GeoComrade

Yesterday Adobe made some important announcements that will have a huge impact on UMapper and other Flash-based platforms. It looks like Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR will be [finally] supported on Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms. Add to that Adobe’s IPhone packager and the entire smartphone vertical is covered, or at least will be by 2012.

Having played with Flash CS5 (mobile libraries and the new version of device central), I think Flash has a good shot at becoming a truly cross-platform (desktop, mobile, web) development solution.The fact that you can take an existing ActionScript code-base, adjust the UI and deploy it on a number of mobile devices (while maintaining a consistent user experience) will be a huge improvement. That said, Apple is still not supporting Flash and there is a risk that ‘packaged’ Flash IPhone applications will be limited.

I guess we will have to wait and see.

Today was my first day working with Flash CS5 and I loved it. Adobe finally added code completion and auto-import for the custom classes to the ActionScript editor. The code completion works for functions, events, properties and everything in between. Another cool improvement is the compiler error panel. You can now make more sense of the messages and switch between errors and warning. All and all, these changes significantly improve productivity and streamline the development process. Now to the big stuff.

It is true, you can compile Flash applications for the IPhone and it really works.

It works and it is quite simple. Adobe added libraries to handle location, accelerometer, multi-touch and other phone-specific features. To give you an idea here is how to capture GPS coodrinates of your device:

import flash.events.GeolocationEvent;
import flash.sensors.Geolocation;
 
var location:Geolocation = new Geolocation();
location.setRequestedUpdateInterval(1000);
location.addEventListener(GeolocationEvent.UPDATE, onLocationDataReceived);
 
function onLocationDataReceived(event:GeolocationEvent):void
{
// Here is your location data
trace(event.latitude);
trace(event.longitude);
}

To sum things up, I had a very good first impression, now is the time to test thing with a fully-featured location app.

Just rolled out a new version of UMapper Twitter Search template with a very cool feature. You can now specify a default search term in the title of your map. Simply add a colon and a keyword to the title of your map – “My twitter map: keyword”.

Twitter Search:Saints

This template is still in closed beta testing, let me know if you would like to get it.

This is what the new UMapper Twitter search template looks like:

Few to-do items for tomorrow: modify the search area, add rollover tooltips, clustering, rework marker positioning logic. Anything else?

Few days ago I felt a sudden urge to resurrect andreit.com, so here we go! This blog is going to be a testing ground for some of my experimental projects and a general repository for thoughts, code snippets and everything in between. Cheers.