Section 3.3.1: Fuck off, devs

Well, if you haven’t heard about section 3.3.1 by now, you probably lived on another planet for the past 24 hours. Yesterday Apple gave a developer preview of what they’ve been working on for the next generation iPhone OS. It was a pretty great preview at first: They announced multitasking, folders, iAd, Game Center, etc. All pretty great stuff. Everything well executed as far as we could see.
As expected: Apple still says no to Flash, but nobody really expected something new on that subject.

After the keynote, developers were enabled to get their hands on the iPhone OS 4 SDK. That’s when they had to agree to the new PLA (programming license agreement) which stated the following at some point:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

If you’re not into reading legal stuff or long and very boring statements, let me translate and summarize it for you.

Hey you non-Objective-C writing prick: Fuck off. Go play somewhere else.

What Apple did here is not to make sure the apps on the app store are of a good quality. They literally told every creative Flash/Unity3D/etc developer to either learn Objective-C or to sod off and create apps for Android.

I don’t really know why Apple is doing this, other than to piss off Adobe (in particular) and make sure every developer thinks twice before even considering building apps for the iPhone platform.

Some people on Twitter suggested for Adobe to postpone the Adobe CS5 Mac release.
I’m sorry: What? Read the rest of this entry »

Why Apple is doing a good job not allowing the Flash Player to be on the iPhone

I’m going to get shot down for this. I can already feel the finger on the trigger of the sniper on the roof across the street, aiming at my head… I love Flash, I have been playing and creating with Flash ever since I was 17 years old. But…

In the past 2 years there have been numerous times when people expected (and were insanely excited about) a full in-browser Flash Player on the iPhone and while I was one of the people hoping it would happen only a few months ago, I’m not so certain anymore.

Everybody is saying that once Flash Player 10.1 will run in the browser on the iPhone, you will be enabled to have a ‘full web browsing’ experience. But how do you expect the ‘full experience’ on a mobile device (in this case the iPhone)? Read the rest of this entry »

A Deviner’s Life

Let me just get to the point right away. No fancy little story, no boring little bla-bla.

At school I was given the assignment of creating a room in Flash that tells a story. One, and the most important, limitation was the fact that we were NOT allowed to use any Actionscript 3D libraries out there. No Papervision3D. No Away 3D. They wanted us to feel pain. We were forced to use the 2.5D capabilities of Flash Flayer 10. They’re not that bad… But I really really really (yes 3 times) prefer Papervision… And not only performance-wise.

I really put all my effort in this project and I am pretty positive about the result.

If you’re not interested in the story, feel free to stop reading and feel free to check out the site. You won’t miss anything important (I think…). (Oh btw: the site is in Dutch, but the content isn’t really that important )
If you do: (this is where the jump is ) Read the rest of this entry »

Flash on the iPhone? Orly…? Ya. Rly.

Well… Actually not…

But: If you are a Flash developer and you know how to compile a SWF then as off today* you can build native iPhone applications using your current AS3 knowledge. Does that sound familiar to you? Well it should because Adobe did the exact same thing when they first announced Adobe AIR.

Adobe just showed a Flash CS5 preview featuring a ‘compile for iPhone’ demo. (Watch a similar demo here) Read the rest of this entry »

Open Microphone pt 1

If you’ve come by here a few times you know I have been experimenting with computeSpectrum and webcam motion detection. At a given moment I wanted to combine the 2 of them in order to use voice commands in order to make stuff happen on the screen. That would be pretty badass, right?

However I soon learned the microphone feed didn’t go through the SoundMixer of the Flash Player, therefor would would not be able to be analyzed. There was a workaround with FMS/RED5 and bouncing the stream off the server but that’s rather overkill (not to mention the lag). Read the rest of this entry »