Posts Tagged ‘Flash’

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Android vs. iOS for developers

Friday, November 11th, 2011

Here are my thoughts on Android vs. iOS for developers:

Pros and cons for Android:

Pros:

  • Android is open source
  • Android runs on many platforms. For instance: many different smartphones, laptops, netbooks, tablets, Google TV, etc.
  • You develops apps mainly in Java
  • Java apps runs on most platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac, BlackBerry and all Android-based products, + +
  • You can develop apps in C++ if you need the extra performance
  • Android takes more and more smartphone market shares, and I have read that it is likely that it will exceed iOS in 2012.
  • Android runs Flash
  • You are not locked into one hardware manufacturer.

Cons:

  • Android App Store, or the lack of a good App Store.
  • Customers have often little or no knowledge of Android

 

Pros and cons for iOS:

Pros:

  • Customers wants it (if it is an advantage or not can be debated, but there is a large customer base there)
  • Apple has very good development tools, but they exist, unfortunately, only for Mac. It is possible to develop iOS apps on Windows-based platforms, but as far as I know, it is not a good option.
  • IPad and iPhone are great products, although they are quite overpriced.
  • App Store works well. You can be confident that the app you buy are safe and secure. Or can you?: http://onforb.es/tW94L2 … Notwithstanding, it is safer and easier than Android so far.
  • You develop a low-level programming language that runs faster than for example Java and Flash

Cons:

  • Comprehensive and time-consuming approval process. Even updates to the existing products must go through the approval process. I have heard of developers who have waited up to two months to get their approval.
  • You have to pay a fee to be developer.
  • Apple takes 30 percent of revenues sold through the App Store.
  •  iOS apps has to be sold through the App Store.
  • You can be thrown out of the developer program by Apple: http://zd.net/sTM4el
  • You need a Mac to develop Apps for the iPhone and the iPad. There are alternative solutions for Windows, but they are not very good so far I know

 

I do not like Apple’s rough business strategy. Apple’s products are good, but somewhat overpriced. It is already some good Android-based pads. Have you seen the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 yet?  A lecturer at the University showed it to me here the other day, and it was sexy! I believe Google will launch a pad very soon as well.

 

I would like to hear your thoughts on this subject?

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Posted in Android, Apple, Flash | No Comments »

Adobe Air, SQLite, and apostrophes

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

I’m currently developing an Air application and I run into a problem inserting file names with apostrophe (because apostrophe are used as string delimiter). There are several ways to handle this problem. You can add two apostrophes, and Jake Churchill has made a function for this.

While working with back-end I’ve used PHP’s utf8_encode edit: I meant rawurlencode() quite a lot, and AS3 has several similar functions, but there is only one that encodes apostrophes, and it’s called escape(). So what you can do is escape() the strings to be inserted into SQLite, and use unescape() after receiving the string back from the database.

Here is an example with escape() and unescape() used in AS3:

var testString:String = "This is a test ' with ' several apostrophes'";
trace( testString ); // This is a test ' with ' several apostrophes'
testString = escape( testString );
trace( testString ); //This%20is%20a%20test%20%27%20with%20%27%20several%20apostrophes%27
testString = unescape( testString );
trace( testString ); //This is a test ' with ' several apostrophes'

Here is an example with rawurlencode and rawurldecode() used in PHP:

$testString = "This is a test ' with ' several apostrophes'";
echo $testString . "
"; // This is a test ' with ' several apostrophes'
$testString = rawurlencode( $testString );
echo $testString . "
"; // This%20is%20a%20test%20%27%20with%20%27%20several%20apostrophes%27
$testString = rawurldecode( $testString );
echo $testString . "
"; // This is a test ' with ' several apostrophes'

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Posted in Flash, PHP | No Comments »

Sound visualizer in Flash

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Per Kristian Stoveland held a cool presentation of his Sound Spectrum Analyzer at FUGN (Flash user group Norway) in the beginning of April. Inspired by this session I decided to try this my self.
I remembed seeing a beutifull graphic called “Imagination” made by Paul Neave, which he also had released as open source. So I grabbed my copy of it and tweaked a little bit and instead of mouse interaction I hooked it up with the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() in Flash. I turned out pretty cool I think!
This is my first attempt so there will be more to come. The source code need to be cleaned up so I will release it later. The awesome soundtrack is by virgill & tasium.

Check it out!

soundvisualizer

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Posted in Flash | No Comments »

Colin Moock, James Patterson and Hoss Gifford with new training video

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

Colin Moock, James Patterson and Hoss Gifford has put out a new training video series called:  “The lost Actionscript 3 weekend”. You can download some free chapters and after watching them I must say I’m going to buy the DVD’s. Use this link to get a discount.

It’s impressive that Colin Moock manage to outtalk both Hoss Gifford and James Patterson, and at the same time! :-)

Check it out!

The lost Actionscript 3 weekend

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Posted in Flash, Guitar | No Comments »

Flash on the Beach

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

 Flash on the beach 2008

I’m currently on Flash on the Beach in Brighton. I were here last year and it strucked me then how well organized this conference was, and I must say it lives up to its reputation this year as well. This year I’m together with Hågen Landsem, which actually was my teacher at school, and of course all the other guys from Norway (and the rest of the world for that matter).

One thing we’ve noticed is that FOTB08 is a little bit more technical than last year; the Flex/Air session is dominating more now. This is a trend that runs the hole Flash community. This was something Hågen and I talked about yesterday, and It was interesting to hear some speakers expressed their concern about this evolution as well. One of the speakers that addressed this was Aral Balkan, he had a very nice session that was both entertaining, inspiring and an eye opener for many I think. He talked about the simplicity of AS1 compared to AS2, and especially AS3 and how this might be negative for the Flash community. That it might leave some of the creative people out of the Flash community, and those are, by my opinion, the most important users of the Flash platform. It is the creative part that has brought Flash to what it is today.

Anyway, we had a short chat when he was done and he really seems like a nice guy. I think it is very important that guys like Aral Balkan speak up about this.

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Posted in Flash | 2 Comments »

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