Earlier this week, Google announced a new IDE for Android development: Android Studio. They released an early build that developers can download and start using today. Based on IntelliJ, Android Studio aims to simplify the standard development process for Android which currently is rather convoluted and utilizes Eclipse. I've never been particularly fond of the Eclipse IDE, so this was definitely good news for me. I was excited to try out Android Studio, but found it was a bit frustrating to get up and running. I decided to collect all the issues I faced and the solutions and post them here in a mini-guide in hopes that it may save others a few headaches. (more...)

I recently picked up a Nook HD+, primarily for app development. Typically, I use the excellent FlashDevelop for my projects, but after running through the set up on the Nook developer site, I was still unable to get the ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to recognize the device. As such, my Android project in FD wasn't able to deploy to the Nook. It's taken me several hours to figure this out so I thought I'd post some helpful links in case anyone else is having issues getting their Nook device recognized by ADB. I can't say that this will help in all situations, but this solved the issue for me with the Nook HD+ on Windows 8 (64 bit). (more...)

I've recently been toying around with the Axel Game Library (www.axgl.org). I'm really liking the library so far as it is based on Flixel, but also utilizes hardware rendering. This means you get better performance and is especially nice for mobile devices.
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Both Flash Player 11.4 and the AIR 3.4 SDK are available now from the Adobe Labs site. The update brings some pretty big features to the Flash platform including multithreading and better support for iOS development.

I'm not a big proponent of threading and concurrency in programming, but the iOS additions sound pretty nice. You can now deploy your applications to your iOS device without going through iTunes and you can receive push notifications and utilize iOS SDK 5.1 features.

You can go here for more on AIR 3.4 and here for Flash Player 11.4.

For the last few months I've been experimenting with NFC at work and also at home. Everything was pretty simple in the beginning; I was able to write tags from my Android phone and then read them immediately. Things got a bit more difficult at work when we wanted to do more than just read simple tags. We wanted a reader/writer device connected to a PC to communicate with the phones and this turned out to be much harder than I had anticipated!

The hardware we're using is the SCL3711, which is a fairly popular choice in the NFC development community. After months of struggling with another SDK, a Google search brought me to NFCTools from Adrian Stabiszewski. NFCTools is a Java-based library for NFC development and I highly recommend it to anyone looking into NFC. I know almost nothing about Java, but I was able to get a working application built in just a few hours that could successfully send urls via NFC to both of the Android phones we were using for testing; a Nexus S and a Galaxy Nexus.

I really can't say enough good things about this library; you can check out the demo here and then head to github to grab the files for yourself!

I just pushed a new version of my Jury Duty application to the Android marketplace. The new version, 1.23, includes a fix for a bug that was causing text to get cut off from longer content pieces in the history portion of the app. If you're an Android user, grab the new version from the play store now!

As for iOS, I will also be making an update there in the next couple of weeks. It takes a lot longer to get stuff published with Apple.

Just in case you haven't been keeping up with the news; there was a pretty cool announcement from GDC for Flash and HTML5/Javascript developers. Microsoft revealed Xbox LIVE Web Games which means they're opening up the Xbox LIVE platform to web game developers. Microsoft will provide an API for making web service calls into the XBL platform. API's will be available for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 and also Javascript. (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

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.

I've been busy the past couple months working on a new mobile app and it is now freely available on the Android Marketplace! The application, called Jury Duty, allows you to cast your vote on major US court cases and popular political issues. It features facebook integration so that you can share your votes with your peers and also allows users to submit their own questions for the community to answer. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Jury Duty

An ios version is on the way as well; I just need to get the binary file uploaded and see if it gets approved.