ACE Solitaire, 2009 Resolution, Happy New Year
Ahhhhh the first post of a new year, Happy New Year! During the long holiday I decided to do something very different with my idle time and focused on finishing a Flash game I have worked on quietly for about 3 months called ACE Solitaire.
ACE Solitaire was build using ActionScript 3 and leverages some earlier code written by Darron Schall during the early IFBIN and ActionScript 3 days. The codebase has been almost entirely rewritten to support the features needed in ACE Solitaire and will soon leverage the full social aspects of Facebook. Currently the social aspects are limited but there is a lot more code to release in the next 2 days before I return to work.
The game is written in pure Old School AS3 using ActionScript Project in Flex Builder. The output SWF is 19K and that includes the card graphics made in Flash CS4, tiny tiny! The game is specifically designed to allow for long gameplay (4hrs in same session) and I tested the game running for 48hrs without any memory leaks or abnormal behavior. I also had some fun building forms with just Sprite, TextField, and Drawing API which is way fun if you haven’t tried it, I just love TextEvent.LINK (later post)! One unique element is that I added in imaging support into the game so the app can upload screen shots to Facebook ( bug reports, high scores, shared games ). The game is also unique in that it supports FullScreen to allow you to play ACE Solitaire taking advantage of the full desktop real estate.
My recent work at Adobe (MAX+Groups+Video+Community) has really limited my ability to write software and this project scratched a huge itch for me personally. It really made me realize that in 2009 I need to write and blog about the code I write much more often. It is my top resolution for 2009 and I get so much enjoyment out of writing code that it really isn’t work for me, it is fun. I guess once an evangelist, always an evangelist. With this project in particular it really helped to be a Solitaire addict. Over the holiday I think I played over 500+ games of ACE Solitaire.
Back to code, 2 more full day sprints!
Ted 
mouseChildren=false
There is a beautiful property called mouseChildren that I had completely forgotten about. mouseChildren=false turns off all mouse events at a node in the DisplayList so that event on children only reach the actual object where mouseChildren is set to false. Essentially this allows you to enable certain graphics/objects to be invisible to the DOM Event phases and behave as part of the object they are parented to.
Why would this be important?
Say you are writing a game or component and you make these amazing skins for all the elements in the game. If you do not set mouseChildren to false (default is true), you will get events within the skin and need to detect what Object you are working with when events occur. You will see code start to appear that reads:
//within event handler
if( event.target is Card ) do this…
//then the madness begins as you hunt up the DisplayList for the object in question
event.target.parent blah
event.target.parent.parent blah blah
By setting mouseChildren to false, events on any mouseChildren are given to the parent automagically.
ok back to coding…
Ted
SlideRocket up for Best Design at Crunchies on TechCrunch
Congratulations to SlideRocket for being nominated for Best Design in the Crunchies on TechCrunch. Mitch and his team have done an amazing job making SlideRocket easy to use and look great. They more then deserve to win this one.
VOTE FOR SLIDEROCKET (BEST DESIGN)
ted
MAX SESSIONS on AdobeTV - Added 25 sessions
Today we are pushing out 25 new MAX sessions onto AdobeTV for a total of 41 of 295 sessions posted. Having ironed out the video issues last week, explanation below, we are pushing forward with posting videos regularly. To catch up we are posting a batch today.
Cheers,
Ted
MAX SESSIONS on AdobeTV - Update and MRSS Feeds
We had a bumpy launch of the MAX sessions on AdobeTV. It seems that we have 10 videos with malformed headers that caused all sorts of problems in the Akamai streaming service. We have fixed the headers in the FLV files, uploaded new FLVs, and everything is working perfectly. In addition we have added MRSS feeds for use with Adobe Media Player for each track of the MAX conference. This way you can sit back and let the videos come to you!
TRACK FEEDS:
http://rsstv.adobe.com/Max2008Design
http://rsstv.adobe.com/Max2008Develop
http://rsstv.adobe.com/Max2008Envision
TRACK URLS:
MAX 2008 DESIGN
MAX 2008 DEVELOP
MAX 2008 ENVISION
These feeds provide direct access to the FLV files themselves so you can watch the vidoes offline 100% vs online viewing with high quality streaming on AdobeTV.
We will be pushing out a schedule of the upcoming videos given we are past our technical issues with posting the videos. Again sorry for the delay!
Special thanks to the teams on AdobeTV, Akamai, and Digitally Speaking for working through this initial issues. Getting 300+ hours of video posted is a big task and they have done an amazing job!
Spread the word, MAX Sessions are on AdobeTV without restriction!
Ted
ILOG Elixir at MAX
I watched the ILOG Elixir session at MAX this morning on AdobeTV. It is really great to see how far ILOG has come with their component set. I met the ILOG team at the Component Developer Summit in 2006 and they were just exploring Flex as a medium for their state of the art components. They have spend the past few years bringing their knowledge to the Flex component developer community and their work really stands out. Make sure to check out the heatmap component at 35:00 minutes into the presentation.
It was really great to support ILOG at MAX and event better to get to watch their session online this morning. The downside of working on MAX is that it is really hard to attend the sessions. This is actually the first session I have gotten to attend at MAX NA other than the keynotes. It is my deepest hope that putting MAX online will help developers around the world build better applications and experiences.
Regards,
Ted
MAX SESSIONS Launched on AdobeTV - tv.adobe.com
16 MAX sessions from Adobe MAX 2008 NA have been posted. The sessions are being posted into 3 Programs on AdobeTV for each track of the conference:
MAX 2008 DESIGN
MAX 2008 DEVELOP
MAX 2008 ENVISION
Cheers,
Ted
MAX Sessions Online - Intro to Catalyst and Flex 4
Starting Wednesday, Dec. 10 we will be posting session videos from MAX 2008 onto AdobeTV. At MAX NA we recorded all sessions at 1024×768 at 15fps to capture all the subtle details of the presentations including videos, animation and the more subtle features of the Flash Platform from the leading speakers in the community.
To kick things off early and build some buzz about the MAX going online here is the first MAX session online!
Introduction to Flash Catalyst and the Next Generation of Flex
Ryan Stewart, Steven Heintz, Tim Buntel and Heidi Williams will show us how Flash Catalyst, Adobe’s upcoming interaction design tool (first previewed at MAX 2007), is poised to change the collaboration between design and development on rich Internet applications (RIAs). We’ll also preview the next generation of Flex Builder, the development IDE for creating datacentric applications on the Flash Platform. Attendees of this session will receive a DVD with early preview builds of both products.
292 more sessions to go all on AdobeTV!
Cheers,
Ted
Adobe MAX Session Videos
We are planning to release session videos from MAX NA on Dec 10 with 4 videos posted per day to AdobeTV. We will be posting videos across all 3 tracks evenly and will post the keynotes initially as well. We will be posting videos until all 293 videos are on AdobeTV, about 10 weeks total. Anyone interested in the MAX session content will be able to view the videos in full on AdobeTV, regardless of geo-location for free.
For MAX attendees we are posting the videos to Adobe Groups for exclusive viewing within the 2008 MAX NA Group and the 2008 MAX Europe Group. Group invitations are being sent to all attendees by email, please watch for communication this week.
Sorry about the delay on getting the videos ready. They will be posted soon.
Regards,
Ted
Growth in Community and Events
Despite the recent changes at Adobe, we remain very focused on the long term growth for community and events globally. Having just finished record setting events in MAX NA, MAX EU and soon MAX Japan, we are planning to expand events and community programs in 2009. I wanted to talk openly about plans headed into 2009 and provide some insight on our direction and things to come.
Our team has been working on making everything we do more scalable. As a team of 5, we manage 600+ user groups (growing rapidly now with Adobe Groups), the community experts program (growing soon), and events (MAX & Camps). We only have time to work on programs that scale. The programs we start/maintain must be easy to manage, sustainable globally, and bring about measurable returns for the community/ecosystem. Recent projects, Adobe Groups and event recording (MAX, 360Flex, Ajax Experience), are good examples of scalable projects but we plan to do more in 2009.
Community
We will be focusing on new community growth in 2009 leveraging Adobe Groups, Connect, and online events to foster new types of community programs around the globe. Adobe Groups is really an enabler for our team as it allows community members to manage community directly and work in parallel to our team’s effort. We need to get community members more involved in managing community at the local, regional, country levels and we are very open to creating new community roles to support this. Given we added 176 user groups in the weeks following the launch of Adobe Groups, we are projecting 1000+ Adobe User Groups by mid-2009. With this level of growth, we need to change the way we work and get more community members involved in the process. I am looking forward to working with the community to build this new open governance around the globe. It will be challenging but when we get it right the Adobe community programs will be more resilient, larger, and better at ever corner of the globe.
Over the past 2 days I have seen a lot of disappointment in the community regarding people departing Adobe, clearly this is understandable. What I find troubling is that some of the disappointment is related to loosing a “connection” or “contact” at Adobe. We need to change this and share information, contacts, and programs more openly and more transparently with the community at large. Ideally everyone should feel connected and no community member should ever feel cut off when someone departs Adobe. We need to do more to foster stronger bonds between the ecosystem and make sure that everyone has access to great programs and contacts.
Events
We need to reach more people at a lower price point with our events. MAX is targeted at customers who have invested and adopted Adobe’s platform but we lack an event that drives adoption at a lower price point (AKA FREE). We are going to add a new event in 2009 that will be free online and will be paired with Adobe User Group meetings around the global. We are also going to scale up MAX even larger in Los Angeles, 8000 or bust! Seeing as the event backs up to Universal Studios, it will be an event not to miss. We will also be building MAX in the open in 2009 on the MAX Open Working Group on Adobe Groups. Gone are the days of building MAX behind closed doors and not getting the community deeply involved.
We will be growing events and community in 2009 like never before. I look forward to working with you.
Cheers,
Ted
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