http://www.moock.org/blog/ en-us 2010-07-21T15:15:26-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000302.html on tuesday august 17 at fitc san francisco, i'll be unveiling MegaPong, a realtime, massively multiplayer version of the classic video-game, Pong. the expected audience of 600 will be split into two 300-person teams. players will use their cell phones as game controllers to collectively control their team's Pong paddle. this will be the first time in history an audience of this size will play Pong collaboratively using cell phones,... events moock 2010-07-21T15:15:26-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000301.html we recently announced a free 1000-user licence for Union. also, this week, we posted an online multiplayer pong game tutorial and a multiuser fridge magnets tutorial. happy (multiuser) coding!... Union moock 2010-05-28T03:48:50-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000300.html Earlier this week, Adobe released Flash Builder 4, the successor to Flex Builder 3. The new version includes a ground-up overhaul of the Flex SDK component set and significant enhancements to both the ActionScript development environment and the MXML design environment. Anyone using Flex Builder 3 today should definitely upgrade. The improvements in Flash Builder 4 are extensive and wide-ranging, and well worth the investment. In particular, the rewritten component... flash builder moock 2010-03-27T00:23:14-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000299.html On May 7/8 I'm doing a hands-on workshop on the fundamentals of object-oriented programming ("OOP") in ActionScript 3.0. The course covers all OOP basics, including: Classes, objects, and packages Methods and variables Inheritance Encapsulation Datatypes and error handling Garbage collection and memory management Application structure and design principles And also the following core areas of Flash coding: Graphics loading and display Interactivity Model/View/Controller architecture State management Event dispatch and event... moock 2010-02-23T16:06:26-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000298.html bloom... events moock 2009-12-01T16:50:43-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000297.html i recently sat in on one of joshua davis's workshops in toronto and had a good look at hype--an ActionScript 3.0 class library for creating scripted motion graphics. simply put, hype is nice. joshua and branden hall (hype's creators) have done a great job wrapping powerful and complex features in an elegant, easy-to-use api. definitely worth taking a look if you're a graphics professional or game programmer looking to add... ActionScript moock 2009-11-30T16:27:48-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000296.html Learn about Union (a platform for building multiuser applications) and MegaPhone (a hosted service for developing multiuser big-screen games you control with your phone) in these two recently posted presentations: Multiuser Adventures at FITC >> http://www.fitc.ca/media/?video=Your_phone_is_your_controller-C_Moock.flv Your Phone is Your Controller at MAX: >> http://max.adobe.com/online/session/116... Union moock 2009-10-13T23:06:43-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000295.html last saturday erik natzke opened Colors of Nature, a solo show in toronto's function 13 gallery, run by fitc. while i've always been a fan of erik's experiments, and i love seeing his work running live on huge digital screens, prior to last saturday, i had never actually seen any of his paper prints in person. now that i've stood in a room of them, i think i finally really... events moock 2009-10-01T14:07:31-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000294.html Last week at Flash on the Beach 2009 in Brighton, England, Flash authoring product manager Richard Galvan demonstrated some of the improved integration planned for Flash CS5 and Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder). Like most of the ActionScript developer community, I've been waiting for better integration of the two tools for years, so I tracked Richard down after his presentation and pulled some additional information out of him. If... flash builder moock 2009-09-27T17:59:50-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000293.html fitc mobile in toronto is only two months away (september 13-14, 2009). i'll be there showing how to use the MegaPhone platform to build phone-controlled multiuser games that run on big public screens (like the ones in times square, sports stadiums, restaurant chains, airports, etc).... events moock 2009-07-08T13:51:12-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000292.html When it comes to the width and height variables of ActionScript's DisplayObject, what you see is not always what you get. For example, consider the following code, which draws a 50x75 rectangle at position (10, 10) in a Sprite, and then masks it with a 40-pixel-diameter circle: // The mask var maskShape:Sprite = new Sprite(); maskShape.graphics.beginFill(0); maskShape.graphics.drawCircle(20, 20, 20); addChild(maskShape); // The rectangle var rect:Sprite = new Sprite(); rect.graphics.beginFill(0xFF0000); rect.graphics.drawRect(10,... ActionScript moock 2009-05-25T22:58:22-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000291.html while working with a colleague at megaphone, it recently came to my attention that there is currently no way to enable hardware acceleration at the .swf level with flex builder 3 or the flex framework's standalone compiler, mxmlc. hence, a .swf file compiled via the flex framework or mxmlc currently cannot use hardware acceleration when running in the standalone version of flash player. i logged a bug as soon as... flex builder moock 2009-05-21T16:18:45-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000290.html three days ago at fitc, derek clayton and i announced the launch of USER1 Subsystems Corporation and the Union Platform, a platform for creating multiuser applications. Union Alpha 1 is now available for download. USER1 is working in an exclusive partnership with Play MegaPhone Inc to create a network of big-screen, multiuser applications you control with a phone call. like shoot 'em up in Times Square or trivia at an... flash moock 2009-05-01T01:17:52-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000289.html i finally decided to break the print tradition and make an actionscript training dvd with o'reilly. but it's not your average training video. we wanted to capture the energy of a programming session with a group of fun and passionate friends. so james paterson, hoss gifford, and i locked ourselves away in a cabin by the ocean for a three-day weekend to shoot an eleven-hour crash course on object-oriented programming.... ActionScript moock 2009-04-24T16:04:37-05:00 http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000288.html Here's a handy little ActionScript function that reports the number of bytes in a UTF-8 encoded string (the default encoding for ActionScript): public function getNumBytesUTF8 (s:String):Number { var byteArray:ByteArray = new ByteArray(); byteArray.writeUTFBytes(s); return byteArray.length; } // Usage: trace(getNumBytesUTF8("automobile")); // 10 trace(getNumBytesUTF8("車")); // 3 Note: "number of bytes" is not the same thing as "number of characters". For "number of characters," use the String class's length variable: trace("車".length); // 1... ActionScript moock 2009-04-05T20:39:05-05:00