The Flash Art of War

I just wanted to thank everyone who showed up to tonight’s Flash Meetup at my office. As promised here is a pdf of the presentation I gave on setting up Flex Builder 3 to compile Flash Player 10 swfs, Ant + Flash CS 4, and some Flash Player 3d fun. Hope you enjoyed!

If you work/live in New York City I hope you can make it to the next one. We go over a little code and theroy for the first hour or so and then do a Q&A on anything you want to talk about until people get tired and need to go home. Its a lot of fun and I love hosting them. Check it out if your interested in joining.

Since Flash Player 10 was only officially released a month or so ago its hard to dig up any good examples on how to use the new 3d properties on DisplayObjects. I was interested in creating a simple 2 sided plane that would correctly show the front and back when it rotated. My searches led me once again to Lee Brimelow’s http://gotoandlearn.com/. He has a great example on how to do a simple 3D Video Flip. I find his site is always an excellent springboard for my code ideas but I am not a fan of using the Flash IDE. So here is an reusable class of a two sided plane that takes advantage of Flash Player 10’s native 3d Support.

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Had a really good time presenting at 360/Flex Camp. There was a good line up of speakers and I especially enjoyed hearing from Simon Horwith on Object Oriented ActionScript as well as Simon Free’s intro into AIR. For those of you who couldn’t make it, I talked about my new Framework Flash Camouflage. I also wanted to share the PDF of my presentation for anyone interested.

I just got done cleaning up all the photos from my 2 week trip to Italy and thought I would share them with everyone. Hope you enjoy! Because there were so many I have broken them up into separate galleries grouped by each place we had visited.

• http://jessefreeman.com/italy/capri (203 Photos and my personal favorite)
• http://jessefreeman.com/italy/greve (63 Photos)
• http://jessefreeman.com/italy/naples (149 Photos)
• http://jessefreeman.com/italy/rome (152 Photos)
• http://jessefreeman.com/italy/venice (187 Photos)

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Just a quick notice to let you guys know I have been invited to be a speaker at the 360/Flex Camp in NJ on the 26th. I am still working out the details of what I will be going over but it will be something along the lines of this:

• FlexBuilder/FDT WorkFlow
• Project Organization
• Building using Ant
• And a quick overview of my new Flash Camo Framework

I hope anyone in the area can check it out. The line up of speakers looks good and its important that we support these things so they can grow into larger conferences. Pick up your tickets here!

I am happy to introduce my new Framework called Flash Camouflage. I have just posted a stable build of it on google code and will be continuing to add and refine it over the next few months. Here is a little background into what the framework can do:

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I just got an email from the UG Manager for NJ Flex who wanted to spread the word about a Flex Conference in NJ not to far away from the city. I don’t know much about the group considering I have issues leaving Manhattan but it looks like its going to be really interesting. I am happy to see this getting organized in my neck of the woods. Because of changing jobs and my 2.5 week vacation in Italy starting next week I wasn’t able to attend any conferences this year. Please check it out and if your interested and got the cash register, here is info.

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I have been promising to do a large multi-part posting on Ant and workflows and all of this great stuff but I haven’t gotten to it. Well if you remember I have just started a new job I have been really slammed trying to get things in order. One of the issues I am dealing with is how to automate builds of a site built entirely in the Flash CS 3 IDE. Well for those who know me, I am not a happy camper when I can’t have everything automated so I did a little digging on google and came across FlashCommands by Mike Chambers on Google Code. Well seeing how this python script lets you compile FLAs from the command line using Flash CS 3 I decided I would share with you my Ant script to automate the entire process.

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Not sure how many of you out there have been playing Motion Poker X on your iPhones but I have been addicted ever since Apps were legally made available on the iPhone. Usually when I play a game I like I try to think of how to build it in Flash. Mobile phone games make really good inspiration and game development was one of the biggest reasons why I got into Flash in first place¹.

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1. Here is one of my oldest Flash game sites GameCook.com [↩]

I am going to be doing a 5 part series on setting up the perfect Flash Development Workflow. These tutorials will go over setting up FlexBuilder 3 / FDT 3, project organization, a local Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) setup for testing, version control, and finally automating all of your builds with Ant.

The Prefect Flash Development Workflow

• Part 1: Setting up FlexBuilder 3 and/or FDT 3 - Coming Soon
• Part 2: Version Control (CVS/SVN) Organization - Coming Soon
• Part 3: Project Setup and Organization - Coming Soon
• Part 4: Setting up LAMP for Local testing - Coming Soon
• Part 5: Builds, Runs and Ant - Coming Soon
• Appendix: Some extra tips, tricks, and shortcuts I use in my own setup. - Coming Soon

I will continue to update this posts with links to each part of the series as I finish them. My goal is to release a new part each week. If you have any suggestions or things you would like me to cover leave a comment and I will try to get it in there.