The Phantom Reference

Now, I am an Adobe Certified Expert in Flex 3 and AIR.

I am professionally qualified to build RIA-based Flex/AIR applications for the Web/Desktop. Thanks Adobe for certifying me.

 

Do you know that you can create cool and realistic effects using the open source Flex SDK? Here is the one that I created to simulate a heart beat with minimal MXML and ActionScript.

A little bit of elasticity and rotation along with the correct timing will bring the heart to life!  Here is the code:

<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			import mx.effects.easing.*;
		
			private var beatSync:Boolean = true;
		
			private function beatHeart():void {
	                    beatEffect.end();	
	                    rotateEffect.end();                
	                
	                    //Init the beat effect
	                    beatEffect.xFrom = heart.x;
	                    beatEffect.yFrom = heart.y;
	                
	                    if(beatSync){
	                	//beat it
	                	beatEffect.xTo=beatEffect.xBy=heart.x+1;
	                	beatSync = false;
	                    }
	                    else{
	                	beatEffect.xTo=beatEffect.xBy=heart.x-1;	
	                	beatSync = true;
	                    }
	                
	                    beatEffect.play();
	                    rotateEffect.play();
	                }
		]]>
</mx:Script>	
	
<mx:Move id="beatEffect" duration="600" target="{heart}" 
         easingFunction="Elastic.easeOut" repeatCount="0"/>
<mx:Rotate id="rotateEffect" target="{heart}" duration="700" 
         angleTo="1" repeatCount="0"/>

Isn't Flex too easy to learn? Get the open source Adobe Flex SDK today!

Adobe Air is increasingly being used to promote movies. You can watch the latest HD movie trailers from this AIR application.



And here is the interactive movie trailer of Avatar



A year from now or much sooner, Adobe Air might become the preferred platform for providing customer entertainment.

I'm building a really scary FPS-based 3D game with just 2D sprites freely available on the internet. This doom like game is built using GML, Direct 3D, Inkscape, and Gimp.

As the game is completely based on Direct X, the game now runs only on the Windows platform.

Here is a screenshot:



More Info.

Here is a really old issue (Sep. 2003) of the JDJ magazine made available as a PDF, which you can download from their official site.

7 years later, still most of the articles in that magazine reads relevant except for my lame article on Jini and MBeans that sounds very primitive now. But that said, building a self-healing, services-based distributed system is still an acceptable topic to debate on-to Jini or not!

You can follow the developments of Jini through the Apache River project.