Mike Chambers

Yesterday, Apple announced their new tablet device, the iPad. Even if you are able to step back from all of the hype and reality distortion field surrounding the announcement, it is still an impressive device, once which I would love to get my hands on.

However, as a developer and Mac user, I am increasingly concerned with Apple’s movement toward creating a locked down, and closed ecosystem and platform. A platform where Apple controls which applications developers can deploy, and which applications and content users can consume.
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Sorry for the two month hiatus on posting. I was on a sabbatical and vacation from work for the last 6 weeks of 2009, and have spent the first couple of weeks of 2010 busy working on code, and preparing some events for the spring (more on that in another post).

Some of the stuff I have continued to spend a lot of time working on, has been building iPhone content using the Flash CS5 private beta. I have been doing a lot of work on trying to figure out how to get the best performance, and understand the limits of Flash content on the device. I plan to make a separate post on that in the next couple of days.
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I have just completed running all of the performance tests for the ActionScript 3 Development Task Contest #1.

The result below are tentative until I have confirmed that the code follows the rules (and spirit) of the contest. If you see any issues with any of the top 5 submissions, please post them in the comments. You can view all of the entries in the contest’s GitHub repository.

Here are the results:
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I have uploaded all of the entries for the ActionScript 3 Development Task Contest #1 to the contest’s GitHub repository.

If you sent me an entry and do not see it in the repository, email me ASAP (without the file). Adobe’s spam system can be a bit overzealous at times, but if I know you sent me something, I can find it.
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Well, there is just a little over a day before the deadline for entries to the ActionScript Development Task Contest (AS3DTC) are due. I wanted to make a quick post with a couple of reminders to ensure everyone has their correctly working submissions in on time.

First, a couple items:
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I was working on some code over the weekend and was spending a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to approach a problem, and how to get the best performance from the solution. I thought it would be useful and interesting to see how other developers would approach the problem. This gave me an idea for an ActionScript 3 contest, which I am announcing today.
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I use Git and GitHub to manage all of my personal code projects. I have one large repository called projects, which is then broken into sub directories based on the main technology used for each project (i.e. Flash, JavaScript, iphone, etc…).

I am currently working on a Flash based iphone game code-named “pewpew”, which is maintained within my projects repository. As I have begun to work on it more and more, I decided that I wanted to have pewpew in its own git repository. This will make it easier to track issues, as well as give me the option of open sourcing it and allow others to create and submit forks.
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Here are my slides from my FITC Edmonton talk titled “Building iPhone Applications with Flash CS5“.

You can download the slides from here.

Btw, really great conference and vibe, and the speaker list was simply amazing. Congrats to Shawn and the FITC crew for putting on another great event.

Below is a list of some of the best resources if you are interesting in getting a deeper understanding Adobe’s recent announcement that Flash CS5 will be able to output standalone applications for the iPhone.
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Prompted by some of the work from Grant Skinner (in particular his FOTB 2009 session) and Thibault Imbert, I have been doing a lot of research lately into optimizing ActionScript 3 content. Not just how to make it run faster, but how to approach the process of optimization.

I am also starting to work on a small project which works with pixel data from images, and on which I anticipate performance might be an issue when working with larger images. I figured this would be a good opportunity to use some of the early code as a case study. I wanted to post the process and results here.
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