress your files into a zip file.
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_Posted in Category==Null
September 29, 2011
by Nick
I hate to keep bringing up Facebook, but when you spend a lot of time working on Facebook applications, its the thing that comes to mind most often. And it may seem like I’m continually bashing the platform, but you must agree, a blog post praising Facebook would be much less interesting and much less informative. So here we are.
The recent F8 conference has brought some new features that will make facebook users happy, such as the timeline and the ticker, but that also means that there will be more work for developers. It also seems like they are trying to make their api more consistant, with other api’s, and in general, which should make development life easier. Although we know from past examples, that that will be a long road. The facebook roadmap doesn’t show much for developing for these new features, but you can bet as time goes on and demand increases, they will be just another roadblock developers are going to have to tackle. Read the rest of this entry »
_Posted in Facebook, Javascript
_Tagged css, developer, Facebook, html, social network
Jam3’s looking to invade SXSW Interactive in 2012, and we have more ammo and explosive content than a Michael Bay flick.
There’s plenty of methods to our madness at Jam3 and we want to share some of that with you at the SXSW Interactive conference this coming year. Give them some love and support their initiatives in the talks they aim to present.
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_Posted in Approach
I know I’m not the first to delve into the world of Paper.js, but being such a new technology, i figured it was worth a look. Not to mention that you can do some pretty neat stuff with it on any canvas enabled browser.
See these quick examples:
cubes
lines
starfield
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_Posted in Canvas, Category==Null, HTML5, Javascript
_Tagged Canvas, html, js, paper.js
Seem’s like I’ve brought the House Of Cards dataset to almost every platform I work with. So it was only logical to use it with my first experiments with WebGL:
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_Posted in Canvas, HTML5, Javascript, Radiohead, WebGL
If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my years as a Flash developer its that we’re lazy. Coders are always trying to find ways to make their work easier and to write less code. The most interesting thing about coding is that the more experienced you are the less code you probably write on a day to day basis. There are a variety of reasons for this. One reason is that the code they write is simply more efficient than the code written by a less experienced coder. Another reason is that senior coders have been around for so long that they’ve simply written it already. However, the biggest reason I think is having a mindset of always trying to solve the problem with the least amount of work.
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_Posted in Approach, flash
_Tagged actionscript, beginner, best practices, code review, coding, developer, developers, development, flash, interactive developer
When I look back on developing Björk I’m surprised by one thing… It wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.
When I first saw the creative for the site I started thinking “How will we pull this off in HTML?”. As the previous post stated we took quite a few test routes before deciding on doing everything using canvas. Once we had decided on the Canvas method I developed Jam3D.js quite quickly. I think the core of the engine was written in two days or so.
You might be asking why didn’t I just use another 3D engine that’s out there. Well… Generally with projects that have a tight timeline or are high profile I’m scared to use other peoples tools/code. Especially when it needs to be optimized as much as possible. It’s very hard to optimize someone else’s code vs your own. Sometimes to optimize code you have to know every nook and cranny of the code. That’s not to say I don’t EVER use other people’s libraries. (I do look forward to playing with ThreeJS though)
When I was writing Jam3D.js I knew we had to optimize as much as possible but still keep it flexible. To do this you have to keep things as simple as possible.
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_Posted in Canvas, HTML5, Javascript
