Flash Platform Rundown – Week of October 13th, 2013

This is an experiment – we’ll see how it goes… but I plan on doing a weekly or semi-weekly rundown of happenings in the Flash Platform community on this blog in the spirit of what Brian Rinaldi used to do a few years back (and continues to do for JavaScript, HTML & CSS).

I’m still seeing lots of activity around the Flash Platform both within Adobe and through the work of the community – so will find time to note down everything that catches my eye over the week and create a simple digest like this every Monday. For more frequent Flash happenings – I recommend you check out Flash Daily. There is a hole which needs to be filled so let’s go!


AIR on Google Glass
Both Tom Krcha and Colin Holgate have reportedly gotten Flash to run on Google Glass via AIR and captive runtime. This is just another example of how versatile AIR is in relation to a platform like Android – which is used across all manner of devices… automatically extending the reach of AIR.

Adobe Bugbase and Windows Phone 8
There is much community activity in terms of feature requests for things like AIR on Windows Phone 8 (127 votes, 69 comments) and even Windows 8 “ModernUI” (117 votes, 36 comments). Both of these are currently set by the engineering team with a status of “ToTrack” – so there is hope that AIR may possibly come to these platforms!

Apache Flex 4.11 RC
Apache Flex 4.11 has entered the release candidate phase and should be out very soon. This release will include a new mobile datagrid component, 120 and 640 dpi skins, and OSMF 2.0 support among other improvements!

Starling 1.4.1
A maintenance release for the excellent Starling 1.4 of two weeks back. From Daniel: “The main reason for the new version is that the 1.4 release contained a nasty bug in its ‘clipRect’ implementation. Feathers makes heavy use of this feature, so this bug was extremely annoying for its users. Thus, Josh and I decided an update would be helpful.”

Lynda.com Activity
Lynda.com recently published a great little piece featuring Erik Natzke (now working at Adobe) which shows him working with AS3 in Flash Builder to create cutting edge apps for Adobe. Be sure to check out Lee Brimelow’s course on making games with Starling as well!

X-Platform Study
There was a study published just this past week which features AIR prominently as a solid cross-platform tool among a number of other solutions including PhoneGap. AIR seems to be spoken of rather favorably in the paper.

AGAL2
Bill Howard made mention of Adobe’s work on AGAL2 (Stage3D) on Twitter:

Mozilla Shumway
From a glance at the comments for this article on Shumway it really does seem that much of the hatred for Flash has calmed down to a sort of apathetic impotence at this point.
“Despite early hopes that HTML5 would gracefully and efficiently replace Flash for video handling and more, too many hurdles remain.” I still have yet to get any of my daily work to run on Shumway.


What have I missed? Add a comment below and show support for your favorite projects!

16 thoughts on “Flash Platform Rundown – Week of October 13th, 2013”

  1. for me getting displacementmap filter for starling has been by far THE biggest event for flash in months – im mean f**** shaderlanguage… we can do almost everything with this if we learn to wield its power correctly :)

    example belov shows how starling now works within a dragonbones test environment
    http://thonbo.com/starling/DisplacementTest.html
    http://thonbo.com/starling/DisplacementTestGameBg.html
    http://thonbo.com/starling/DisplacementTestRain.html

    – now we just need to be able to stack filters and drawfilters on a rendertexture :) and I know Daniel is looking into it… (no promis)

    it will be interesting getting this to js(typescript)

  2. Thanks for these efforts, will provide a much required summary of what’s going on. I seriously think Gaming should be the buzzword for next MAX edition, in pretty much same fashion as ‘creativity’ and ‘community’ were during 2013 edition.

  3. It’s too bad that many of the people voting and commenting in the feature request that you claim is for Windows 8 Modern UI seem to think it’s for Windows Phone 8. The original description certainly seems phone-centric. It kind of dilutes things for those of us who want to vote specifically for Windows 8 Modern UI support.

    1. Hi Josh. There are two entries – one for Windows Phone 8 and one for Windows 8 Modern UI. I agree there is some confusion in the bugbase comments around which is which… I think that also stems from how the original Bug description is worded… but that probably cannot be avoided. Hopefully Adobe can sort out the relevant data – though the display of interest is the most important thing, IMO.

      Personally, I’m pulling stronger for Modern UI support.

      1. Yes, I’m aware of the two entries. It’s just that the votes and comments on the Modern UI one are mostly in support of Windows Phone instead. Probably because it doesn’t mention Modern UI or even Metro in the title or description, and the description compares it to iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. It’s really unfortunate that the submitter hadn’t thought to be more specific. Honestly, if you or someone else hadn’t associated Modern UI with the request, I probably would have assumed it was for Windows Phone.

        I am also pulling stronger for Modern UI. That’s why I’m concerned about the confusion. I’m glad that the community is pushing for more platforms, regardless of which ones they are. I just want to be sure that Adobe isn’t getting too much noise in the process.

Leave a Reply to Mikeciz Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *