June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers

June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan

June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize 

June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones

June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha

June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha

June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn 

Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty 

Learn more and register today.

Iain’s talk will include:

• Input and controls.
• Cameras and scrolling.
• Side-on VS top-down – 3D perspective.
• Business models / making money.
• Multi-user.
• Blitting vs. DisplayList.
• Frameworks and libraries that can help you.
• Game design principles.

The talk on moving to OO development in Flash/actionscript is aimed at answering the many questions of why and how to move from procedural development in actionscript to Object Oriented analysis and develpment.

To find out more about this group and talk, please see the entry at FlashCoder.

But wait, I hear you say, there’s already the London Flash Platform User Group (LFPUG) run by Tink in Clerkenwell Road and the Flex London User Group (FLUG) in Brick Lane run by Mike Jones and Drew Martin. Both do an awesome and tireless job in showing what boundaries people are pushing in the Flash Platform world, so who needs another Flash user group? …Right? …WRONG!

LFPUG and FLUG are both high end development groups, catering for those who know the Flash Platform well and want to explore the higher end of it’s capabilities and methodologies. The very nature of the people who attend and run these groups ensures that they are advanced user groups and I know I find them very informative, but no one group can be all things to all men.

What’s been missing for a very long time is a group that caters specifically for beginners and intermediates: those who want to learn or improve their understanding of the Flash Platform (Flash, Flex, FMS etc) in a development and design capacity. Those who are trying to swap to Flash platform technologies, those who are learning them on their digital media courses but want real world experience or those who have mastered many of the basics but now want to move on to real world application of that knowledge. This user group is the nursery for user groups like LFPUG and FLUG. It also caters for designers as well as developers and as I believe very strongly that Flash platform developers should have an appreciation of both development and design, this seems like a well balanced beginner and intermediate group.

If you want to understand things like:

• Patterns,
• OOP,
• moving from AS2 to AS3,
• how to begin using Flex,
• how to start to work with video and audio in Flash and FMS,
• how XML and E4X work,
• how to do your first Augmented Reality piece,
• what best practices you should follow,
• how to work with 3rd party hardware like the Wii,
• getting started with 3D,
• code for designers

and much more, then this is definitely the group for you.

Better still, make a request for a topic to be covered (design or development). There’s a lot of sharing goes on to, with people being encouraged to show the group any work or solutions they have made. It’s an open and friendly forum. No judging and lots of support.
The group meets once a month, normally around the middle of the month. They have a fantastic set up: meeting rooms, over head projectors and several networked labs at their disposal. The group can and will be running workshops along side presentations so you’ll be able to get your hands dirty with real code and design and take them home to play with after. There are prizes to: Apress/ Friends of Ed have kindly agreed to give us books on Flash platform technologies to give away on the night.
The beginner and intermediate community is huge and poorly catered for. This Meetup group group addresses that gap. If you want to learn or improve your Flash-craft then go check out the group. Sign up, and come along.

June issue Free for Download now

So, what is process and more importantly, what is good process?

Generally speaking it’s the process of understanding a clients requirements, managing and enhancing them where appropriate and possible, creating a strict agreement of product and delivery schedule based on a solid understanding and explanation of those requirements. Setting realistic milestones and creating comprehensive documentation to deliver the agreed product or service in a timely fashion and to an agreed budget, requiring no one to do over time. Leaving the client feeling happy, the staff feeling valued and fulfilled, the management feeling empowered and reliable, and everyone feeling like they are one big team.

No unsatisfied customers. No late deliveries. No slavish, unpaid overtime. No scope creep. No runaway project costs. No last minute client changes with impunity and without due consideration and articulation of the consequences to the client. Everyone, every team accountable and focusing on the business delivery requirement (not just their own personal/departmental agendas).

It requires optimal interdepartmental logistics, pragmatic client management and a firm hand to keep everyone’s eye on the ball and steer them toward a common goal, not just a department’s or a person’s. Crucially, it requires team work across your entire delivery network.

At this point you’re either thinking that this is an impossible magic formula or it’s bleeding obvious. If you are the former, then part 2 of this article will address some of the Common Causes of Bad Process and hopefully make a believer out of you. If, like us, you are the latter, then take comfort in this: You are not alone, and it is absolutely possible to kill bad process. The perfect antidote is to have exposure to multiple sectors, roles, companies and continents. Have decades of experience and knowledge. And of course, know where to hide the bodies along the way .

Mojo is an MVC (Model-View-Controller) application framework, based on the HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript web standards. Applications that are built using Mojo can be run at native speeds and have access to a wide range of APIs to access device specific functions and services.

Hearing anything familiar to the iPhone’s development stature during it’s first year?

We’ll you shouldn’t.

It’s a completely different situation.
Apple was forcing users to create iPhone optimised web applications.
In order to do this, the end user had to open Safari, and navigate to the web application. Something that was improved in a later release with icon short cuts on the main screen, but still unable to match the look or feel of any of the native Apple applications.

In contrast to this, Palm use their own SDK (JavaScript and HTML5) for all of their own applications. It’s integrated and consistent across all applications, with a specific bespoke API for interacting with the device or doing webOS specific functions.

The Mojo SDK contains a number of useful pre built widgets you can use, such as buttons, checkboxes, date picker, drawer, filterfield, list, people picker, progress bar, rich text edit, and a webview.
As well as a number of useful utility classes.
The whole Mojo framework is unit tested using its own bespoke unit test implementation.

Using the leaked SDK on an Apple Mac, I’ll be putting together a quick hello world tutorial for those getting started.

Firstly you’ll need to download and install Virtualbox.

It’s a free virtualisation software for x86 hardware created by Sun. It is used as an emulator by the SDK by loading the webOS image.

Secondarily you’ll need to download, and install, the SDK.

MAC, Rapidshare
WIN, Rapidshare

It was leaked by someone else, not myself, so I’ll link to their SDKs.

Now that you have everything installed, I would recommend having a play around the phone, and getting a feel for the interface and the conventions of the pre built applications.
If you haven’t had a chance to play with the actual device yet, you can definitely get a feel for how it behaves.

Palm Pre

In order to create our application, we need to generate a base to build upon. The base that you’ll be generating provides you with a folder structure, and application information files.

1. Open Terminal.
2. Enter the command "palm-generate HelloWorld" and press enter.
3. You’ll receieve a message stating "Generating new_app in /Users/{username}/HelloWorld".

Open the /Users/{username}/HelloWorld folder in Finder. Replacing the {username} token with your username.

Within the HelloWorld folder you should see the following;

app (folder)
JavaScript class files

appinfo.json
used to specify a unique name, version, and icon information

icon.png
icon for the dashboard

images
PNG/JPG

index.html
the default view

sources.json
Seems to be used to list all of the files used by the application for the packaging process?

stylesheets
CSS

Editing the appinfo.json file allows us to add a unique name, and change the vendor, so we’ll do that first.

Opening the file will display the following:

{
	"id": "com.yourdomain.helloworld",
	"version": "1.0",
	"vendor": "My Company",
	"type": "web",
	"main": "index.html",
	"title": "HelloWorld",
	"icon": "icon.png"
}

The file format is a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) file, basically, a readable format representing associative arrays, objects, and simple data structures.

The values are in the following format "key":"value".

Lets start by altering the unique id of our application, so change the value of "id" from "com.yourdomain.helloworld" to "com.test.helloworld".

Alter the other values to match the appinfo.json file below.

{
	"id": "com.test.helloworld",
	"version": "0.1",
	"vendor": "TestEvaluationCompany",
	"type": "web",
	"main": "index.html",
	"title": "Testing Hello World",
	"icon": "icon.png"
}

There are more potential key-value pairs we could add to the appinfo.json file, below is a list of the ones I know of so far. Please do let me know of any more you find via the comments.

id
Unique identifier for your application.
Recommended usage is to use a reverse DNS notation (com.domain.appname) in lower case characters.

version
Versioning of your application in a Major.Minor format.
Best to keep to this format as it could be used for over the air downloads/updates.

vendor
Company or individual who created the application.

type
Application type, which should be “web”.
This seems to be a clever way of future proofing there install process, potentially “native”, “java”, or even “python”?

main
Initial HTML file to be displayed when the application is launched.

title
Displayed in the launcher, and in the top grey tab, which I wish to affectionately call, the tabular.

icon
Path to the icon used for the launcher screen.

vendorurl
URL of the company or individual.

miniicon
Path to the icon used for the notifications.

Now we’ve gone far enough to test our application. It will show up as an individual application on our home screen, but not do anything other than display a predefined message.

But it’ll be good to test and get someone up and running now, so lets go.

First of all you need to package your application into a IPX file.

An IPX file (or an Itsy Package) is an installable package apart of a lightweight package management system designed for embedded devices, similar to Debian’s dpkg.

Packaging is done via Terminal;

1. Open Terminal.
2. Enter the command "palm-package ~/HelloWorld" and press enter.
3. You’ll receieve a message stating "Creating package in /Users/{username}/com.test.helloworld_0.1_all.ipk".

Now we have the package, we could send it off to a friend to test, or presumably, off to Palm to enter into the App Catalog.

Installing an application on the emulator;

1. Open Terminal.
2. Enter the command "palm-install com.test.helloworld_0.1_all.ipk" and press enter.
3. You’ll receieve a message stating
   "connecting to device emulator (###)
copying /Users/{username}/com.test.helloworld_0.1_all.ipk to /media/internal/developer/com.test.helloworld_0.1_all.ipk on device emulator (###)installing package /media/internal/developer/com.test.helloworld_0.1_all.ipk on device emulator (###)".

You’ll now be able to click on the launcher icon and see your application. The icon is the standard unchanged ‘blue square with crescent moon’, with the label “Testing Hello World”, as we specified in our appinfo.json file.

That’s it for our introduction. In part 2 we’ll start to create a real world application.