I am delighted to announce that I have just picked up a book deal with Friends of ED to write a new iPhone development book with a twist!

It’s called “The Essential Guide to iPhone Development for Flash Users” and I am extremely excited about it. I’ve planned the Table of Contents and I’ve just begun writing, all is going well. I’m hoping to really leverage what we as Flash developers already know for game and application creation and how that can be used to learn Obective-C and the basics of iPhone development. So if your a Flash dev and interested in the possibilities of iPhone development but havent made that step yet, this is for you!

I’ll be covering lot’s of topics ranging from basics of the Objective-C language, converting simple Actionscript to Objective-C to much more advanced topics like Mapping and some OpenGL.

I would love to hear any comments, thoughts for topics you’d like to see in the book, anything your currently stuck on if you are trying to learn iPhone / Objective-C or even if you might be interested in doing a little bit of writing as I am looking for a co-author to take on half of the book with me.

Leave as much or as little info as you want, even if it’s just something like “it would be cool if you covered…” as at the end of the day it’s for you guys so I want to include as much of the content you’d like to read or learn about!

anton.

It’s not everyday you get to feature in a magazine so I’m thrilled to have two features in one month! One for .NET magazine and the other for Computer Arts.

The Flash tutorial written for .NET magazine focuses on the Text Layout Framework Panel beta created by Adobe which offers vastly improved control of type in our Flash projects and some really interesting little features like columns and the ability to add images to text fields.

The Computer Arts tutorial teaches how to simply link Flash and Flickr by creating simple querys and displaying the results in Flash. It strives to teach the fundamentals of connectivity between the two but also gives the reader a 3D Stack Panel style image viewer they can use in their own projects.

Here are some photos if you haven’t seen them yet:

If you’ve read either of these and have any feedback or are having any problems then feel free to give me a shout either on my email address me@antonmills.com or on this thread and I’ll help out.

anton.

PureMVC

For quite a while now I’ve been looking at different AS3 frameworks that I could adhere my code to to make it easier to scale as the project grows, more reusable and easier to understand for others. I’ve always wanted to pick up Cliff’s PureMVC but I’ve found few tutorials on the net that really get granular enough to explain how and why to use it for total new comers like myself.

I’ve spent the last few days learning from various little tutorials and I’m hoping to start using the framework in all my work projects. If all goes well I’m going to start piecing together quite a large multipost tutorial on here that will help in picking up PureMVC if you’ve never used it before.

anton.

I’m really looking forward to the LFPUG tonight at the Cosmo Bar in Clerkenwell Road.

I’ve not really touched on much Papervision yet as it doesn’t really fit in with the needs our client categories but I’m really looking forward to seeing some great examples from Seb and Carlos and seeing what others are doing with the framework!

Update: It was a fantastic evening with great talks about the use of Papervision in some of Seb’s and Plug-in Media’s projects. As well as a great presentation from Carlos Ulloa showing some new work and a behind the scenes overview of how he achieved some of the fantastic effects seen in his HelloEnjoy.com website. Also a huge thanks goes out to Tink as I didn’t get a chance to say hello on the night, as he runs and organises these monthly meetings in his own spare time. I’d deffintely recommend coming along to these meetings, I thoroughly enjoyed my first and I’ll be attending the Away3D meeting on the 25th June!

anton.

Quick post.

I’ve just come across a Flickr API for Objective-C that seems pretty comprehensive. I’ve not had chance to play with it yet but it’s definitely worth a look.

This version 2.0 rewrite also comes with Mac and iPhone sample applications to show how to implement the API in various projects. Nice.

ObjectiveFlickr:
http://github.com/lukhnos/objectiveflickr/tree/master

anton.

My first game for iPhone is coming along well and it is, in all honestly, pretty straightforward. Since there’s not a lot of complexity and because I’m pretty new to all of this I’m using the standard UIKit. Never Again!

The UIKit generally seems pretty good but there are annoying little quirks like when sending a list of images in an array to a UIImageView using .animationImages, it tends to crash the device… really handy. Yeah I know you can make your own and avoid using the command as it’s obviously bugged, it’s just not ideal. So i think I’m going to have to invest more time in something a little more robust.

I purchased myself a copy of the OpenGL Red Book as per Keith Peters recommendation on his site but I’m still wondering if that’s overkill or if Quartz would be a better option. I’m primarily concerned with writing 2D games. I’ll probably make the move to 3D eventually, just not yet.

For those also looking for OpenGL resources on the iPhone you should probably check out these two resources, they seem pretty good:
1.> http://www.play3d.net/iPhone/
2.> http://nehe.gamedev.net/lesson.asp?index=01

anton.

Just booked my train tickets and hotel for the next London Flash Platform User Group on the 30th April.

I’m excited as not only do we get to meet Seb Le-Delisle and Calos Ulloa. We’ll get some hands on Papervision training, expert advice and of course the night wouldn’t be complete without some drinks.

I’ve done very little with Papervision to date so I’m looking forward to having a play with it.

very very excited!

anton.

I’m currently switching between hosting providers so there might be some pretty rough waters until it’s complete. Expect some misplaced files and downtime.

On the plus side. My new hosting provider (Heart Internet) allows me more monthly data transfer, space, unlimited mySQL databases and ability to host more sites from the one account.

So, coming soon is something called Yokori… more to come :]

EDIT: All complete and 0 downtime. I prepared the new server with Wordpress 2.7 (very nice update, definitely grab that if you can!) and copied the blog and files across to the new hosting and everything seems to be running normally.

DOUBLE EDIT: While I was at it, I spent a few days giving the site a bit of a face lift with a largely hacked Vita theme. It’s not 100% finished but it’s getting there.

anton.