Hey guys,

I’ve been having some issues with my blog and finally decided to go for a full re-install. If you see any weirdness, please let me know so I can fix it. Thanks!

To be fair though, I would be just as frustrated to see a message that says “sorry, iOS users, we can’t show you this page.” I guess my point is that JS isn’t without it’s drawbacks and sites should always degrade gracefully.

Found on the otherwise impressive site: http://flashtml5.com/

I added the draw command to a loop that moves around the grid’s starting point just for fun.

See it in action.

This may be a little off topic but since I love video games and logic, I thought I’d take a moment to share some thoughts I was having.

I just read this post from Kotaku talking about the new proprietary memory card that will be used for the PSVita, Sony’s upcoming gaming handheld. The tl;dr version: Sony’s making a new type of memory card. They will only work with one gadget. They will be expensive.

This is not the first time that a gaming company, especially Sony, has asked us to pony up for a proprietary storage medium. Sony has virtually cornered the proprietary format market: MiniDisc, MemoryStick, BetaMax, even those little cassettes that go in your answering machine. All of this, I must assume, was in the hopes of making one that lasts and becomes a standard. Well, they kinda did with BluRay even though it’s appearing at the twilight of physical media. But I digress. Microsoft’s also in the game with their custom XBox360 hard drives costing about twice the going rate. In fact, every non-standard CD-ROM or cartridge is also a proprietary format when you get down to it.

Anyway, this post isn’t really about storage being proprietary. It’s about storage being expensive. The companies create this proprietary media then sell it to us. We’ll have no choice but to buy it so they can charge whatever they want. That makes sense I guess. So to sum up their thinking…

• Make a thing customers need to use our product
• Sell it to customers for $$$
• Get rich… Right?

There’s one glaring flaw here. If I may be so bold as to illustrate my consumer-centric logic…

• If storage is $$$…
• I don’t buy storage
• I don’t have much storage
• But I need it to play games!
• I can’t play games :-(
• I don’t buy the games I can’t play
• I spend less money and have a generally un-fun experience with the gaming system

To look at the same argument conversely…

• If storage is El Cheapo!
• I buy lots of it
• I have lots of room for games
• I spend the money I saved on storage buy games without worrying about where to put them
• I have a more fun experience with the gaming system.

To try to turn this from pure gripe into something useful, I will just say this. Don’t make me your willing customers have to work hard to spend money on you. Always be aware of decisions that benefit your company by punishing your customers.

This is not just a video game rant. The online world is also fraught with similar follies. One phenomenon is discussed in this great post about the Mobile App Splash Screen Anti-Pattern by Martin Sutherland. Another example is any site that makes me create an account before I do even a simple task. Virtually every restaurant website ever made has made me endure a Greek techno slideshow and download a PDF menu just to find their hours and address.

Don’t let this happen to you, or to your clients! Always Be Closing! And let me buy more video games, dammit!

First, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the news. I think the best explanation comes from Mike Chambers’ Blog and a corresponding post on the Flex Team’s Blog.

Don't panic! Take a deep breath and look at this cute bunny

Not much has changed with the Flash Platform

If you read closely, not that much has really changed. The problem is perception. Let’s review what is going away and why it’s not as crazy as it might sound.

Mobile Flash Player

Adobe is discontinuing work on the mobile Flash Player. I don’t know the numbers of people building Flash content for Android but I suspect it’s not incredibly high. I would also wager that even Air on Android/iOS is still far from critical mass, but Adobe say they will continue to support this. The desktop Flash Player will stay the same and for the foreseeable future continue to surpass HTML5 in features and cross-platform functionality.

Another way of saying this is that the Flash Platform remains the best choice for the tasks that it was already the best choice for. Mobile was never one of these and some applications, like video players, may have lost that title to HTML5. But in cross-platform, rich-media, deeply interactive experiences on the web, Flash is still ahead of the competition.

Flex is still here

Adobe is discontinuing its support for the Flex SDK. However, it will stay around as an open source project (it was already open source.) It may never get better than it is already, which so far has been good enough to become the platform of choice for many Flex developers.

Flex cannot get any worse than the next version 4.6, which you were probably looking forward to until today. And you know what, that’s okay. We don’t need to be so obsessed with the next thing that we change careers because the next next thing has an uncertain future. I happen to know of some projects that are still using Flex 3 and will probably never upgrade. Why? The user doesn’t know the difference between mx and spark skins.

It may also get better after being untethered from Adobe and in hands of the Flex Community. In other words, we’re in charge now. The Spoon community, who is inheriting the Flex project, already have plans to make a version 5.x.

Fear itself

The real issue now is the way the public will preceive this news. This announcement has sapped the confidence of a lot of people, customers and developers alike. In my opinion, it’s not the time for us to decry Adobe as evil jerks. It is a time for us as experts to try to help our clients, companies and the public to make sense of the news. It’s time to remember that Flash is just a tool in the arsenal of an interactive developer. In fact, Flash’s popularity, due to largely political reasons, has already been on the decline for a while now. But, it will certainly be dead if the Flash users themselves don’t believe in it.

The next time a client wants an awesome, interactive video, 3D puzzle game, website thing I will still recommend Flash. I don’t want to have him tell me “it has to be HTML5″ because he read online that “Flash is dead.” In fact, I think it’s our job to talk about its strengths and its weaknesses in a totally objective way. We should all dwell in the middle ground between Adobe zealotry and jumping on the next bandwagon.

Your next job

I feel hopeful that the shit will not hit the fan, at least not immediately. That being said, I am always an advocate of looking at other technologies and keeping those abstract coding skills honed. Good developers are in a prime position to port our skills to whatever platform comes next, and those skills are almost always in demand. Even HTML5 (JavaScript) apps share a very similar language with AS3 (really AS1). I was able to pick up JQuery and build my first HTML5 project in a matter of a day or two.

As Mike Chamber’s writes:
“I think it is a HUGE opportunity for the Flash community. As browser support for richer content and motion graphics improves, so will demand for designers and developers who have experience working with motion graphics on the web. The Flash community has been doing this type of work on the web for over a decade and is uniquely qualified to fill demand for similar work in the browser. I don’t think it is a coincidence that some of the most cutting edge motion graphics work being done in HTML5 today is being done by developers and agencies with extensive experience in Flash (such as Grant Skinner, Branden Hall, Big Spaceship, etc…).”

Joel Hooks adds some great notes on this in his blog post. I’d like to also add HAXE, Java, C# and Dart to the list of languages that you should be able to pick up with little effort.

The Community

In LA, our local Flex group shut down abruptly after this news was released. I personally feel this was very hasty indeed and wrote a letter about it upon which this blog post was based. I see that a lot of people are really pissed and their identities are in question. If you’re in this position, I would suggest instead of jumping ship, why not continue to talk about how this will impact our jobs and what skills we can port to other platforms. If there really are people out there who are going to lose their jobs over this, and I think it’s too soon to say, we should still be able to support each other as a community.

Even with all this positivity, I still have to agree with @neurofuzzy “Anyone who has ‘Flash’ in your job title, scratch it out and write ‘Interactive.’” It’s something we should have all done a long time ago because I believe we are more than just Flash dudes.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Please leave comments. It will be very interesting to look back on this post in 6 months and see whether I was right to keep a cool head or being terribly naïve.

Some of these ideas are great, many are not. But regardless of their quality, I want to try to reset the expectations of the idea generators. I hope this post sheds some light on the legal, social and practical implications of these ideas and provides some ground rules that will help bring these ideas into fruition.

(Read the full article after the jump)

First of all

If your idea includes the words “like [a social network] but better” stop right there. I had an idea for a car that’s like a Ferrari but it’s twice as fast gets 1,000 miles per gallon! Fuck you.

The value of your idea

Great achievements come from great ideas. Most of the time, however, people are all too willing to start planning their retirement before the thought of a business plan ever crosses their minds. Making an app can cost a lot of time and money and there’s lots of competition. Most don’t sell well after their first month. While it’s true that you can make a million, it doesn’t happen every day.

In reality, your idea is probably worth a great deal less than $1,000,000. In fact, it’s probably worth very close to $0. Why? For one thing, can you even reasonably define what an idea is? For example, If you have a $1M idea but I have an idea that makes your better, how much is mine worth? What if 5 other people had that idea independently? (Even Calculus was discovered by at least two mathematicians working separately and they drew from centuries of previous concepts.) So the answer is simply this: ideas (even good ones) are worth nothing until they’re turned into something.

The good news, how ideas are implemented is at least as important as the intial idea. Google didn’t invent the search engine, they just made it better. That means that you don’t even need a new idea to make a million (or 189 billion)! There’s always room for improvement. The App Store is full of garbage apps that could be made better.

Release early, Release often

If you’ve had an idea, great! Me too. Keep having them. Have as many as you can. Write them all down. Take the best ones and make them!

Any photographer will tell you that for every 100 photos you take you’ll be lucky if you get one good one. Ideas are the same way. I have a long list of ideas for apps, games, products, etc. that I maintain and regularly review. A couple are (I think) really good. Some are good but would require a huge amount of work to execute. Most of them, over time, seem so stupid as to make me wonder what the hell I was thinking. The important thing is that I have lots and lots of them and I recognize that they all need work.

To continue with the analogy of photographs, if you leave them as negatives or let them just sit on your camera card, you might as well not have bothered. Ideas are the same way. They need to be developed into something tangible to be worth anything.

Who owns your idea?

If you think your idea is something you own that people want to take, you’ve got it backwards. You don’t own the idea and people are free to take it but they don’t want to.

Now I’m not a lawyer (and this is not intended as legal advice) but if I’m not mistaken, unless you have made an agreement to the contrary, an idea alone cannot be copyrighted or trademarked. These protections are reserved for “things” that exist in the world. Even a unique concept carefully described in writing is little evidence when faced with a solid, working app. Think about it. If it were not true wouldn’t that mean science fiction writers could sue technology companies for stealing their ideas for robots, spaceships, etc.

Does that mean you shouldn’t tell anyone? Not necessarily. In reality, most people are not interested in stealing your idea and if they are, they still have to make something out of it. I can’t think of anyone who’s got the talent and capital and drive to build something great who is just waiting around for someone to slip up and hand him a genius idea. So you’re probably safe to talk about it. In fact, you’ll probably find it helpful to get other’s input.

If the idea of sharing still makes you nervous you can always use a non-disclosure agreement. You can find many examples online.

The right way to do it

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t want people to stop contacting me with their ideas. I just want to set the level of expectation back to a reasonable level. Here’s a checklist for you potential idea-havers:

• Lower your expectations. This is the crux of the whole article. Put the concept of the million dollar idea out of your head and think about how to build a million dollar company.
• Develop your idea. Take your idea and make it better. Find out who your competitors are. Spend some time researching, designing, polishing. In other words, turn your idea into a plan that you can use to build.
• Make yourself useful. If you think you deserve 50%, you better be ready to do 50% of the work. That means writing business plans, fundraising, designing the interface, hiring a team, or doing whatever it is you can to make it happen.
• Respect other people’s professions.Building an app or website is hard. It can take months or years of man-hours. You wouldn’t expect a carpenter friend to say yes to building a new restaurant in exchange for 50% of the sales. But he might if you had blueprints, a star chef, and $500,000! See the difference?
• Don’t stop sharing your idea Ask for feedback. Try not to take it personally if you don’t like what you hear.

The last thing I have to say is a note to myself: Take your own advice. Stop talking about it and go make some $1,000,000 apps and things!

P.S.

During the writing of this article, I was trying to do some research into the copyrights of ideas themselves and found a couple of great articles on the same topic by Pek Pongpet so apparently I’m not alone.

The myth of people stealing your ideas

I’ve got this great idea if you only build it

Quicksilver

It’s possible that I’ve just been living under a rock (or in Italy) but I was recently surprised when I stumbled across a blog post announcing that Quicksilver is still around. I had presumed that it was abandoned but it has just been updated for Lion! For those of you who don’t know, Quicksilver is a great little freeware utility for Mac that essentially adds a quick, text-based interface to your Mac. For example, you can type the first couple of letters of a file name, then “mv”, then “doc” to move a file to documents
or “PS + enter” to launch PhotoShop (it figures out what you’re trying to say even if you misspell something). It’s also got lots of plugins to make it even more powerful. I highly recommend it.

ifttt

This is a good opportunity to also mention a new web service that works in a very similar way. It’s called ifttt (short for “if this then that”). It essentially allows you to take events that happen with your online services (like when someone tags you in a photo on Facebook) and use them as triggers for other actions (save a copy of the photo to your Dropbox). These relationships are called “recipes” and they can be shared and customized by other users. It’s a very programmery way to work.

I recommend giving both a try.

The problem:

You’re positive that you just upgraded to the Debug version of the Flash Player, when you go to test it in Chrome it says that you don’t have the debug version even though it works fine in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and who cares if it’s working in IE because you would never use IE right?

The solution:

You can reinstall the player until you’re blue in the face but it won’t help. Why? Chrome manages it’s own version copy of the player so it can provide automatic updates. You’ll want to disable this version and use your default one.

Open up your Preferences in Chrome. Go to Preferences > Under the Hood > Privacy > Content Settings… > Plug-ins > Disable Individual Plugins (Or just paste chrome://plugins/ into the address bar).

You should see a plug in called Flash. If you click the Details+ button in the top right, you’ll see more info about the plug-in files themselves. You’ll probably see two versions here; one will point to the plug-in installed by Chrome

e.g. /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/Versions/15.0.874.92/Google Chrome Framework.framework/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player Plugin for Chrome.plugin

The other points to the system folder

e.g. /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin if you’re on a Mac

Disable the one in the Google Chrome folder and you should be good to go!

This information was originally provided to me via Arron West’s blog which has more pictures than this post if you still need help.

First, let’s get one thing clear… Flash is NOT coming to iOS per se. To quote the press release from Adobe:

“With Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers can extend their already broad mobile reach via Flash-enabled devices, with the new ability to deliver video content to Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices, enabling them to reach the widest audience possible.”

Unless I’m misreading this, it seems that this is only going to allow Flash Video to be viewed on iOS and only when streamed from the new Flash Media Server. This will be achieved by serving the video in an iOS compatible format so there’s no new player or plugin involved at all. Flash content in general (games, interactive sites, &c) will still bring up that familiar
.

This is only a little bit exciting (unless you host a lot of Flash Video). What the end user will experience is potentially more video content available on their iOS device, perhaps from sites that they couldn’t get it from before, and they may notice a performance improvement. It’s a far cry from the headlines stating things like “Adobe releases Flash player for Apple products” or “Adobe Flash coming to iOS”. Still, it’s a (small) step in the right direction.

Frustratingly, most of the articles I’ve seen are tinged with insinuations that this is some sort of surrender, for example, “Apple did not fold, Adobe did.” Really? Are we still acting like these two companies are having a little schoolyard rivalry? Nobody folded or cried “Uncle”. A company just found a solution to a technology problem. As I said in my last post, this sort of talk creates an artificial sense of certain technologies being inherently “good” or “bad”. It misinforms the general public and turns the choice of platform for a project into an emotional or political battle.

On the other hand, as much as I want people to get the story straight, this is more good news for Flash developers. If the general consensus is that Flash will run on iOS then our clients will perceive it as less “bad” and more “good”. So I guess this is bad reporting of so-so news that will make very good PR for Adobe.

Why?

I have always felt that it is our duty as technology experts to help our clients chose the best platforms for their products. And sometimes the best platform is the one that lets the developers do their work the fastest. Flash has always been great at adding a lot of character, subtlety, and interactive flair much faster than other platforms.

Unfortunately, due to recent high-profile skirmishes between Apple and Adobe, most clients currently think that “Flash is Bad.” They don’t understand that Job’s argument is full of half-truths and non-truths and most probably don’t realize that Flash code can now be run on an iDevice and more importantly sold for $$$. While Flash certainly ins’t the best in every situation, it’s actually a fantastic choice for a lot of applications and the programmers who have been using it for a long time who have honed their skills as interactive developers can add a lot intrinsically to their work. To say that it is “Bad” is to ignore much of the bigger picture.

Having a solid example to point to makes the case for using Air for iOS so much easier. And despite our cries, clients don’t really care about technical reasons… they DO care about top-selling apps that look beautiful! So next time you’re faced with a client who’s using some overhyped article from 2010 about Flash not performing well on mobile, you now have one more weapon in your arsenal. The more tools we have to deliver great experiences for our clients, the more everyone wins.

Also, I’ve heard this is a pretty good game!

First, I’d like to say thanks to all of you who have read and commented and shared this blog over the past 6 years or so. Despite the infrequent posts, it’s been a huge source of pleasure for all of us to be able to share helpful info (and a few personal rants) with the flash community.

For a while now we’ve been living in a world where a lot of what we cover on a blog like this is competing with Twitter, Google+, StackExchange, screencasts, Tumblr, Facebook, &c. for the reader’s attention. I often wonder if blogs are even relevant anymore. I certainly struggle to keep up with everything and blogs are usually at the bottom of the list.

Furthermore, the three of us, Mims, Roger, and Caleb have changed a lot in the last couple of years. For example, only one of us lives in NYC, and none of us work exclusively on the flash platform anymore.

We’re not necessarily going to stop posting, however, it may be time to change up the format. I would really appreciate some feedback on what and how you’d like to hear from us in the future. If you’ve got a blog or twitter account that you think is reaching people, tell us how! Comment, email, tweet me, or whatever.

Some things I’ve been thinking about…

• Should we keep blogging or spend that time being more active on Twitter? How do Twitter and blogs work together?
• How do we keep it fun and frequent?
• What posts do people like the best? Who’s visiting the site?
• Should we stay Flash-focused or go more broad with programming and interactive design in general?
• Does it work better having multiple authors or is it confusing? Maybe three more specialized blogs would be better.

Thank you!

numberToString – wonderfl build flash online

Now, I wouldn’t really recommend using this code in a project. There are ways to do the same thing that are much more readable and less error prone. Instead, I thought it was an interesting experiment to show off some of how AS3′s syntax works for those of you who may not have seen something like this.

What’s happening here? Let’s break it down.

• ["Alpha", "Bravo", "Charlie"] – Here we are instantiating a new array and populating it with three strings. This is essentially the same as:

  var a:Array = new Array();
  a[0] = "Alpha";
  a[1] = "Bravo";
  a[2] = "Charlie";
  

• [...] – next is another pair of square brackets. This is an array access operator. In other words, everything between the two brackets will be evaluated as the index of the array to retrieve.
• int(...) – This is an explicit type-cast to an int. That means that everything inside those parentheses is evaluated and flash attempts to convert from whatever data type it is to an integer. In the case of decimal numbers, they are rounded down so this is similar to using Math.floor().
• Math.random() * 3 – random() of course produces a random floating point (decimal) number between 0.0 and (almost but not quite) 1.0. Multiplying that number by 3 (the length of the array) produces a number between 0.0 and 3.0 (technically, between 0 and 2.99999999etc).

The result, an array is created with three strings, a random number between 0.0 and (almost) 3.0 is generated, it is rounded down to an int between 0 and 2, that number is used as the index of the array to look up. The result will be randomly one of the three strings.

I hope you found this interesting!

John Lindquist commented almost immediately that there is a project on github designed to collect these sorts of useful little snippets of code. It’s called as3-utils. Check it out!

This week’s snippet, isRoughlyEqual(), provides a simple way to find out if two numbers are in the ballpark of each other.

I’ve added it to the as3-utils project too.
http://github.com/mimshwright/as3-utils/blob/master/src/utils/number/isRoughlyEqual.as

Anyway, here’s my first contribution. It’s a simple little function that limits a number between an upper and lower limit.

BTW, I used gist.github.com for this but snipplr is good too. If you know of others, leave a comment!