Are you a flash developer that occasionally has to dabble in php and hates the lack of strict typing and misses the ease of type-hinting like there is with actionscript? Well, any developer that is comfortable with Flex Builder will welcome Eclipse PHP Development Tools. Flex Builder, which is built on the Eclipse framework, functions almost identical to Eclipse with PDT. I’ve used Dreamweaver, Coda, Notepad++, jEdit, Komodo, PHP Designer — I’ve used almost all of them — to write PHP, and nothing is as powerful as Eclipse (in my opinion)! Plus, it is free! So, this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while and it should be short and sweet. There are a few features that took me a while to find that help greatly with writing PHP in Eclipse, so I thought I would document them here for those of you who wish they would have learned about these features years ago like I do.

Facebook’s Like Button in Flash: A Tale of Broken Dreams and Tortured Souls

It all started so innocently, “Hey, can we implement The Like Button in flash?”. Seemed like a very average and reasonable request. I mean really, how hard could it be? Its all just http requests right? Shouldn’t be an issue… Turns out its like agreeing to step into a ring with Kimbo Slice, assuming that anyone with a name like “Kimbo Slice” couldn’t possibly put up much of a fight.

In the end we found a solution, but it came at a price…
Here is a working example:
http://labs.byhook.com/hookconnect/HookConnect.html

There is nothing better than a little friendly competition, right? Mike came to me with the request to make his post a little more modular and into a javascript library that could be shared for the masses. Don’t get me wrong, I pretty much hate javascript unless it is wrapped by JQuery, but any opportunity to improve and take credit for another person’s hard work sounded too fantastic to pass up. So here is my update to Mike’s post — the BETTER way to implement video that is compatible with mobile phones, difficult browsers and HTML5-lovers/Flash-haters!

This was my first attempt at integrating HTML5 and I quickly learned that a number of quirks must be addressed when deploying video in this fashion. There’s nothing groundbreaking about this post; however, I’m hoping it serves to be a comprehensive summary of how to integrate HTML5 with the following criteria:

- Compatibility with all current browser implementations of HTML5 (H.264 and Theora)
- Flash fallback for older gen browsers
- Platform detection
- Mobile device support

The final result of my efforts can be viewed here by a Desktop PC or iOS / Android device: http://labs.byhook.com/html5video/

WTFFFFF! We all know the feeling. You just sent off a build to the client about fifteen minutes ago, and are finally packing up for the night. Then the phone rings… We have created a platform that has been designed to help the Developers and QA People collect data about a running swf from a clients machine, while trying to keep it as simple as possible for the client.

While hopping between projects the idea of a particle-based approach to rigid-body kinematics soon became my white whale, obsession ensued and I quickly began filling enough notebooks to fill a John Doe apartment. While the mechanics of rigid-bodies can be fairly simply described and implemented with linear and angular properties, my goal with ‘fuzzy physics’ has been to at least test out the possibilities of a different approach to physics-based movement, one a little more accessible to someone that is programmer by trade but animator by craft (in other words, can’t do a Jacobi rotation to save his life)

There has been quite an onset of controversy surrounding Facebook as of late. Privacy issues, security issues, leaked IM messages, chats that can be seen by people not involved in the chat, Zynga threatening to leave, and the like. Seems like just the right time to jump in head first and make some wall spamming apps don’t you think? So we figured we would sit down, see how it works, and try to come up with an easy way to allow for flash apps to talk to the all mighty Facebook API/Data… So here goes nothin’!