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Validation in Flex with Hamcrest-AS3

By Joel Hooks
November 20, 2009

Hamcrest? No, it isn't a fancy sandwich topping. Hamcrest is a framework for creating matchers, allowing matching rules to be defined declaratively (from Wikipedia). Hamcrest has been used by many popular unit testing frameworks including JUnit and FlexUnit 4. Hamcrest-AS3...

The CMMI in 2500 words or less

By Ed Willis
November 10, 2009

This article provides a brief introduction to the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) that aims to cover most of the ground, if at a fairly shallow depth. The CMMI is a process-based model that sketches out a comprehensive picture of development. It builds on that to define a method for developing organization standard processes and for keeping them relevant. Those processes are leveraged to ultimately deploy statistical process control to improve organizational performance. The model is supported by a standard method for assessing an organization, SCAMPI appraisals. My hope is that after reading this article, the reader will be able to make an informed decision on whether or not digging into the CMMI further is warranted. Note that the notion of the "organization" in the CMMI allows for smaller groups within a company to be the focus of CMMI-based process improvement - so you don't have to wait for your whole company to get on board to get started.

The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around

By James Turner
November 6, 2009

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs with spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

Land and Expand: Why Apple Allowing In-App Purchases in Free Apps is a Big Deal

By Mark Sigal
October 16, 2009

Yesterday, Apple announced that they are now allowing In-App Purchasing within free apps. I think that this is a big deal, an entree into what I refer to as 'land and expand,' and yet another reason that Apple remains the gold standard of mobile computing.

Photoshop For Developers

By Jesse Freeman
October 14, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Photoshop for Developers.

Should Apple Give a Rat's Ass that Developers Aren't Getting Rich off of the iPhone Platform?

By Mark Sigal
October 7, 2009

Apple's iPhone Platform is a runaway success relative to just about any metric that you can throw at it, save for one. Where are the breakout successful developers for whom the platform is a 'True Wealth' inducing moment? Read on...

Using Windows 7 for Music Production

By David Battino
October 1, 2009

Cakewalk has been reprogramming PCs into music studios since the days of DOS. Today, CTO Noel Borthwick explained the deep, technical details of how the architectural changes in Windows 7 will help (and sometimes hinder) audio processing.

AS3 Object Oriented Concepts: Polymorphism

By Joel Hooks
September 27, 2009

This article is not about werewolves or other shape-shifting creatures. Polymorphism is an object-oriented concept. Perhaps THE object-oriented concept. For a language to truly support object-oriented paradigms, it must provide developers with the ability to implement polymorphic objects. Luckily for us, Actionscript 3 meets this criteria. This article is an introduction to polymorphism and how you can utilize the concept to build stronger applications, promote code reuse, and more easily unit test your code.

Agile's Next Challenge: Selling it to the Business

By Timothy M. O'Brien
September 23, 2009

Agile's next challenge is selling executives on the idea of rapid iterative development without rigorous up-front planning. As Agile becomes a default mode of the development for most technology departments, it will need to be properly positioned in the Board room. How will Agile's evolution affect the way that the business views technology as a "profession".

iPhone, the 'Personal' Computer - Future of the Mobile Web

By Mark Sigal
September 15, 2009

The iPhone is the first truly 'personal' computer; more personal to its owners than the PC ever was. Talk to iPhone owners (not to mention, the 20M iPod Touch owners), and this truth bubbles to the top again and again. Read on...

Do You Speak Flex? Part Two: Recruiting the Right Experience

0 September 9, 2009

It’s imperative to identify what your requirements are and the number of resources that you’ll need to address them. You must determine what your team needs to accomplish before you begin to assemble it, otherwise you risk redundancy, inefficiency, and slowed or stalled projects. It sounds elementary, but this step can save you a lot of headaches later on.

Hiring Developers - Why "Smart and Gets Things Done" is not Enough

By Ed Willis
September 4, 2009

Back in 2000, Joel Spolsky published the first version of his "Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing" about hiring developers. Since then, he's published revisions to that article as well as including it in a book on hiring developers. I don't know when I first read it but it certainly stayed with me. Given how frequently people around me reference these sources - especially the guidance about the people to target ("smart and gets things done") - it seems to have resonated with many others out there also. That said, over the last few years I've managed a group that's done a fair bit of hiring and, while I love the confidence of that article, it's not enough for us.

Computerization in Nilekani's Imagining India

By Andy Oram
August 31, 2009

Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation promises to occupy a central position in discussions about India as well as the world economy this year. Particularly relevant to this blog are the book's observations on computers' role in the economy and society.

Skype and Remote Development

By Amy Blankenship
August 14, 2009

In the past, I've talked about the advantages of telecommuting. Today, I'd like to talk about the mechanics of telecommuting. Specifically, how to communicate when none of the members of the project are colocated. In the past, I've participated in...

Do You Speak Flex? Part One: Building a Team

0 August 12, 2009

With the release of Flex 4, misconceptions abound regarding Flex, and there has been a general reluctance to build Flex development teams internally. These are that Flex resources are scarce, and that teams need years of experience, must be large, expensive, and comprised of all-stars. However, I’ve found that, with a few exceptions, the opposite is generally true and that nearly any organization can afford to build an effective team.

Is There Any Correct Java Code Out There?

By James Elliott
August 5, 2009

Writing correct, concurrent code is really hard. Java makes it seem easier than it is, even when you think you're being careful. The language support is better than it was before Java 5, but we still have a lot to learn. And we have to learn fast, because our code is running on more and more processors every day.

Object Oriented Programming Overview - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
July 30, 2009

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, enjoy a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of object-oriented programming, including classes, objects, methods, and variables.

Why attend InsideMobile?

By Steve Weiss
July 20, 2009

O'Reilly is presenting, in conjunction with 360 Conferences, the InsideMobile training and networking event in San Jose, Sunday and Monday, July 26 and 27th. We designed the program to cover the other parts of the story in this summer of...

CSS vs. Tables

By Amy Blankenship
July 20, 2009

Last time I talked about CSS on this blog, I got a lot of feedback, and let me tell you, I'm all about the attention, so I thought I'd give my take on the CSS vs. tables debate. I've...

O'Reilly Books Example updated: Show a different image for each book

By Elisabeth Robson
July 12, 2009

I got some great feedback on my first screencast - thank you! A few of you asked: how can you show a different view for each of the rows in the table view, instead of just showing the same view...

iPhone workshop frequently asked question: Key Value Coding error

By Elisabeth Robson
July 1, 2009

One of the most common questions from the iPhone workshops we held recently is: "What is key value coding and why the heck am I getting this error?"

Tab bars and Navigation bars together

By Elisabeth Robson
June 24, 2009

The TableView is a common way to display data on an iPhone. Combining a tab bar with a table view and navigation bar isn't very difficult, but it took me forever to figure out how to do it properly.

Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture

By Jesse Robbins
June 24, 2009

We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft. Here is his keynote in it’s entirety:...

The First Step into the Cloud: Which Kinds of Applications Make the Most Sense?

By George Reese
June 24, 2009

A key to successfully integrating the public cloud into your IT infrastructure is identifying a first application that will provide you with measurable results and learnings that can apply to future deployments without putting your business at risk. IT annoyances make the ideal first cloud projects.

Big learning curve for iPhone development

By Elisabeth Robson
June 22, 2009

I just started learning how to develop for the iPhone. After helping to put together an iPhone workshop with my friend Joe Heck, I got really excited about this new platform. I've dabbled in Cocoa and Objective C before, many years ago, and figured it was time to relearn Mac development so I could write my own apps for the iPhone.

Writing the Pac-Man Game in JavaFX - Part 5

By Haining Henry Zhang
June 12, 2009

In previous articles, we finished writing most of the code of the Pac-Man game. In article 3, we implemented a simple algorithm for the ghosts to catch the Pac-Man. The ghosts randomly decides in which direction they move. They do not chase the Pac-Man even they are very close to him. This makes the game less challenging. In fact, the behavior of the ghosts are the most tricky part of the game. According to Iwatani, the author of the original arcade game, he had designed each ghost with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming too difficult or boring to play. ( More info) However, there is generally no conclusion on what behavior of the ghosts are good for the players.

Writing the Pac-Man Game in JavaFX - Part 4

By Haining Henry Zhang
June 2, 2009

In the last article, we developed a preliminary version of the Pac-Man game. Four ghosts are randomly roaming the maze and a Pac-Man character can be controlled by a player. Now, we write some more code for the interaction between ghosts and the Pac-Man: Pac-Man eats a ghost after he gobbles a magic dot. A ghost eats the Pac-Man when it touches him.

Building an Enterprise Framework - Enterprise Development with Flex, Part 2

By Yakov Fain
May 13, 2009

Note: This is excerpted from Chapter 3 of the Rough Cuts version of Enterprise Development with Flex. This book is still in progress, and you can get access to it now. Get the Enterprise Development with Flex Rough Cut Rough...

Apply Sparingly: Open Standards (and When to Use Them)

By Mark Sigal
May 8, 2009

The great thing about standards is that there are "so many to choose from." While it may be convenient to default to aphorisms like proprietary is evil, open is good, I am here to tell you that there are only three reasons to embrace open standards.

Building an Enterprise Framework - Enterprise Development with Flex, Part 1

By Yakov Fain
May 7, 2009

Using the brand new Facebook ActionScript 3.0 library

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 15, 2009

In the 5th article we will deal with Adobes new Facebook ActionScript 3.0 library. It is a brand new product and it is still in beta, but it looks promising. In fact, it has beed there for quite some time and was original developed by Jason Christ. This time Adobe decided to support it and add features. The way the library works differs from the methods from the previous articles because it is completely based on ActionScript and does not use a PHP middle layer. In this article we will explore the library briefly and examine the basic features to get us started. The goal of this article is to create a simple swf file that will connect to facebook.

Creating a Custom API for Flash using Facebook API and PHP

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 15, 2009

In the previous article we discussed how to set up the framework for PHP, FB API and Flash. We did a lot of work to make this happen. We tested the framework only with very simple methods that made calls to the FB API and databases. In this article we are going to extend the sample to implement all necessary calls to the api. We will try to find the most important and needed fb api methods and teak them for usage in Flash. All the hard work will be accompanied by a sample that will make the whole article more interesting. We will create a small photo album viewer that will let you send notifications of type "I like this" for every photo to your friends. This sample will be more interesting.

Setting Up AMFPHP for Flash and Facebook API

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 15, 2009

Following good software engineering principles and following the goal to make flash based facebook applications easier to develop there are well known technologies to utilize. So far we have been introduced to the basics of Flash - Facebook API communication. In the second article we discussed the various methods to embed swfs into the facebook canvas. Equipped with that knowledge, we can make a good step forward. In software engineering, experts say that we should develop applications “close to the problem”.

iPhone Dev: IOKit - The Missing Public Framework

By Erica Sadun
April 13, 2009

A lot of fuss has been made about Apple's public and private frameworks. Did you know that there's actually a public framework that you're not allowed to use? Here are the facts.

Managing Event Listeners

By Jesse Freeman
April 8, 2009

Managing event listeners can get tricky as your ActionScript application grows. This technique takes advantage of overriding the core addEventListener and removeEventListener methods inherited in any classes that extends the EventDispatcher. When adding listeners, we will store a reference of...

Shippingness vs. Awesomeness

By David Battino
March 31, 2009

Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music posted this terrific graph yesterday, showing that the more appealing the promised product, the longer it will take to ship: The object of Peter's gear lust was the Teenage Engineering (even the company name...

Will People Learn OOP and AS3 from Video? If it's Colin Moock? We'll See

By Steve Weiss
March 25, 2009

While InsideRIA isn't about marketing, we are about letting the community know about potentially important learning resources, and face it, anything related to ActionScript that involves Colin Moock is going to be worthy of note. In three ActionScript titles...

Developing Mashup Air Apps: Consuming Twitter APIs

By Marco Casario
March 18, 2009

Excerpted from Chapter 18 of the Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook. Mashup applications are based on the possibility of consuming remote data sources, and to create one, you need a good understanding of the APIs available. AIR offers even greater possibilities for creating mashup applications and widgets. With AIR, you can go beyond all the sandbox security of the browser and add advanced features to the application to interact with the file system or local storage with SQLite. This chapter demonstrates how to integrate the Flickr, Yahoo Maps, and Twitter web services to create desktop mashup applications with AIR.

Forget Best Practices

By RJ Owen
March 13, 2009

I hear a lot of talk about "best practices" these days, and I'm sure you do too. As design has become a more visibly important differentiator for web development professionals and companies, understanding the "best way" to accomplish any given task has been a big deal, leading to a plethora of blogs, conferences, podcasts, etc. on the topic. How can I communicate that there's more information to fill out? How can I make my form most intuitive? How can I present an intuitive interaction? These are the types of questions "best practices" are called upon to answer.

Developing Mashup Air Apps: Yahoo Maps Web Services

By Marco Casario
March 10, 2009

Setting Up Your Android Development Environment

By Allen Noren
February 3, 2009

Last week I excerpted a section from Jonathan Zdziarski's iPhone SDK Application Development, and today I want to give equal time to an excerpt from the Rough Cut (still in development) version of Android Application Development, by Rick Rogers and John Lombardo.

On Vibration

By Erica Sadun
January 23, 2009

Making an iPhone vibrate requires nothing more than a simple call to Audio Services. Deciding on when your application should buzz is a different matter. The code for producing that short buzz effect is this:

Opt-In Complexity

By Chris Adamson
January 16, 2009

It's an interesting trait that the Mac and iPhone stacks work this way, opting in to complexity and keeping the higher-level APIs sparser and simpler, and you have to wonder whether it's a conscious design decision or a happy accident.

Bring Airplane Mode control back to life

By Erica Sadun
January 16, 2009

At some point, my apmode utility got dropped from Erica Utilities and a number of people, particularly my pal Pytey, asked if I could find some time to bring it back to life. Last night, I decided to see if I could put this together using 2.x technology after having put this off for far too long.

The Evolution of Python 3

By chromatic
January 10, 2009

The Python core developers released Python 3.0 in December 2008, following closely behind Python 2.6. Python creator Guido van Rossum generously agreed to discuss the present and future of the popular programming language, as well as the history of the Python 3.0 revision.

Thinking about table selection: Persistent or Active?

By Erica Sadun
January 9, 2009

A colleague recently had his application rejected from App Store because he used what I can only call a noun-verb approach. He allowed items in the table to be selected, and highlighted upon selection, and then provided buttons that used that choice to perform an action. His application was rejected, with the rejection citing the following from the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines:

Defining legal input characters

By Erica Sadun
January 2, 2009

I sometimes use a little trick to ensure that a UITextInputField only accepts a certain subset of characters. Say for example, you want to ensure that a user enters only letters and spaces. A UITextField delegate can catch each character as its typed and decide whether to add items to the active text field. Here's how.

iPhone without Cocoa?

By Daniel H. Steinberg
December 29, 2008

There are a ton of people attracted by the iPhone gold rush who want to write iPhone apps without taking the time to learn Cocoa. Come for the phone but stay for the Mac.

Useful Core Graphics functions

By Erica Sadun
December 26, 2008

Last week, I introduced several handy utilities that let you convert standard Core Graphics structures to and from strings. This week, I thought I'd continue to explore utility functions, moving on to ways you can work with points and rectangles for on-screen calculations. Like the string utilities, these are functions, not methods, and are as such called using standard C rather than Objective C.

Converting Points and Rectangles to Strings and back

By Erica Sadun
December 19, 2008

Two core graphics structures, the CGRect and the CGPoint, play a large role in iPhone development. They are used to position items on-screen and to set their size. Every time you use a UIView, you can work with its frame, its center, and its bounds--all of which use these two structures to handle geometry. Here's a quick review of the structures in question.

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