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Posts Tagged ‘flash’

Linkfest 4

February 21st, 2010 1 comment

Some links for y’all:

  • Chad’s love of code reviews—and I agree. It can be tough to expose your code to better eyes, but everyone is improved because of it.
  • Review Board—along those lines, here is an open source code review tool that was linked to in the comments for the code-review post.
  • Building Flash Multiplayer Games—a somewhat extended tutorial that I haven’t actually gone through, but looks decent.
  • What Really Happens When You Navigate To A URL. Semi-technical, and informative if you don’t already know it.
  • Factorial Lookup. Ever wonder what 182,731! is? (You might have to give it several seconds to download before it renders.) Sometimes the most practical way to solve difficult (or impossible) problems is to just try to look up the answers in a massive precalculated table. Also see Reverse MD5 Hash Lookup.
  • Arimaa—a modern game played on a chess board with chess pieces, specifically designed to make it difficult to write effective AI to play it.
  • Making Computer Science More Enticing. A good inspirational 2-minute vid at the top, and information about how Stanford University’s revamping of their CS program led to higher enrollment.
  • Understanding Weak References, a Java-oriented article, but generally applicable.
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Adobe AIR

February 17th, 2010 No comments

Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime. It enables you to write faux-native (if I might coin a term) apps in Flash, Flex, or HTML/Javascript/Ajax (it uses WebKit for rendering), and then distribute those apps to run on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

It’s been out for a while, but I only now just looked at it and installed it on my 64-bit Arch Linux machine… with limited success. Read below for some of the nasty details.

(I don’t have FlexBuilder, so these incredibly incomplete starter instructions are for building from the command line.)

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Getting Started with Flash Development

December 31st, 2009 1 comment

I have to admit my secret shame: I find Flash programming to be pretty fun. You get a lot of bang per line of code, and you can distribute your results from your web page.  (Plus Adobe has a compelling incentive to keep Flash working cross-platform, unlike all the browser developers.) Or, if you want, you can build it into an AIR app later.

For the record, I don’t represent Adobe in any way, though I am friends with a person who works there. :-) However, Adobe has been generous in their Linux support, so I am inclined to promote them over their main competitor.

So lets say you’re a developer like me who doesn’t tend to use GUI development environments, and loves command line stuff, and doesn’t want to spend a bunch of money on a Flash tool that doesn’t even run under Linux (though some people might have CS3/4 running with WINE). Fortunately, Adobe has you (me) covered!

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