One of the most common tasks in Flash game development is calculating angles. This becomes important in even simple 2D games such as shooters where the player can fire bullets in all directions. If you're anything like me, you're probably not very good with math. I typically will find other ways to get the job done, and indeed I had my own way for figuring bullet paths, but eventually I decided to use real angles and I'm pleased to say it really isn't that bad. (more...)

Well, I'm a bit late with this one, but my newest mobile app: Jury Duty, is now available as a free download from Apple's App Store. I know I had posted about it when it was released on the Android Marketplace, but I also wanted to let iOS users know they can grab it now too!

Jury Duty is a mobile poll app where you can answer political-based questions about the United States and high profile court cases. You can also see how your votes compare to others as the application tracks all votes and shows you the percentage of users that choose the same answer as you do! Check it out!

Jury Duty for iOS

In yesterday's post, I showed a simple example of how to do some very basic facial tracking using the Marilena code from the Spark Project. I had initially planned to look more into it later down the road, but Luis Rodriguez kindly posted a link to some work that he had done previously and turned me on to another face tracking sdk: Beyond Reality Face. (more...)

At work we've done several projects that involve facial tracking of some sort. While we're still mostly a Flash shop, when it comes to facial recognition, we've been relying on C and C++ apis to get the job done. Today I decided to start looking into an ActionScript solution and the results so far have been promising! (more...)

I woke up today to find Facebook all atwitter with the news that "Apple has won!" and "Steve Jobs was right!" Naturally, I was curious. I clicked the links and read the news articles and discovered this wasn't exactly the case. People seem to have misunderstood the news. Yes, Adobe did announce that they will soon stop supporting Flash on mobile browsers, but a post on Adobe's blog also states that they are focusing on making Flash a great tool for creating native platform applications: "Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores."

This is the vastly more important item for Flash developers. If you'll recall, Apple at one time attempted to ban apps that were created with Flash (and other 3rd party tools) from the app store. The reaction from the development community was overwhelmingly negative and the company soon dropped the policy. So don't let the all the hype fool you; you can still use Flash and ActionScript to produce mobile applications on a wide variety of platforms, including iOS.