JavaScript NES Game Emulator
It's things like these that make me say wow and what is making me say wow today is a little project created by Ben Firshman. What Ben created is a JavaScript emulator that emulates the Nintendo Entertainment System. What makes it remarkable is that it's actually playable. Under Chrome and Safari I get ~50 fps. Firefox delivers about ~10 fps and the iPhone surprising works at a miserable ~.5fps.
What I think is cool about this is that it shows us how far JavaScript has come over the years. and how powerful HTML5 + Canvas will really be. I'll be excited to see what else comes out from the community in the upcoming year.
Build iPhone Applications With Flex Builder
It always excites me when I'm able to find a new little gem on the internet. I think this could prove to be interesting as a way to develop for multiple mobile platforms. Not just for the iPhone or any other one offs. Today i was made aware of Elips Studio 3. You can register for the developer beta here. It'll be interesting to see how well it works at compiling to multiple platforms and the differences between all those platforms.
From the site:
"ELIPS Studio 3 cuts through the complexity of the fragmented mobile market by providing a single development toolkit for the world's most popular handsets. It includes a sophisticated simulator, and the code it generates is compact and rapid enough to run even on low-specification, mass-market handsets."
How does it work?
- Develop in Adobe Flex/Flash Builder
ELIPS Studio 3 is available as a plug-in for Adobe Flex / Flash Builder, a popular IDE for the development of RIAs and RDAs using the ActionScript and MXML languages.- Use our mobile Flex Framework
The product comes with a mobile-optimized version of the Flex Framework and a wide range of Flex extension libraries, including mobile device features and UI components. These provide additional capabilities beyond those found in the 'standard' Flex, such as making voice calls, accessing the phone's address book, sending SMS or MMS, taking snapshots or videos with the camera, and more. You can also import open source ActionScript Web 2.0 libraries.- Build and deploy for the mobile platforms you want
ELIPS Studio 3 automatically mobilizes and packages your Flex-based applications for industry-leading platforms, including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, plus proprietary mass-market devices that run Real-Time operating systems (RTOS).
And because Open-Plug has a long track record of creating optimized code for cellular handsets... you’ll get amazing performance with your new Mobile 2.0 applications!
iHandler – AIR iTunes Exporter
This is a cool little tool written in AIR by Ondrej Rafaj. What iHandler does, is allows you to export your selected files from your iTunes library. I could really see a project like this doing some cool new stuff in the future with the new AIR 2.0 api's. Maybe let you play your music through the web using an HTTP AIR Server or export them to different formats using the AS3 OGG Vorbis library. Just a thought.
You can grab a copy from here
Adobe AIR 2.0 Web Server
I found this cool example of an HTTP based socket server over at Christophe Coenraet's blog. Basically he setup a socket and made it listen for incoming HTTP connections and server data based up the requests. Very neat stuff. It's always interesting to see people push the uses of AS3 in new directions.
This should also be possible under older versions of AIR too. since those versions supported sockets too. the only difference is in AIR 2.0 we now have UDP sockets.
You can view the code and examples here.
My 20 Most used AS3 Libraries
Because I work full time developing primarily in AS3. I have come across a lot of very useful libraries that I like to use in my day to day work. So today I present you with a list of the top 20 libraries that I have come to use on a more regular basis. I hope you may find and discover something here that may be of use to you. If you have a library that you use a lot please let me know.
Adobe Social
So I've been looking into the new Adobe Social API for a little application I've been planning on working on. One of the things I hate is trying to update my avatar / icon on all of these different social media sites. So I'm planning on making a simple Adobe Air application that I can add an image to, resize and then upload to all the social media sites I use. The only problem is from what I understand is that the Social API will only work from a valid domain that you setup and will not work from localhost. So as a result this new API is incompatible with AIR. Oh well. Shouldn't be to hard to figure out all of the different API's for uploading to a bunch of different site. Right?
Google Closure
Google has just announced a new project in their labs called Closure. Closure is for those who are doing JavaScript development. It is supposed to help speed up development time and make it easier to re-use existing code. Google is currently using Closure in Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. The Closure tools include:
- A JavaScript optimizer
- A comprehensive JavaScript library
- An easy templating system for both Java & JavaScript
Personally since i generally do more web RIA type of work. I would like to see how well this works with Ext JS. But more on that after i get to play with it some more.