Tag Archives: opensource
haXe
What is it all about ? Well its all about another language. Not really, if you know ECMA script like javascript or actionscript, haXe is just another home. It does not hurt to learn the simplicity of the language. That does not mean, its not capable! The capability of this language is, it compiles to a lot of platforms! Are you serious?! Yeah, you heard it right. It compiles to almost all the platforms we have now. Starting from AVM1 and AVM2 swfs to native windows, mac, linux applications.
The simplicity of a scripting language and the robustness of C, the best of both worlds! Awesome. For a quick overview of all the platforms, head over to the official page here.
Now haXe comes with a lot of libraries on top of the basic language, which makes it even interesting. And one of the such libraries is NME. After working in NME for a week, I am not kind of addicted to it. It simply allows the code to be compiled to HTML5 and iDevices like iPhone/iPad. The complete list of supported devices are listed here in the official page.
Hope that should already have been making you interested in haXe.
If you still need to see some hands on coding and examples, join me this sunday, where I am doing a workshop on haXe and NME for flash developers.
Happy haXe -ing.
OpenPlug : ASlate, drawing application.
While learning OpenPlug|Studio and diving into the code, my third Android application is here. Its a simple drawing board, kind of slate. As an user one has option to select different color and pen thickness for drawing on it. Again a simple but usable application, which can be downloaded from this link.
The source code is availbale at Github too.
Architectural visualisation with Blender
The complete project details are here.
Some more details about the project.
The 3D software used is Blender.
Some more community news about the project.
Sparrow V1.2 is released
This is one of the most stable releases of Sparrow framework, as it is said from its creators. This is very exciting news as there are some very subtle but significant changes happened. One of the features, which I like most is, the position of the pivot point of a texture. Previously one need to put it inside a container, now its just a property setting.
The complete list of updates could be found in its officials blog here.
Posted from WordPress for Android through my “HTC Wildfire”.
Lua : some basics
This is an extension of my last post about Lua. If you have not read that yet, I strongly suggest start from there as a beginner of Lua. On the other hand, if you know the basics of Lua, this post is exactly for you.
Hope you enjoy Lua as I am excited about it. Lets get started.
Commenting in Lua is done by “–” for single line and with “–[[ ]]” for multiline.
-- single line comment
--[[
Multiline comment is
Like this.
]]
print("comments are done, get back to work")
Lua : getting started
At very basic Lua syntax is very flexible. Lua can interpret the line ending!! I am serious. For example the code below
local a=6 local b=5 print (a+b)
is exactly same as the code below
local a=6
local b=5
print (a+b)
That means we can go ahead writing like the code below too.
local
a=6 local b
=5 print
(a+b)
But then comes readability. Its generally better to write code, which we, ourselves can read later too !! So generally one statement per line is a convention.
Now for the declaration of variables, by default any variable declaration is a global variable, unless we define it as a local variable with the ‘local’ keyword as follows.
local a=1
local b='string'
If we remove ‘local’ keyword, the variables are global.
Any variable declaration can contain any kind of values, i mean its not mandatory for a variable to store one kind of values, Lua interpreter can take care of that.
For people who are used to semicolons at the end of the statement, can write that way too and Lua interpreter can take care of that too.
local a=6;
local b=5;
print (a+b);
Writing a for loop in Lua is as below
for i=0,10 do
print (i)
end
Writing a conditional statement is as below
if(a>b) then
print ('a>b')
end
Similarly the if-else would be as below
if(a>b) then
print ('a>b')
end if(a
Finally the way we load different .lua files is through 'require' as follows
require "newFile.lua"
Finally there is a way to start experimenting with Lua without even installing it. This is through the Web Lua project.
With that I think we can get started with this small but powerful language, Lua.
Lua : My experience with it.
Well, on my journey with mobile development, I picked up Lua for sometime. I am quite impressed with its simplicity and power. If you do not know, Corona SDK provides Lua scripting language to build applications for mobile devices. The popular Angrybirds game utilises the power of Lua.
Basically its a simple language with very minimum number of key words and language syntaxes. Anyone familiar with javascript or actionscript can start jumping into it and be productive from day one. There are variants of the installer for Mac and Windows. Some what I feel Windows installer is the best and has got its own IDE, which is on top of popular SciTE IDE.
There is a complete 2D game engine / framework for Lua named Love. With that one can instantly start creating Lua games. As Lua is simple, so as Love is. But then one gets a whole lot of goodies out of a framework. I would say a must try for any game developer.
There is a nice framework for iPhone, which uses Lua and its called WAX. This also fits Lua’s philosophy as to keep the framework simple and easy. The best part is, once you start coding in WAX, you do not have to think about memory management, which is very important and sometimes most time consuming act, while developing application with ObjectiveC.
Now that I have seen Lua’s power and simplicity, I will try that out more and more and post updates about my experiments. Here are some Lua related links for you to get used to
1. Users, tutorials and more
2. Love : 2D game engine
3. WAX : iOS development framework
4. 2D Engine A 2D game engine (I Have not tried yet)
5. Luxinia 3D game engine (I have not tried yet)
6. Lua Forge Projects, tutorials and more
7. Baja Engine A game engine (I have not tried yet)
With that I think I also have to pick up some engines and start playing with it. Overall, Lua feels just perfect as its simplicity and power. Its portable and lightweight. After all its Opensource and Free.
Enabled mobile update.
Well, must say WordPress is a nice framework if you want a php framework for your content management system. Appart from just a framework, it is a blogging engine and a full blown CMS ( Content managent system ) . I must say, after using its free service for a long time , I started to experiment with the engine and put forward this blog. Now I have just enabled its mobile publishing facility. It is a setting on the administration area, under writing section.
Is not that just wonderful about a free and opensource software.
This post itself I am publishing from my cell phone, just to test and feel the service.
javascript library for converting SWFs to HTML/CSS3
When HTML and CSS3 are really catching up, its the animations which need a way to go to the web without flash plugin. Fortunately we have some very promising javascript libraries out there which does this. The two must mention libraries are
Gordon : http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki
Smoke Screen : http://smokescreen.us/
While Adobe showed a tool on this years MAX, 2 days back, which converts FLA animations to HTML5/CSS3, its time to wait and watch, when people will have access to the tool.