Richard Leggett on New Media

This post discusses the various workflows for producing SWFs with the standalone compiler that use graphical assets and animations created in Flash Professional ("Flash Pro"). At time of writing the latest version of Flash Pro is CS4, with CS5 briefly out in beta for a short while. Specifically we look at the methods that involve exporting SWCs and using the [Embed] metatag within class files.

Recently I posted a bug report regarding the [Embed] metatag, which led me to write this post in order to find out whether people are happy with their current workflows and how well others receive projects when it comes to handovers and maintenance.

Background

So you’re building an application, a game, or a website. Immediately you have two options when it comes to setting up your Flash project. You can create an FLA file, assign a document class and get coding, or you can fire up Flash(/Flex) Builder/FDT/Flash Develop et al, create a new Flex or AS3 project and compile it using the Flex SDK compiler. Pretty much every time I’ll opt for the latter because of the increased reliability of the application, and faster compile times.

Even if you use the first option, compiling in Flash Pro itself, you may be actually editing your code in Flash Builder or some other IDE, but the point is the compiler being used in the former is Flash Pro, and in the latter mxmlc/compc the Flex SDK compilers. For the purpose of this post we’ll be looking at Flex or AS3 projects using the Flex SDK compiler, and how to get assets from a FLA, into your project.

I’ve written the following to the best of my knowledge, but there are always tips and tricks that I may be missing, perhaps an entire workflow. If you spot any inaccuracies or flaws please let me know in the comments and I’ll change it ASAP.

Why an FLA at all?

You probably already know you can embed PNGs, SVG and other file types in your classes and never go near an FLA to get graphics into a SWF. When it comes to animations, you may use TweenLite or GTween to perform transitions, but when it comes to frame-based animation, character animation, or simply buttons and panels with hand-made flourishes you may want to use an FLA to create and animate these using the powerful timeline, graphics and animation tools within Flash Pro.

It’s at this point you ask yourself, how do I get these assets from a FLA into my project if I’m not compiling my project in Flash Pro?

The Workflows

Here are 5 methods for getting assets from an FLA, into a Flex or “pure AS3″ project. I’ve excluded those which are MXML-only as this post is not about Flex specifically.

1. Publish SWC from FLA

This method involves linking library symbols to classes, so instead of “MySymbol” in the class field, you have “com.package.MyClass” which refers to a class file in one of the FLAs classpaths. You must then turn on SWC export in the FLA Publish Settings panel, and most likely turn off “Automatically declare stage instances” in the ActionScript 3 settings panel to avoid errors where your class has defined properties for items on stage. Finally add all of the required classpaths that the linked classes will be using (that could include 3rd party libraries) to avoid any compile-time errors.

When you publish the SWF it’ll also publish a SWC in the same folder. You add that SWC to your AS3 project and the classes/symbols compiled into it become available for use in your code.

Pros:

This method keeps any timeline ActionScript, great for complex, nested or multi-state animations.

Cons:

You have to compile the FLA every time you change a class linked to a symbol, in reality that can mean toggling to Flash, exporting the SWC, toggling back to Flash Builder, refreshing the project to re-build the SWC indexes and then recompiling the project here also.

You have to make sure the classes your symbols are linked to are not in the main project source directory (or any directory the project is set to reference as source code). If you don’t do this you will likely not see your graphics/animations appear because the Flex linker will find the class definition first, not the definition that is inside the SWC due to the compilation order.

You have to add all required classpaths to the FLA, possibly every classpath your project is using.

Flash Builder will not report errors in the code used and you lose the ability to Ctrl/Cmd+Click to go to source.

You don’t have access to items on stage immediately, the workaround is pretty painful (link).

Summary:

Whilst this is really the only sensible method for keeping timeline code, the cons make it a really un-intuitive and frustrating process. If anyone can suggest a way to improve this I’ll owe you quite a few beers.

2. [Embed] tag above a class declaration

Example:

Code:

Here we’re simply using the SWF produced by an FLA to store our symbols. The FLA does not link any symbols to any classes itself, the library is simply full of vanilla MovieClips. In our class files we add the [Embed] tag and that binds the symbol from the SWF to the class, so that when we create a new instance of that class, we will also get the graphics from the library symbol.

Pros:

You don’t have to re-compile the FLA unless your graphics actually change.

You can spend more time in your coding environment and not toggle back and forth between it and Flash Pro.

You get real-time compilation errors in the Problems panel of Eclipse because the code is not coming from a SWC.

Cons:

It strips ActionScript from the timeline of your symbols. If your symbol is an animation, and you had a few stop frames in there, perhaps one per labelled segment of animation, you’ll lose these and the animation will just run through on loop. What you see coders do to circumvent this is use addFrameScript(5, stop); for every stop frame, or even using lots of frame labels to act as meta-tags for code replacement (link).

Any children of the symbol lose any typing, so if you’ve added a couple of MyButton’s or a MyCustomWidget to your symbol on it’s timeline, those become plain MovieClips. This is a huge problem which relegates this method to animations only.

3. [Embed] tag above a class property declaration

This method involves using the [Embed] tag above a class property, for example:

Code:

So you can probably guess this is more of a composition-based approach, which works well for simple graphics, for multi-frame MovieClips you’d type myInstance as MovieClip, and tell it to stop().

With this method you’re instance will either be a SpriteAsset (extends Sprite) or a MovieClipAsset (extends MovieClip), you cannot cast it to a custom class, so for a symbol that is meant to represent a contact form, with an instance of MyButtonClass or even just some TextFields in it, this will fail.

4. Embed metatag to embed a whole SWF

There’s also another attribute available to the Embed metatag, that’s mimeType. If you remove the symbol attribute and replace it with mimeType="application/octet-stream” it will embed the entire SWF and preserve the class associations set up in the library, i.e. you won’t have to have the instances typed to Sprite(/Asset) or MovieClip(/Asset).

When you embed a symbol from a SWF in this way, you can then use Loader to get at the classes within:

Code:

Pros:

Great way to provide a library symbol a class/some behaviour without having to constantly re-compile the FLA.

Cons:

I think you’ll agree that’s not a great option if you have a lot of symbols or symbols which have others nested within. There are libraries to help with this, but…

No strict typing.

5. Runtime loading a SWF

Perhaps the oldest option here, loading a SWF at runtime allows you to pull out symbols/classes using the applicationDomain.getDefinition() function as described in method 3. If you’re already familiar with the getDefinitionByName() utility this works pretty much the same, but you are targeting a specific SWF’s classes.

Pros:

Great for loading content that rarely changes, such as fonts.

Cons:

Magic strings. Making a string a constant does not make it any less hacky, if you change the string in your FLA, your constant is meaningless, and you’ll only find out about it at runtime if that piece of code executes.

You’ll have to export your SWF from an FLA or using one of the other techniques which means you’ll also have some of the problems associated with those.

Feedback

So what route do you take? Please also state the type of project: application, game, website; it’s quite possible that people building applications simply never encounter these issues due to the primarily scripted animation and simple non-hierarchical graphical assets.

You may also want to consider how easy it will be to start compiling in Flash Professional in order to take advantage of CS5’s export to iPhone, this can impact your decision on which method you use.

Overall I feel that whilst choice is great, each method seems to have pretty serious downsides, and I’m yet to find one that doesn’t make for a less than pleasant rinse-and-repeat workflow. It would be nice to be able use Flash Pro to speed up the process of preparing game assets, laying stuff out on stage, animating on the timeline… but there are too many down-sides associated with this, and too many idiosyncrasies to learn just to get things working, I hope in future the two tools can be brought closer together perhaps through the new file format.

As usual, all comments welcome, unless you’re the bargain-dishwasher spammer.

Further reading

http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=853
http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=864
http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/03/using_flash_sym.html
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/news/?p=327

Also the Flex Livedocs, which certainly don’t explain all of these methods in nearly enough detail or context, which makes using the Flex SDK a darker art than it could be.

Disclaimer: This post is not about defending Flash. I couldn’t care less whether Flash sees another year, nor do I care what language I type into my computer as long as it does the job better than anything else. I would rather just the one option, but more on that later.

“The World is moving to HTML 5″

This poignant, yet immediately dated and tautological quote is supposedly from Steve Jobs, as reported by Wired. The article speaks of HTML 5 being used to create sophisticated web pages, and I wholeheartedly agree. If you are building web pages, HTML and JavaScript are almost always the right technologies to use, but we went beyond solely building web pages many years ago. Web pages are not the only type of internet destination, even though the ever vocal standardistas seem to think that’s what everyone wants. I say get your head out of the sand, it’s nice out.

Types of Web Content

We can break down web content into four main categories:

Pages

Pages were once the only type of content to be found in a web browser, primarily there for information display with very little user interaction, they are designed to provide the desired content as fast as possible, as such they tend to use text as the primary method of communication, they work very well with search engines, and they date just as fast as anything else (Microsoft’s first web presence).

Dynamic Pages

We have in this category the semi-interactive stuff that AJAX has found a home with, adding dynamism to an otherwise static page, and it does this stuff very well indeed. In short, it’s all very direct and to the point, it works outstandingly well. If you had to wait for an intro to play before you found out the price of the avocado you want to buy from your online supermarket you’d go elsewhere.

Experience and Brands

Then again, if you’re a 14 year old boy who loves watching Top Gear and you’re being delivered a loud, visceral and engaging experience for a super-car brand, this is the 21st century equivalent of that Ferrari F40 poster on your wall, that aspirational experience now even more compelling; one day you’ll drive that car. It may be interesting to some people to scroll through a highly efficient search engine friendly static page to see this kind of thing, but it’s really very boring for most people. There is a world of purely enjoyable content out there; don’t paint it grey. If you’re trying to build a brand, you have to tell a story.

Applications and Games

This is really a big part of what the web is today. Web-deployed applications and games have proven their worth. Open to wide audiences across multiple platforms, secure, immediately updateable, cheap to develop, and getting ever more sophisticated. If you look at these examples all done in Flash, I’d ask you what else you’d use that ticks all those boxes:

I wouldn’t underestimate the shift to web-based applications, IMHO nearly all applications will be web-based in the next 5 years; applications that include office suites, image and video editors, casual and hardcore games, music production software, and of course the most ubiquitous, social networking and media sharing. All of these are equally deserving of being available to users of a web browser, all of these requiring the most cutting edge technology available in order to stand out from the crowd and avoid being locked into the glacial flow of web standards progression.

Plugins

Plugins drive things forward by letting non-techies bolt on new functionality. Director, Flash, Unity all did or still do their part. Zoom forward 5 years and let us visit a perfect world where all the major browser vendors, including the behemoth Microsoft, have agreed on the various parts of “HTML 5″. Miraculously IE supports the same Canvas abilities and video codecs as the iPhone, Android and Nokia browsers, Mozilla (Firefox) has conceded to paying h264 royalty fees, sites with video content have conceded to paying h264 broadcast fees, everything is gonna be allllright. The issue now is that things are looking a bit dated, the browser can now natively do what Flash applications were doing 5 years ago. This is a never ending game of cat and mouse, no-one can argue one is better than the other when nothing is standing still.

And so what now? What about new technologies, where’s the now ubiquitous multitouch we’re used to seeing since Flash 10.1, since iPhone and Android devices dominated the markets. Maybe that’s in the HTML 6 spec, maybe just in Firefox, how many more years after we start using it does it become standard. Along with multi-touch there will be many more features missing, we will still need plugins. Flash has added a myriad new features that game programmers and web developers are using to create a whole new level of experience that has obliterated the console and desktop software markets. HTML 5 is starting to look a lot like HTML 4 used to. Long in the tooth.

HTML 5

If we come back to today, I think it’s important to clear up just what this HTML 5 really means. It’s more than a spec, in general the term is used to refer to the many sub-technologies involved, including new HTML markup, the Canvas tag for 2D (and possibly in future 3D) static and dynamically scripted graphics, fast JavaScript VM’s like Tamarin (donated by Adobe), a video tag for playing back a choice of video files, and possibly WebGL which aims to bring OpenGL 3D graphics to the web on par with Unity3D perhaps. I need to make it clear that I really want this to happen, no matter how open to feedback Adobe are, no matter how open the SWF format is, it does not sit well with me that one vendor controls what will and will not go in to the runtime, and it’s still a plugin, no matter how easy and fast it installs, something doesn’t quite feel right about it.

But I live in the real world, it’s mainly this technology that I’ve used to pay my way since I was 16, and that doesn’t show any signs of slowing. I am 100% willing to use HTML 5 if it suits the job. I’m not sitting around either, trust me. No flash developers are tied in to using it. But there are too many things stopping me from switching. Let’s take the hot topic of the day, the <video> tag; it doesn’t even replace what you could do with Flash 8 or 9 let alone some of the cool things you can do *right now* (no waiting)…

Video

Flash is not video. The Flash Player was installed on over 90% of internet connected computers before YouTube, when Flash video was limited to the early Sorenson Spark codec, optimised for small files that performed really badly at anything larger than 320x240, and 8 years ago when performance was so bad with Flash video we were using postage stamp sized video, but it was the immediacy of the playback that made it successful over more powerful plugins like Quicktime, WMV or Real Player. Either way, Flash video clearly changed the web, no more picking a plugin, picking your bandwidth, looking at truly ugly system chrome, so let’s look at what we need to see from HTML 5 video for it to displace Flash as the most efficient, cost effective and flexible solution:

If >this< is the cream of the crop right now, and it doesn’t even work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (percentages?), what is there to shout about?

Yeah but Flash eats 100% of my CPU

In a sentence: so do the most basic HTML 5 experiments (link).

An empty SWF consumes ~0% of my CPU, funnily enough the same amount as an empty web page. When something eats 100% of the CPU, it’s because is is doing something computationally expensive, possibly animating high quality 32-bit images whilst applying real time bitmap effects so that you can see just how that logo will look on this crumpled T-Shirt before you send it off to be printed. The CPU usage is not automatically higher with Flash, it’s down to the design and programmer to figure out what they want to achieve, and optimise it to whatever they find acceptable for their intended audience. JavaScript can and does use 100% CPU in some of the best apps out there, we just don’t see many apps that are up to the level of the Flash apps linked to earlier in this post. Video acceleration is a fair point until you consider video is also a display object in the Flash Player that can have these filters, transformations and so on applied in real time, that comes at a cost, however with Flash Player 10.1 hardware acceleration is starting to come into play, a truly impressive feat for such a small cross platform runtime.

If we kill Flash, we kill annoying banner ads

It’s also the case that displacing Flash will not get rid of annoying banner ads, agencies will just use <canvas> and <video>, don’t kid yourself, it’ll be those same Flash developers making it, they would simply re-tool and utilise their existing experience to produce infuriating ads in whatever makes the biggest impact. The internet is only less annoying with things like FlashBlock because only a tiny drop in the ocean of internet users use Flash block so they scoot under the radar. They are excluding themselves from the mainstream for this small benefit and more power to you for doing that, it’s up to you.

Browser integration

This is a major sorepoint for me as my primary job has been developing ever more complex Flash applications that are deployed on the web and on the desktop (indeed to replace existing desktop apps). You can communicate in real time between JavaScript and Flash, passing simple and complex data types between them, but it’s still a black box on the page. This is a really tough nut to crack, if you spend just 10 minutes asking yourself how you could get a native desktop application that you’ve embedded in a page to play well with the HTML around it, you’ll see why it simply doesn’t make sense, we shouldn’t try to shoe-horn these things.

The Semantic Web and Accessibility

Another gotcha. I can absolutely agree these things are so very important, depending on the content. What on earth is the point of making accessible a site where the entire aim is to build a burger out of people dressed up as beef, buns and lettuce, running and jumping on one another in a video montage. You may think the site should not exist anyway, but who are we to dictate what kind of content can be put online. Some idiots love this stuff and clearly so did Burger King! What about a game like Dofus? Semantics and accessibility don’t apply to everything. You can build Flash sites to be accessible, you can build them on top of a CMS like Drupal to make sure you get the best of both worlds. In summary, use the right tool for the job.

Mobile

This one is very important to me. Hand on heart, devices that we now consider mobile: phones and tablets; these are going to be how 90% of people use computers, period. There’s simply no need for bulky laptops and desktops for non-professionals. Wireless TV connections let you get that big screen experience when you need it, but the redundancy in devices will be huge. This became clear in my own circle of entirely non-geek friends already, almost exclusively using mobile devices for everything, and this at the very beginning of the full-on shift to web-apps.

It became quite clear to me in 2007 (link) that Flash was never going to do well on mobile until it was the same runtime as the one we were using on the web, especially when it was licensed per handset. Funnily enough I called that convergent version “Flash X", and it turns out “X", by pure coincident, was right, in a roman numerals kinda way. Flash 10.1 has been optimised to run on lower powered CPUs like ARM chips found in iPhones and Android devices.

Hating Adobe

The animosity directed at Adobe is unusual. They simply invest in whatever proves popular in order to generate revenue, and they’ve had a lot of popular HTML/JS editing tools, even demoing Canvas support in the next Dreamweaver IDE. When Director started to die, occasionally being used for the odd online 3D game, and Flash took off, they invested time and money into creating what they like to call the Flash Platform. A range of commercial and open source tools, open-spec file formats for rich media, binary data transfer and a video container, a runtime, and a few free and commercial serverside offerings. They are not forcing anyone to use this stuff, if we stop using it they will move on like they have in the past, investing in whatever it is people do want to code in. In my opinion, Adobe will be the second big player, after Apple, to fully embrace HTML 5 in their software, with Microsoft lagging behind a very long way.

Conclusion

To everyone shouting support for HTML 5 as the flash killer, if that were really possible don’t you think Flash developers would already be doing it? We are a thriving community positively chomping at the bit to try out new stuff, I’m presenting on Android at a Flash user group shortly, we don’t hang around. We weren’t born knowing ActionScript 1, 2 or 3 and we have to live in the real world, we may even be right next to you Indeed many Flash developers are also HTML/JS developers and may practice a serverside language in smaller companies. It just leads to frustration when we hear “use HTML 5″ when it is not supported even across desktop browsers. What version of IE should we be targeting before we can start building the rich compelling experiences we’re used to.

The world will move to HTML X when Flash X is not needed, it is a non-argument, no amount of insane zealous preaching from within the idealist world of either side will make this happen in the real world. The market will use whatever tools provide the best solutions for the best return on investment.

I can’t wait till we get through this next transitionary period, with web designers having to spend twice the effort providing Flash fallbacks to video, companies encoding and hosting their videos twice for Firefox, licenses and royalties for h264, this will be another messy, frustrating time for web users and progress may slow, but I can’t see a way around it.

Gizmodo is reporting OpenGL 3.0 support in OSX 10.6.3, not massively exciting in itself, but OpenGL is something I have been thinking quite a bit about recently.

In my brief career as a programmer, I’ve dabbled with DirectX, starting with version 7. I found it incredibly cryptic as a mid-teen but by this time just about all console games had gone 3D, so I wanted to know how all of this worked. I never really touched OpenGL, it seemed like some sort of abandoned standard at the time, all the cool kids were off building stuff in DirectX, but I was to later realise this was just plain FUD.

More recently I’ve spent some evenings dabbling in Android and OpenGL ES. This is one of those things that if I don’t get on top of soon, I will totally be kicking myself in future; my perpetual bleeting about how big Android will be is not a well kept secret. Of course Android devices supports OpenGL ES, specifically 1.1 and in the newer devices 2.0. It’s a bit of a misnomer that OpenGL isn’t as powerful as DirectX, certainly John Carmack of id software, creators of the ongoing Doom and Quake series doesn’t think so. It’s true that most PC and XBox games use DirectX, and even that DirectX supports more advanced features, but it’s important to consider that the PS3 uses OpenGL ES (PSGL) as well as many, many devices…

This, when combined with the rapid acceleration of mobile GPUs, could be the most important shift in the 10 year battle between SGI’s OpenGL and Microsoft’s DirectX. In a nutshell, devices tend to exclusively support OpenGl ES. iPhones and Android powered handsets are multiplying; these are quickly spawning countless new games, from studios old and new, big and small, all coding for OpenGL ES. So could it be that this is the unexpected trojan horse, or was this outcome built into the very DNA of an open standard like OpenGL?

Another interesting rumour is Microsoft’s XBox live going mobile, which we can only presume will run exclusively on Win Mobile devices, and that would mean DirectX (?). Yet another twist in the tale is the ethereal WebGL, which when solidified promises to bring 3D to the web once and for all, and in doing so, bring it to all manner of platforms. So all in all the future is looking quite good for OpenGL, but there’s still plenty to play for.

As further food for thought, you may find this article on “Why you should use OpenGL over DirectX” of interest which was posted just recently.

I was lucky enough to receive one of the first waves of Nexus One’s (N1) from Google’s direct online shop. Before I go on, the shopping experience was a little too slick IMHO. I signed in with my Gmail account, clicked buy, clicked confirm and it was shipping, if you’ve used Google Checkout before they will likely have your card details and address. You do have 15 mins to cancel the order though. When you see Google’s ever growing list of properties getting together you can see why they are so immensely disruptive.

So the Nexus One, possibly erroneously construed as the “Google Phone", when in reality Google have already sold two Android dev phones. The N1 is more like the first of many in a Google Phone shop, which if you ask me is pretty much like Phones 4 U. A way of purchasing a sim-free or network contracted phone from a broker.

I was a little hesitant about this phone, it was invariably going to be compared to the iPhone due to the way it was positioned, the capabilities, the Android market and the form factor (albeit slimmer). So with that on with the review…

Hardware

It has the usual “superphone” (more on that another time) credentials; a large capacitive touchscreen (albeit a much improved OLED), sensors galore, but the most standout feature is probably the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. It’s a huge risk to put such a beast in a small device with current battery technology. This thing has the potential to drink a lithium ion like a student with a beer bong. The Acer A1 (which I had very briefly) suffers from this, it just cannot tame the CPU to satisfy the tiny battery. It’s not just the CPU burning through electrons, Android itself is architected to be a multi-tasking, never-quit-an-app OS. But I’m pleased to say N1 deals with this well without resorting to task-killer apps. The battery is large enough (but if a 2000mAh came out of course I’d get it), and it managed memory hyper effectively through Android 2.1 and a couple of power management chips on the motherboard.

It’s fair to continue to make comparisons to the iPhone 3GS, there are a few things the iPhone wins out on, which considering it’s an older device is still encouraging, but on the whole the N1 is equally polished, with a super hard yet soft to the touch Teflon coating, it’s what the iPhone might look like if aesthetics weren’t so highly weighted in the design (that’s not a dig, it’s a design philosphy that makes Apple products so desirable). Every lesson and trick learned from building and using the iPhone has been considered by HTC.

The N1 comes with 512Mb of RAM (yep!), but only 4Gb of space on the SD card in order to reduce the purchase cost. The point it it’s a removable micro-SD card, these things already cost peanuts, come in up to 32Gb (for the iPhone comparison), and will continue to fall in price as the sizes go up this year.

The camera is a good 5MP shooter, with intelligent focus, LED flash, and a good lense. I think the one to look out for in this department will be the Sony Ericsson X10, which has all their camera know-how surrounding an 8MP ready to blitz the competition. Without going onto talking about Android itself just yet, suffice to say your immediate sharing options are impressive.

There are plenty of little touches which make it pleasant to use. The myriad sensors; proximity to dim the screen and prevent accidental touches, compass to support immersive augmented reality, trackball which if you ask me provides that essential accuracy required for some tasks which touch-screens can really let you down on, and doubles up as a tri-color indicator for notifications. The combination of these sensors and powerful CPU really starts to make sense when you try applications like Google Goggles. This is a visual search app, you point the camera, shoot, it scans the image for text and details, and will recognise and bring up results for books, barcodes, media, paintings, scan business cards and plenty more. The thing is, it’s so fast, the scan takes several seconds on the Acer, on the N1 it does it in one swipe, and on the N1 it also adjusts the flash brighter and dimmer until it gets a good image.

I had heard of it’s secondary mic, used for noise cancellation, but I didn’t expect to have someone remark on the quality of the call the first time I made one, comparable to a good quality land-line.

Software

Perhaps a killer feature of Android is Google’s role on the net. If you are a Google user, you will get a shockingly good setup experience. I entered my email address and password, it downloaded my calendars, gmail, contacts (with photos and maps) and that was it, setup was 1 click. Even more scary, it also populated my Gallery with live images from my Picasa account, which I use as a backup for Flickr, but I may switch over now.

Android is through and through a web OS. You really get a feeling for interconnectivity between apps and services on Android. Not only does it allow developers to write any app they desire with no approval required, you can write background services, fullscreen apps, widgets or live wallpapers. The OS itself it built on top of a system of notifications and intents that allow these things to communicate and interact in a secure manner. So when you open a photo you get sharing options for all the apps that registered as such, Picasa, Flickr, Email, SMS, from built-in to 3rd party and back again.

For the developers reading this, you can write in Java (optionally using XML layouts), Webkit (HTML/JS/CSS) or native C using the ADT plugin for Eclipse and supplied emulator. However the way it has been built allows you to leverage all the layers below, so you can write an app in JavaScript using Webkit, and embed a Java or native C class exposed as a javascript function, for real number crunching power.

The OS itself is responsive and polished, but it doesn’t do anything to sacrifice what is so important in devices you rely on when you need something done fast, devices such as phones and cars. When designing a touch-screen devices it’s easy to lose speed and efficiency amongst gloss and animation, that’s why the N1 has a Car Home app that provides instant voice enabled access to navigation, search and calling (I’ve heard this app can be launched whenever you put it in a car docking cradle). On top of that every text input is voice enabled, you can speak your search input or SMS messages. This can be a complete joke on some devices, but Google does this on a server, a server that has been learning from millions of Google Voice transcripts the last couple of years, this makes it very accurate indeed.

App-Store vs. Android Market

I can’t believe those professional journalists saying that there’s no competition because the App-Store has ~120k apps, and Android Market only has ~20k… Surely that’s a given because of how long these devices have been out, the Android Market targets a much much wider range of devices from several manufacturers from phones to tablets and TVs, and dare I say a great deal more potential customers than the App-Store. It’s just a matter of months.

The purchase experience is definitely better than the App-Store in 2.1. The Market app (screenshot) itself is much like the App-Store app, full-screen image previews, top free/paid, and purchase is a single click with instant download and install. Apple have the edge on how it looks, but with Market you can purchase a paid app and refund it within 24 hours, this gets around approval/testing because if it doesn’t work on a brand new handset yet you can just refund it, it also means you don’t always need a trial version (however that can be a good marketing technique).

You can of course also purchase direct from developers because you do not have to use Google’s own Market, or you can use some 3rd party markets that have sprung up, in particular for adult content.

So that’s it, a pretty positive review so far. I’ll update if anything changes. HTC are one to watch in 2010 that’s a given. Something that I’ve taken away from this is that we are finally getting to where us mobile-fanatics have been wanting to get to for some time. That was the promise that your mobile would be your primary device, not your laptop or desktop. IMHO, laptops and desktops will be the exclusive domain of software developers.

If you’re not familiar with Blender, it’s one of the most impressive pieces of 3D modeling, animation, rendering and game-creation software ever made. It can easily compete with high-end software like 3DS Max and Maya (proof), added to that it’s 100% free. For this, it deserves some attention!

Unfortunately having used 3DS Max, Maya and Blender myself, it’s very clear Blender has always suffered from a desperately unforgiving user interface. By that I mean you really need some help learning the basics, there are so many things that it simply expects you to know the shortcut key for due to the minimal interface, but this has improved significantly just recently.

Of course this ties in nicely to the book review, which is of course the perfect thing to bridge that gap between initial bewilderment, and zen guru-like control of Blender.

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines written by Allan Brito is suitable for people who already have basic knowledge of Blender, but not necessarily loads. I recommend you follow the intro tutorials before diving in.

The books theme, if you hadn’t guessed, is beautiful mechanical creatures, machines, spacecraft and weapons. The theme could have been anything, but this one nicely captures the imagination, and deals heavily with polygonal modeling especially suitable for game assets.

I’ve mentioned poly(gonal) modeleling, in fact that’s the first technique encountered, you can model almost anything using this process, starting with a crude plane or cube, extruding, splitting and rotating faces until you end up with a boxy looking figure which can be further refined or smoothed to the required finish and detail. The weapon chosen, a rifle, provides most of the usual stumbling blocks you’d encounter and neatly explains the tools and techniques required to complete the model.

The next subject is the Yafray rendering engine, which can provide ultra realistic ray traced graphics, suitable for motion graphics, FMVs or stills. Of course this chapter also covers applying materials to the models and setting up light sources to set the scene and add realism.

We then move on to more advanced modelling, this time a steampunk spacecraft. This section is much more difficult, I learned some new techniques such as extruding bezier curves along a path and then twisting the solid 3D result in order to form some twisted cables. Finally UV mapping is covered, unfolding the entire model to apply texture details to all the panels and surfaces. This is increasingly relevant for other Flash developers, using engines like Away3D and Papervision, you will no doubt have to use these techniques along the way (along with texture baking of course).

Now something all geeks love, particles. Blender has a fully customisable built in particle engine in this case used to produce the spacecraft exhaust.

The book then moves on to even more advanced techniques, used to create a robot. These include some of the built in modifiers (something I always found very accessible in 3DS Max, but less so in Blender). The author uses LuxRender to apply some bling in the highly reflective metallic textures. In fact here’s a great video that shows the end result…

Finally we complete the project with animation, using pivots and curves, this pretty much covers the majority of what you’d want to do in Blender (unless you are using the game engine).

This book immediately gets my vote because quite simply, imho, when getting to grips with Blender you can do with as much help as possible. It’s a truly amazing application but getting tips and techniques like these from the experienced guys is great.

You can buy the book from Packt as PDF or hardcopy.