Good friend Adam has been playing with the Wiimote and Flash on Windows for a while now. About two weeks ago he was round mine showing me the classes he had put togther to enable Flash to interact fully with the Wiimote and he knocked up this first demo of intergrating what he had with Papervision3D.

He now has a site up dedicated to Flash and Wiimote intergration over at http://www.fwiidom.org/ (check the John Grdn inspired StarWiis).

I believe Pete Hobson who has an OSX version up and running named Fii is now working with Adam to provide a cross platform solution.

All this stuff looks very promising!

There’s been a whole lot of talk recently about code-behind on flexcoders, blogs and on IM. There’s lot of differing opinions and I thought I’d throw mine out there.

The idea of code behind is the seperate the logic from your UI. This sounds like a great idea in concept but in practice I’ve not found it to be that useful. I’ve experimented with various ways of implementing it and all of them make the code more difficult to manage (I generally find I have 10+ files open in Flex Builder at one time and any implementation of code behind doubles the amount of files). You end up switching between tabs just to develop one component.

The idea of seperating the two comes from having someone do your UI and someone else building the logic but, it just really isn’t the case that your going to have a designer doing your UI in Flex Builder. If they did, why the hell would they mess around with any of your code in a Script tag anyway?

I also don’t see why the great believers in code-behind don’t take this a step further. You could think of the code behind as your controller for your UI. All components required a UI and some logic, but that logic also requires some data, so why not have the UI, the controller (logic) and a model (data). Obviously this would result it three times as many files, and therefore more files to manage and constantly switch between.

So after me stating that I don’t find it that useful, thats not to say that it may never be useful, so lets have a look into the ways that it can be implemented.

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Want to start writing AS 3.0 or use Flex 2.0, but need to use them alongside older elements created in AS 2.0 and published for Flash Player 8 or lower? You could use LocalConnection or ExternalInterface, both having their own limitations, or you could take a look at FlashInterface.

FlashInterface allows direct communication between AVMs with a common API for both AS 2.0 and AS 3.0. It also supports controlling Flash Player 7 and lower SFW’s through a Flash 8 wrapper.

Features
Bi-direction communication between AVMs, Synchronous calls, Returns values from within same call, Common API, Call Local Properties, Call Local Methods, Anonymous Calls, Global Access to SWF elements, Optional Event Listener Model, No limitation on data size.

Download, documentation, tutorials and examples.

Big thanks to Carlos and Mike for last month, and everyone who came along! The video a presentation files are online.

The next meeting will take place on the 22nd Feb, again at the regular, Play Bar.

First up Alias Cummins doing a session on Creating Realistic Procedural Bitmap Effects. Following that we have Dan Thomas giving us The unofficial WTF on Apollo.

Sponsored for friends of ED.

London Flash Platform 22nd February 2007 (22/02/2007)

Do you know Flash? How well do you know Flash? Can you concept sweet design ideas using all the tricks that Flash has to offer? Can you knock the socks of people with your slick portfolio of ideas? Maybe you don’t have a portfolio, maybe you are working on it? I am looking for the best Flash Talent in London, maybe even the world. You are maybe already thinking about ActionScript3, if not using it at home in your spare time…My client is a top, top Design and Advertising agency in London, working on behalf of some of the biggest most well known brands in the universe, and they want people who eat, sleep, and drink Flash. If this is you, you will know, you will be working somewhere at the moment, perhaps an agency where you feel held back as you want to learn more, be challenged and excel, but you are being given monkey work to do. You need to get your best work and ideas together, and email them to me, so as I can show my clients, and line up meetings. This way you will soon be working for one of the worlds leading agencies, and setting the benchmark for flash design. I look forward to hearing from you, please send CV and portfolio’s to james@ecomrecruitment.com.

Since Flex Builder beta for Mac was released on labs I’ve been using it for my Flex work. It was a week into using the Mac beta that I wrote this post after finding a new events had been added to DisplayObjects that gets dispatched when an object is added to and removed from the stage. For some reason I didn’t publish it then (yeah my blogs been quiet), but the docs haven’t been updated so I thought it was still worth mentioning.

Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE only gets dispatched once an object has been added to a displayList, and also all its parents have been added.

Event.REMOVED_FROM_STAGE is dispatched when a DisplayObject, or any of its parents are removed from the display list.

These events are really useful, as before we could only use Event.ADDED and Event.REMOVED.

Event.ADDED gets dispatched when a DisplayObject is added to a display list, but it doesn’t mean it has been added to the stage, as its parent, or parents parent etc. might not have been added.

Event.REMOVED gets dispatched when a DisplayObject is removed from the display list, but if it’s parent or parents parent etc. was removed we wouldn’t have known.

Previous to this < href="http://www.senocular.com/">Senocular had a nice stage detection script that you can use if your not targeting the latest version of the Flash player (9.0.28.0).

Some events for when Scrollbars are added to containers would now be useful!