My Toolkit: A list of iOS apps

Posted on Oct 25, 2011

I have an iPod Touch, and probably end up owning an iPhone in the future, once my cheapy flip phone's battery finally dies off.  I've had my iPod Touch for a year now and I've loved it, and continue to do so.

Prior to the Touch, I was Palm fan for a few years and before that it was a Handspring.  Before *that* it was my *actual* palm, writing notes on my hand or on index cards.  I am and probably forever will be an incorrigible note taker, so I love electronics that help me in this regard.

But the Touch (and the Palm and the Handspring) all do so much more, from simple games to keeping me organized to capturing moments on the go, and I have become connected at the hip with these devices. (quite literally seeing as they have a permanent place on my jean pockets)

Single-movie Flash Preloading with AS3

Posted on Oct 18, 2011

Way back in the AS2 days, you could write Actionscript preloaders that could run inside the same *.fla/swf file as your main movie/site/app/animation.  Useing frames and checking the movie size vs the bytes loaded, you could figure out when the movie was completely in memory and readyfor use.  With AS3, with class files and proper object-oriented structures, it became less clear as to how you were supposed to do this.

Generally everything in your library was being exported on frame 1, so how could you put a preloader there?  Frame 1 would need to load first before it would execute, and by then its too late for the preloader to do anything.  So it seemed like the consensus amongst the people I talked to and worked with was that you needed to a build a separate pre-loader movie which would load the main movie.

Triple Town

Posted on Oct 13, 2011

Triple Town is an addictive, city-as-a-garden match three Facebook game designed by Danc of Lost Garden and Spry Fox.

The game was originally released on the Kindle as a kind of experiment to see if you could make a game on there. (you can, although there are some pretty extreme graphical limitations)  The Facebook iteration is pretty nifty.  The presentation is excellent and fun, but it's really the game mechanics that do it for me.