With each new Flash Player comes new possibilities and as usual, it’s left to the Flash community to figure out what those are. Here is a short version highlighting only the new features available and what they probably offer.
3D effects New
Create more intuitive, engaging interfaces using built-in support for 3D effects. Get started quickly without being a 3D master by designing in 2D and easily transforming and animating in 3D. Fast, extremely lightweight, and simple-to-use APIs, along with 3D tools in Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional software, make motion that was previously accessible only to expert users via ActionScript® language or custom third-party libraries available to everyone.
Adobe Flash Builder 4
Adobe has officially announced re-branding of Flex Builder to Flash Builder. Naturally, this change has caused quite a stir among the Flex developer community. The announcement has been received with mixed emotions. I had a feeling that would be the case, considering people involved in Flex development are generally application developers and the word ‘Flash’ does well with designers. In the early days there was a pretty solid line between people working Flex and people doing Flash. Now Adobe might want to remove this separation to some extent (atleast in the name to begin with) and get both the Flash and Flex community together to further the usage of Flash Player as an application development platform.
Adobe Flash Platform
Adobe is renaming the next version of Flex Builder to Flash Builder 4, it will still be the same Eclipse-based IDE with lots of exciting new features. Adobe is not renaming the open source Flex Framework or the free Flex SDK. Adobe will also continue to promote the use of the Flex Framework and Flex development in general.
Also this move to the Flash Builder brand marks the separation between the Flex Framework and the IDE built on Eclipse that can be used for the development of ActionScript as well as Flex projects.
An another interesting development with regard to getting Flash and Flex developer community closer is arrival of Thermo, which basically lets the designers do some part of application development without bothering much about coding.
Adobe is also conducting a pre-release demo of Flash Builder 4 at different locations of the globe. In Bangalore it is slated to be on June 3rd. So if you want to find out more about the upcoming beta releases of Flash Builder, this would be a great place to start.
Many iPhone projects would require setting some numeric value on tabBarItem called badge. We can set the badge value for a tabBarItem by:-
Fig: UITabBarItem With Badges
Too Many Digits In Badge
Apple’s has announced a push notification service for the iPhone that it’ll provide to all developers. It’ll maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone and let a 3rd party server ping Apple’s notification service in order to push out notifications to users device, which can be in the form of badges, sounds or custom textual alerts. According to Apple, the service will preserve battery life and maintain performance, not to mention work over WiFi or cellular.
We can use the UITextField’s delegate method
- (BOOL)textField: (UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange: (NSRange)range replacementString: (NSString *)string
to set the maximum character length.
This can be done by doing the following:
#define MAX_LENGTH 10 - (BOOL)textField: (UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange: (NSRange)range replacementString: (NSString *)string { if (textField.text.length >= MAX_LENGTH && range.length == 0) { return NO; } else { return YES; } }
There might be need at several stages of iPhone application development to insert a new view on top of other views. This can be achieved by setting the zPosition value of the view in question. If a View has a zPosition that is bigger than another views zPosition it will appear on top of the other view.
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Messed Up Icons With iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5
With the latest release of iPhone OS 3.0 seed 5, the icons of the applications are being messed up. This mostly occurs when we install updates to the applications from App store. Few applications will not have any icons altogether, few apps have icons of their neighbouring apps like shown in the figure. iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 is lot more buggier than beta 4 or beta 3. Also I have observed beta 5 drains the battery very fast. My iPhone lost more than half of its power over night even without performing any tasks while lying idle. Seems Apple has purposefully made beta 5 buggy so that users are forced to move to the final version expected in the WWDC.
On the screenshot we can observe that, PingPongLite application doesnt have icon at all and NewsPro and Bloomberg have same icons.
However on a positive note, if we restart the iPhone, all icons are restored to their original application icons.
UIWebview Action Alert
If there is an <a href></a> tag in the html that is being loaded in an UIWebView, then touching that link for few seconds would trigger an alert showing ‘Action’ or the alternate text provided for the link.
If we need to disable it, then we need to set
document.documentElement.style.webkitTouchCallout=”none”;
This can be called in the onload event of the html <body> tag which is being loaded in UIWebview. Put this piece of Javascript before the <body> tag
<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <title>Hide Action Alert In UIWebView</title> <script type="text/javascript"> function OnLoad() { document.documentElement.style.webkitTouchCallout = "none"; } </script> </head> <body onload="OnLoad()"/> </body> </html>
iPhone OS Active SDK Targets Missing
The iPhone SDK 3.0 is great in offering tons of new features to developers to play with. It irresistable not to install it n use it. But we should be ready to make few sacrifices in using it. Firstly as the release notes says, iPhone OS 3.0 beta installed on iPhone can’t be revereted back to a earlier version of OS. While this was a big issue for people who skipped reading the release notes n were excited to install iPhone OS 3.0 Seed 1. However the later versions of iPhone OS 3.0 Seed 3 and 4 seem to be pretty stable and near production quality expect for few problems like low battery backup. The other major issue I am facing with iPhone SDK 3.0 is not being able to set the Active Target to a earlier version of iPhone OS other than 3.0. XCode silently removes all the other available options from the ‘Active SDK’ list and gives only iPhone OS 3.0. This can be annoying, but we cant blame Apple for this as they have warned this in their release notes. The image on the left shows the behaviour I am talking about. Read the rest of this entry »
The other day I was trying to build GData with one of my iPhone applications built on iPhone SDK 3.0. The build failed complaining that NSTask is undeclared. Based on release notes for iPhone OS 3.0, I got to know that NSTask has been removed from the Foundation framework among several other API’s with iPhone OS 3.0. Moving forward all projects which used NSTask would fail n would require some amount of recoding to fill the missing gaps.
