October 1st, 2008
Now its definite: I’m currently involved at Liip in establishing a <head> web conference hub in Fribourg, Switzerland. For those who don’t know it: Fribourg is situated an approximate 20min drive south of Bern and since it is partly French partly German speaking, we’re hoping to unite folks from eastern and western Switzerland under the same roof exchanging ideas and knowledge in between watching the sessions.
Plus, Liip is giving away 5 tickets to join the hub for free! All information on the hub and how to get a free ticket (if they’re still there) can be found under http://liip.to/head and will continuously be updated as organization proceeds. So stay tuned and drop me a line, if you got any questions.
Hope to see you around!
Posted in Events, Liip | No Comments »
August 28th, 2008
I’m currentliy setting up a workshop for Flash based multi player games and since I wanted to use MilGra again, I checked back with the homepage to get a fresh download.
Surprisingly, I found that Milan Toth released version 0.8 of his opensource lightweight Flash streaming server already back in June. So, although this is no steaming hot news, I thought it to be worth mentioning, since MilGra turned out to be really easy to set up and use: simply unpack and start the milgra.jar with your console/dos shell (with Java 1.5 installed).
In version 0.8 MilGra comes with a very sophisticated set of features. So, if you’re trying to get into developing multi user Flash applications with Java, this is an excellent way to start.
Check out the details on the project homepage.
Posted in ActionScript, OpenSource, Server | No Comments »
July 9th, 2008
Apearently, the book that I suggested to look out for in my presentations on flash server solutions is finally available in stores.
Taken from the abstract of “The Essential Guide to OpenSource Flash Development”, the book introduces the reader into an OpenSource based workflow and provides hands on material on the most established and advanced OpenSource software solutions around Flash such as Papervision3D, AMFPHP and Red5.
And besides the interesting topics, the impressive lineup of authors including many well known developers such as Wade Arnold and Aral Balkan fuels the hope for sophisticated content.
Definitely worth a look, I’d say.
Posted in Books, Flash, OpenSource, Server | No Comments »
May 27th, 2008
Last week just blew my mind: Four intense days at the FlashForum Conference in Cologne with tons of input from workshops, lectures and discussions just maxed out my brain capacities.
It all came in a bundle with some partying, of course, and to top it off, I gave a presentation on multi user application development with Flash. Incredibly exiting days! I put up the slides for the lecture as PDFs and they are waiting for you to download them.
Thanks again to Marc Thiele and Sascha Wolter, the two brains behind the FlashForum, for organizing this terrific event. Already looking forward to seeing you all again next year!
Posted in Events | 2 Comments »
May 19th, 2008
So, finally, after months with nothing besides this blog, I finally managed to glue together a new landing page for my main domain, starnut.com.
Since from June 1st, I’ll – once again – be working as a Freelance Flash and Flex developer, I created the page to promote my services and skills.
It’s all just plain (but validated) XHTML and CSS and I might create a Flash version in the future, but for now I’m quite happy with a search engine friendly and barrier-free page. I’d rather invest my time and more challenging projects… by the way, did I mention I am looking for jobs for July and August? :)
Posted in General | No Comments »
May 9th, 2008
As it seems, my lecture on Flash server solutions can be heard again at the Internet-Briefing Developers Conference in Zurich. On the 28th and 29th of May, a whole bunch of lectures on project management and development methods (28th) and developing Rich Internet Applications (29th) will be held in World Trade Center Zurich.
Right now, the public programm hasn’t really been updated but for anyone wondering: my lecture will be held right after lunch on day two (29th). Members of the Swiss Flash User Group (SFUG) will get a discount on registration fees. Just contact me, if you want to know how.
Hope to see you around!
Posted in Events, Server | No Comments »
April 18th, 2008
Now it’s official: I will be speaking about Flash server solutions on this years Flash Forum Conference in Cologne – one of the reasons I didn’t have time to blog, recently. I’m very much looking forward to this event, meeting up with colleagues, chit chatting about Flash… you know the stuff :) Hope to see you around!
Posted in Events, Server | No Comments »
March 11th, 2008
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Thibault Imbert’s Banana Slice Component and since I’m always on the lookout for new techniques to improve the performance of my upcoming games (somewhen at the end of march) it immediately caught my attention.
Thibault is currently working on a book on ActionScript development, so, he didn’t have time to publish neither the component nor the class it is based on, so far. So, I started pondering on a concept of my own, experimented a little and finally got totally caught up in the challenge of creating a component that highly improves vector based animations by rasterizing them. So far, I was able to make some tests that affirm my basic concepts but there still is a lot to be done. Plus, I have several approaches in mind that can be derived from this concept. I want to evaluate which of them make most sense in the different use cases before publishing any details.
Thibault, thanks for this fruity inspiration! I’m so excited about this :)
Posted in ActionScript, Game development | No Comments »
March 6th, 2008
Last week’s Adobe AIR Camp in Zurich was interesting, challenging, fun and exhausting at the same time: After a short introduction of Serge Jespers and Mike Downey about the new features that AIR has to offer and how to create applications with the various tools, everyone was up to develop the coolest AIR App within 24 hours.
I, for my part, tried to create a multi player game, that would connect to a Milgra based Java server. Turns out, it wasn’t the best idea to start developing my first Java application during a contest… So, sadly, when judgement minute came after 24 hours of coding, consuming engery drinks and no sleep at all I didn’t have much to show :(
At least, after a few days on the couch trying to recover from the camp, I was able to write a few lines on the Liip blog expressing a critical view on AIR’s potential.
And since I assume, winning is overrated anyway, I’ll just finish up that game in the next months and simply pretend I won that ultra smooth, super light and shiny MacBook Air … oh, crud, that’s not the same!
Posted in AIR, Events, Liip | No Comments »
February 27th, 2008
While everybody else seems occupied digesting the fun they had attending Flash in a Can in Amsterdam – why, WHY did I miss it? – I’m trying to mentally ready myself for tomorrow’s Air Camp in Zurich.
Since the workshop is being followed by a 24h contest in building the coolest Air application, we’ve been racking our brains to find ideas for suiting programs we could enter with. While my buddy Sandro still seems unsatisfied with his options, I’ve given up thinking and decided for a small desktop game thing. Don’t wanna go into detail too much, right now, but it seems I’m gonna be using Milgra to implement multiuser interaction.
Milgra is a small lightweight open source java server that I recently stumbled upon. So far it has only reached version 0.5 but that one already comes with a good bunch of needfull features and handy examples on how to use it right away. It seems quite easy to setup and use for as little as I’m gonna be needing. Red5, on the contrary, seems way to heavy for my needs.
Can’t wait to dig into this and develop my first multiplayer game *shiny eyes*
Posted in AIR, Game development, Server | No Comments »
