xJSFL [http://www.xjsfl.com/] is a scripting library for extending the JSFL functionality of the Flash IDE. Its aim is to do for JSFL what the jQuery library did for Javascript which, by the way, was awesome.  Basically it extends the JSFL syntax to make it easier and faster to develop.

JSFL is a bit of a niché subject, so I can’t imagine it’s going to take off massively, but who knows.  I use JSFL from time to time, so anything that makes those boring tasks easier to automate has gotta be good – maybe this library will be the turning point for its popularity.  Or something like that.

ImageSizer, now.

ImageSizer is now up to version 0.6.1 – not that the version numbers are anything but arbitrary, of course.  You can import images, rotate them, crop them and resize the lot and output them to your machine.  It works, but the code is a little out of date now, my code-signing certificates are out of date, and I really want to try something new.  So…

ImageSizer, future.

Time to create ImageSizer, version 2.  Going for a full re-write on the code side of things means I’m going to try one cool thing – a desktop version and a web-based version.  The reason for the desktop version is obvious, but having a web-based version should make the functionality behind ImageSizer available for people who can’t (or don’t want to) install the desktop application.  Plus, trial version, and that sort of thing.

A newer code-base will also make it easier to build all of the new features into ImageSizer – there’s a few suggestions and ideas that never made it to the first version before development slacked off, so those are first on the to-do list.  Things like the long-awaited Twitter and Flickr uploads, and multiple output sizes.

So, enough chit-chat. ImageSizer 2 development is underway now, and there should be some more updates on the way.

And also…

As my code-signing certificates all went out of date, it makes it a little difficult for the automatic updates to keep everyone up to date.  The application source code is incompatible with the latest version of the Flex SDK, I want to re-architect the application source, and I think that the interface needs a complete re-think to integrate some of the newer application features.

Of course, you can still download ImagesSizer through the AIR Marketplace.

Just a little demo I’ve been working on, following my previous post: http://www.psyked.co.uk/actionscript/starrequests-simple-box2d-flickr-mashup-sample.htm. I’ve basically updated the code a little and swapped out the rectangular Box2D objects for star-shaped Box2D objects, and the code is available on GitHub: http://github.com/psyked/StarRequests-Examples/tree/master/Box2d-Flickr-Shapes/

This came up while converting a Flex 3 AIR project to a Flex 4 AIR project.  Luckily, the solution is all in the publish settings.

Uncheck the box which says ‘Generate accessible SWF file’ and the error will go away.

Simple!

All of the code for this demo, along with a few others, are available from GitHub, and for those unfamiliar with GitHub, here’s the Zip archive. While we’ve some time, let’s run through some key elements of this sample:

The demo:

If you can’t see the demo, for whatever reason, I’ve stuck an image of it below this paragraph.  There’s a search term box, a numeric stepper for the number of images, and a search button.  When you click ‘Get images’ it performs a search on the Flickr API, which returns a list of images.  I’m then using the StarRequests library to sequentially load the images from Flickr, and throwing them into Simple-Box2D to display them in a funky interactive way.

StarRequests

It’s probably more of a micro-framework at the moment, but StarRequests is designed to make it easy to perform a series of actions (requests) that can be queued or batch-executed in a way that’s portable between projects.  It’s designed to deal with common tasks, like loading a remote URL and extracting the BitmapData, while also abstracting their inputs and outputs to make it possible to mix request types in a single queue.  And queueing is important a lot of the time, because trying to do everything simultaneously often ends with snarl-ups and complex queue management.  With a properly constructed StarRequest class, the systems you so often write and rewrite for different projects are much more portable.

For this example I had to write a complete StarRequest class to load images from Flickr – and that’s all it does – but on the plus side I didn’t have to touch the queuing system, I now have a reusable Flickr image loader class that I can use again in the future, and I also know that elements, like the queuing system, are a solid base to work from.  There’s more tasks going on in this example that I could extract into StarRequests format, but that’s a task for another day.

Simple-Box2D

A little side-project of mine, Simple-Box2D is a set of classes that ease the learning curve between ActionScript and Box2D style code.  It’s in dire need of some new functions, cleanup and most of all, code commenting.  Sorry about that.  All this is doing is taking the final Bitmap objects returned from the StarRequest classes, and using their dimensions as the basis for new objects in the Box2D world.

Flickr

I’m making use of the excellent as3flickrlib classes to interact with Flickr, and then adding a bit of url stitching in the StarRequest classes to create the references to the actual image files (because the API doesn’t return that data).

… that’s all folks.  Comments appreciated – I know this isn’t much of a tutorial, I shall have to conspire with Mark and see if we can get one created.

Those are the three books I have stacked on my desk, in accordance with my recent iPhone development news [link].  I’ve been reading them quite a lot over the last few days, so I thought I’d post my own opinionated summary of them.

iPhone Application Development for DUMMIES

I started with this one first, purely because it says ‘for DUMMIES’.  I figure it’s the lowest level book, and there’s no point reading a lower level book after you’ve read a more complex one, so here’s where I started.

Progress through the book is painstakingly slow – there’s a lot of words and banter for every action you actually get done.  After about 3/4 of the book you’ve made your first application.  The last 1/4 of the book is where you start picking up speed and using more than just the basic drag and drop UI elements, which reads like the last 1/4 was the actual planned book and the first 3/4 was forced in to fill out the page count!

Having worked through the examples in the book, it hasn’t actually helped me work out how iPhone apps work, or how I can make something from scratch myself – it’s just proved that I can follow instructions.  And even then, things got confusing.

Beginning iPhone Development

Currently reading this one.  Immediately it’s more fast paced than the DUMMIES book, and has a whole slew of different tutorials.  Whereas the dummies book takes 8 chapters to go over a single application, this book does more-or-less an application per chapter – or at least something significant in each chapter.  Which means you can quickly build up experience with many of the core UI elements, and then it goes further into the custom ‘Quartz’ application development, which is development without the UI templates.

As well as its own examples, this book does a very good job of paraphrasing all of the official Apple documentation, into a more concise format – very useful considering the wealth of information you’d otherwise have to glean yourself from the official documentation.  Still hasn’t managed to make me understand iPhone development enough to start something from scratch, but it’s come a lot closer than the previous book.

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook

This one’s easy – mainly because I haven’t read it yet.  It’s at the bottom of my pile of books, but only because that’s the order they arrived in.  I’m hoping for good things from it, but I haven’t got to it yet. (Like the title says, an incomplete review)

…

Seems like a lot of this iPhone stuff is being purposefully obtuse about explaining things in simple terms.  The Apple documentation is thorough to the point of being anal, but leaves you with gaps about the relationships between concepts, and this follows through into the books I’ve read so far.  Maybe I’m just spoilt by the Flash Platform community and bloggers taking the time to explain things in simple terms!

One thing that has helped me understand iPhone development:

Surprisingly after buying all those books, the thing that’s helped me understand the process the most is a blog post or two:

• How to embed a navigation controller inside a tab bar controller

I’m sure the books helped some, perhaps got me to the point where I could understand what I was following in this blog post – but this explained with small paragraphs and images what the books have been trying to describe with pages of text. Kudos, b00giZm.

And if anyone can recommend any other iPhone development books, I’m all ears…

It’s finally happened. My tithe to Apple has been paid, and my iPhone has arrived on my desk.

I’m still an Flash Platform developer of course, this isn’t a career change – it’s a broadening of horizons.  I anticipate much cursing and headscratching is in store for the next few months though.  Here we go, should be ‘fun’.