I’ve been wondering lately how many Flex/Flash developers we have on Vancouver Island.  I know there are a few here, here and a couple more here so there must be a fer more kicking around.  I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a Flex/Flash Users’ Group, but would only do so if there were enough interested developers.  If you’re interested send me an email (jim.rutherford[at]gmail.com) or leave a comment that includes your name and email address on this post.

So the iPhone is powerful enough to run Spore & Super Monkey Ball  but not powerful enough to run Flash or Flex applications?  Seems odd to me.

You gotta love the Mac rumor mill!  Gear Live is reporting that Flash on the iPhone is just around the corner and will be available along side Apple’s release of the iPhone SDK near the end of this month.  I can’t wait to start hacking some cool Flex apps if and when the Flash Player is made available on the iPhone.

Alessandro Crugnola has created a very useful Flash Switcher extension for Firefox that allows you to easily test their pages with different flash player versions.  The extension comes with all the currently published flash player plugins from the version 2 to the most recent and allows you to easily switch from one plugin to another.

My four year old son and I have a Saturday morning ritual where the two of us go our for a “special” breakfast at a local restaurant. While we are waiting for our food, Owen always draws a very exciting battle scene on the back of the paper placemat using the crayons provided by our server. This week’s battle scene was that of an army battle that involved a very large spaceship and a tank and some helicopters. Once he was done drawing, he asked “Dad, can we turn this into a video game?”. I answered of course I could!

So we went home and pulled out an old scanner, scanned his drawing, and went to work in Flash! The result, is a fun little game that I had fun making (and relearning a bit of trigonometry) and Owen had fun playing.

The game is aptly titled “Army Battle“. To play the game, you try to blast the helicoters with a bullet from your tank. To move the tank use the up and down arrows. To rotate the tank, use the left and right arrows. To aim the turret, move your mouse pointer around the screen. To fire the cannon, click the left mouse button!

Enjoy!

Digg this…

We all know that the Google Video Player is Flash based and that most Flash movies can be customized using additional parameters. So what parameters does Google use that will allow us to customize our players? Google Operating System blog has a short little post that will show you how to Customize the Embedded Google Video Player.

I am currently working on a presentation that is aimed at convincing a client group that Flex/Flash is the correct technology platform for one of their upcoming projects. I have a collection of my own ideas, but I was wondering if anyone could point me to some good and convincing support materials (other than Flash penetration numbers)? Thanks in advance!

The AMFPHP project have posted a number of excellent screencasts that will help you get started using Flash Remoting for PHP. AMFPHP is an open-source Flash Remoting gateway that’s fast, reliable and free!

Vectored Flash Overlays for Google Maps (VGMap) is a new library that extends the GMap API and allows designers and developers to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. The vector graphics are handled by Flash and there is also a facility for introducing animation onto your map.

This one is a bit old, but in the event that you missed it, you should really check out Measure Map’s open-source Date Slider. The slider is a Flash component that allows you to select a range of dates and present nice summary data based on the date range. Measure Map is a slick web-based analyitics application that is easy to install on virtually any blog.