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:

1. Make sure to include your name for the copyright in the ProximityManager.as file (replace my name at the top). This is really important, as you have the copyright, and it makez it easier for me to know who the submission is from.
2. Run your submissions again against the latest test files. There have been some minor changes to the test, so make sure they dont affect your results.
3. Test that you are returning valid results. See below for tips about how to do this.
4. Read through the comments in the original contest post, especially the comments that I made. There are some rule clarifications that are important.
5. Make sure you are using testing with the latest contest files. TestRunner.as has had some updates.

Regarding #4, here are some of the rule clarifications:

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.

What: ActionScript 3 Development Task Contest (AS3DTC)
When: Submissions must be received by Mike Chambers (mesh@adobe.com) by 12 Noon, PST, Friday, November 13th.
Who: Anyone is eligible (see details below)
Prizes : Copy of Flex Builder 3, choice of a T-shirt from threadless.org, lots of random swag, and the admiration and adulation of your ActionScript developer peers.

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.

Here are my slides from my FITC Edmonton talk titled Building iPhone Applications with Flash CS5.

You can download the slides from here. (PDF).

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.

Building Applications for the iPhone with Flash : My original blog post on the iPhone announcements.

Developer FAQ : Official FAQ which answers common questions about creating content for iPhone using Flash.

Why you should NOT care about building apps for the iPhone with Flash : Blog post I made which puts the announcement into the context of the other Flash Player 10.1 announcements.

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.

The news from Adobe MAX 2009 that probably generated the most buzz and discussion online was the announcement that Flash CS5 will have support for outputting applications for the iPhone. While I am really excited about the news, and the work we are doing around the iPhone, I am here to tell you that you should not care about it.

Let me repeat that:

You should NOT care about using Flash to build applications for the iPhone.

This morning during the day 1 keynote at Adobe Max 2009, Adobe announced that the next version of Adobe Flash (Flash Professional CS5) will include support for creating stand-alone applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. As you can imagine, this is something that we are really excited about, and we expect there to be a lot of questions. This post should address some of those questions, and point to additional resources with more information.

Just a quick note, but my Max session for Wednesday morning, at ( 9:30 AM) titled “Secret Session : Flash” is now an open Q and A with the Flash Player and AIR teams to talk about creating applications for the iPhone with Flash.

View video on YouTube

This was built using the new Microphone Access APIs coming in the next version of Adobe AIR (code named “Athena”). Some more info here.

Lots of info on Athena and other new technologies at Adobe Max 2009.

Pixel Mesh graphics created by eboy.