Why I still love AIR
Upon Adobe’s PR aftermath regarding the future of Flash player on mobile, I wanted to write a long piece and detail how great AIR is and why developers should love it. Half-way through it, I gave up. Instead, I grabbed my camera and after a few hours of preparing, shooting and editing, I came up with this image:
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I love Tagul
I don’t like tag clouds. Not in the way they’re usually implemented anyway. They are dull and ugly, really nothing more than a list of words of varying sizes. And yet, properly designed, they can be great infographics – beautiful and informative at the same time.
I discovered Wordle a few weeks ago and I found it fun for doing a little literary analysis, or comparing the spin on the news from different news sites (say Fox vs. CNN.) Still, I was unhappy with its lack of flexibility and options – not to mention that’s not a real, interactive tag cloud. Then I heard about Tagul.
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The (sad) state of web fonts embedding
In case you think embedding fonts in web pages is something new, I made the first font embedding experiments in browsers in 1998. It was working – cross-browser too: Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4. See, EOT from Microsoft is quite old (introduced in 1996) and Netscape had their own format, called .pfr, based on the TrueDoc technology developed by Bitstream. So how comes that more than a decade later we still don’t have a fully working way of using custom fonts on the web?
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flashCHESS III in Google Chrome OS
A truly humbling moment: Google has selected my flashCHESS III flash chess game to be included with their Chrome OS. Here are some screenshots – apparently the guys at TechRadar like the game as well considering the number of screenshots of the chess app
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Flash exported as native apps on iPhone? Didn’t see that coming
Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.
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Vulnerability Analysis for Flash Developers
Flash Developers get a new shiny and powerful tool for their toolbox: static analysis (and a free decompiler) from HP.
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AS3 Performance Optimization
Working on a CPU-intensive app in flash is a challenging experience. It can be wonderful or frustrating, depending on your mindset. Based on my experience with flashCHESS and other intensive applications, I’ll give some tips and ideas on how to get the most out of your flash project.
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Flash CS4 supports conditional compilation
With all the excitement about CS4 and the major features it brings (3D, the new timeline and so on), some less ‘shiny’ improvements tend to be overlooked. Such is the case with conditional compilation. Developers familiar with “real” compilers will instantly know its power.
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Actionscript, chess and the quest for performance
The reaction to flashCHESSIII has been overwhelmingly positive, especially on forums, even though the blog entry received just a reply. Advanced chess players were expecting a tougher engine though (some players have estimated an Elo rating of of 1500-1800 for the engine). The first time I compiled and run the engine, after weeks of just [...]
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Chess in AS3 – beta 1 available for testing
After too many sleepless nights, I’m now confident enough to show it to the world: flashCHESS3, a complete chess engine written in AS3. Our old actionscript chess engine was written when AS1 was still in beta, and had many shortcomings, but was very popular nevertheless. The new game is written completely from scratch and uses [...]
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