It’s Out In The Open!!

For the better part of 10 months, Automata Studios has been working with Adobe’s XD Team and MTV’s Jackass to develop a casual social game using the Flash platform.  The application is called “jackassworld pranks” and is an AIR application that allows you to send rather juvenile pranks to your friends.  Here’s a quote from jackassworld.com:

“…with a flick of your cursor you can toss poo grenades, pee balloons, and bags of puke at your dumb little buddies. You can have Dave England take a dump in the middle of their spreadsheet or Powerpoint presentation, send Party Boy over to bump and grind it out, or let Steve-O unleash an undigested beast—all right on their computer screen. And just wait until you see the fecal dynamics.”

The Requirements:

Windows

• Intel® Pentium® 4 processor or faster
• Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or Windows® Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate
• 1 GB RAM
• 50 MB of available hard disk space
• 1024 x 768 display (1280 x 800 recommended)
• Internet connection required for installation and online services

Mac OS

• Power PC® G5 or multicore Intel® processor
• Mac OSX v10.4.11-10.5.4
• 1 GB RAM
• 50 MB of available hard disk space
• 1024 x 768 display (1280 x 800 recommended)
• Internet connection required for installation and online services

Check out the app here.

In the coming days and weeks, we will post several articles and blurbs about our experience developing the application, as well as the technical challenges we faced (they were numerous).  We’ll also be doing a guest spot on Adobe’s XD Inspire Blog next week, so check us out over there.

For now, enjoy the app.  It’s time for me to take a vacation!

When you slap the [Inspectable] tag above a getter/setter pair in an ActionScript class you can then go and attach your class to a symbol in Flash (and tell it that the symbol is a component) and WHA-LA! you have a property that’s inspectable in the Component Inspector panel.

That’s all fine and good. The problem is when you’re trying to actually USE that property. The problem is that your component FIRST has it’s constructor called and THEN all of the properties that you set in the Component Inspector get set. Whoops.

What you need is some way of making sure that you have some code that runs AFTER all of your properties are set. Well, the easiest way to do this is to tap into the oft-ignored Event.EXIT_FRAME event as I explained in this answer I posted up on StackOverflow.

I was playing around with Flash Builder 4 & Flex 4 after the public beta was announced, and decided to whip up a quick, very simple AIR client for Basecamp.  It’s pretty straight forward and there’s not much code, but if you’re having trouble getting started with AIR, Flex 4, or Gumbo, perhaps it will help.  

Basecamp provides a very simple REST-based API, which is documented at http://developer.37signals.com/basecamp/. I just used URLLoader and URLRequest to pull the data, with authentication turned on. When authentication is turned on, your OS will handle username and password requests.

I ended up using anchor-based layouts because I couldn’t figure out, with the spark components, how to center my screens.  Maybe this is the way you’re supposed to do it…I’m not sure.  If anyone has any input as to best practices for the new layout mechanisms in Flex 4, I’d love to hear about them.

Beyond that, there’s not much to the application…just a sample.  Maybe I’ll flush this thing out as I continue to play with Flash Builder 4.  All in all, in regards to my feelings about Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4, I am going to reserver judgement until I have a larger data set to work with.  Building this sample was very easy, but I don’t think I accessed enough of the new features to cast judgement yet.

Download source as a Flash Builder 4 Project Here!