@bigspaceship
The wife and I will be in NY Friday through Sunday for a much needed weekend off. While we’re there,
Big Spaceship has agreed to let me stop in and say “Hi”.
If you’re a Lynda.com member, take some time to watch this insightful interview with founder Michael Lebowitz.
Big Spaceship does amazing work, but the thing that really hit me during the video was the way they organize teams - physically in the workspace and organizationally. Everyone is within an arms reach, all essential responsibilities are represented, and if you need privacy just put on your noise canceling headphones. The most productive times we experience around our workplace happen when developers, QA, analysts and managers leave their 4×8 stalls and join forces in a conference room. Unfortunately, this is an emergency procedure instead of a day to day reality. I just want to see it with my own eyes. Even for 30 minutes.
Thank you to Big Spaceship for generously opening your doors to a visitor. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow!
I’ll be leading a 90 min hands on presentation at BFlex ‘09 in Bloomington, IN. Title: Practical Cairngorm for Adobe Flex Applications.
We will cover real world examples of how Cairngorm can make your life (and the life of your teammates) easier. While these concepts can be applied across frameworks, we will be using Cairngorm as the basis for the examples.
Please check out these resources if you’d like to attend but need a crash course in Cairngorm.
- Adobe TV video resources for Cairngorm
- Adobe’s Cairngorm home page
- Cairngorm extensions by Universal Mind (will be used in the presentation).
With a little luck, version 2 of Shotgun 3D will be available in the App Store. Here is a quick preview:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Many thanks to all around the world who downloaded version 1. I would love to hear your feedback and feature requests for the updates to come!
And now we wait for approval …
Some new changes since the last blog post & video:
- New UI for the shooting scene. More intuitive controls.
- Added birds & sound effects. Shooting the birds is 2-20 points, clay pigeons are 1-10 points.
- Added an info screen with instructions and tips for racking up points.
- Game recap screen w/ score vs. high score.
- Ability to clear high scores.
Here’s a preview of my first game built in Unity3D for the iPhone. This pretty much killed my weekend, but it was a ton of fun.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
I’ve always wanted to do something like this - it’s like a dream come true with Unity3D. Before this weekend I had about 10 hours of 3D experience, total. Now that’s tripled, but the real story here is how awesome Unity3D is and how quickly you can pick it up and be productive.
The game above uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to control the shotgun and touch api to control throwing & shooting the clay pigeons. Best scores are stored on the device as expected. Likewise, the user’s preference for easy or hard gameplay is stored and retrieved next time the app is opened.
I’m excited! There are more (complicated) games on my to-do list, so keep an eye on my twitter timeline for updates and new releases. If you’re interested in working together please drop me a line!
Interested in building 3D games?
Blender: Free open source 3D content creation suite.
PhotoShop Extended: For painting 3D textures.
Unity 3D: Multiplatform game development tool.
Video Series: Unity 3D for Flash Developers
http://www.unitytutorials.com/channel/video/2/flash-development
The image above is a render of a clay pigeon. It’s not perfect, nor is it particularly good, but it only took about an hour to model in Blender, paint in PhotoShop, import into Unity 3D and begin launching them from a virtual trap house. This is the most fun I’ve had developing in a long time and I’m looking forward to (finally) getting into the App Store 
Integration with Flash & Flex?
Unity’s browser plugin can communicate with JavaScript similar to the ExternalInterface class in Flex, so there’s a possible integration point. Maybe that sounds absurd … doing the 3D game programming in Unity and building the 2D UI in Flex, but it’s possible. I’ll have to try this out; there are of all sorts of cool possibilities.
I recently picked up a Bamboo pen tablet on Amazon.com for cheap. Clearly I’m no nataliedee, but decided to draw out my daily routine (while in #9).
If you do the math you’ll notice that 15 minutes are MIA - that’s for the snooze button. This has been a completely ridiculous blog post. Thank God for long weekends and Freedom. Happy 4th of July!
Source and example files from the presentation are now available through the following links:
1) What you get for free with UIComponent
2) [view] Component lifecycle
3) [view step one | step two] Invalidation
I have a text version of the presentation in the works. Anyways, I hope this is helpful to you as you create your own custom Flex components!
[just an announcement ... no content]
I’ll be presenting at the next 615Flex user group meeting [details & directions] on Tuesday, 11/11. We should have a great turnout and a decent intro hands-on about creating custom Flex components by extending the UIComponent class.
Description:
1) What you get for free with UIComponent
2) Component lifecycle
3) Invalidation
Throughout) Hands on - Creating an interactive component
[View examples & source from the presentation]
If you’ve ever wanted to create a component from scratch and didn’t know where to start, start here. This isn’t going to be excessively technical - so bring your laptops, I’ll bring the beer, Vaco will bring the pizza, and we’ll have a good time. See you there!
