Yahoo Pipes is Awesome!

For anyone who hasn't tried Yahoo Pipes yet check it out. Pipes allows you to create custom RSS feeds. This is very cool for making complex mash-ups. For example, a friend of mine is looking for an audio position in New York City. I created a simple pipe that uses Google's Job Search and the keyword audio and out came a list of job postings that were mostly relevant. After you make a pipe you can save it to your Yahoo or Google homepage, or access it as an RSS feed, etc.

I heard about Yahoo Pipes from an installation artist who was searching news feeds for different words and then applying that data to a device that dripped paint on a canvas depending on the amount of data received. I was really impressed how easy it was for him to parse so much data down to a single feed.

After playing with Pipes, I think it may be a good solution to an experiment I've been wanting to try. The idea is to get all sorts of real-world data into Flash, use that data to make inferences based on culture and psychology and then have it influence an interactive pet's emotion engine. More simply, if I know it's been rainy and there are a lot of negative keywords in the news the pet could be sadder than usual. If it is close to a cultural, religious, federal holiday the pet could be happier. It is my hope that by creating an emotion engine fed by this data, and then creating a personality that reacts to this data in a certain way, much more realistic virtual characters and environments could be created. Best of all if I use Pipes, I can keep most of the complex parsing out of Flash and use a single feed to get all the information I need.

Making games accessible

Recently I've been making some games I've been working on accessible to the mobility and vision impaired to satisfy 508 compliance. This usually involves setting up tabIndex attributes and adding tags that screen readers can pick up.

Here's a quick overview for adding accessibility using AS2

Adding tabIndex is easy; just write:
someObject.tabIndex = 3;
to change it simply reassign the tabIndex a new value

Adding alt tags for screenreaders requires a little bit more code;
someObject._accProps = new Object();
someObject._accProps.name = "Text for the screen reader";
Accessibility.updateProperties();

The last line updates the alt text; so if you want to change the alt text after setting it once:
someObject._accProps.name = "Next alt text";
Accessibility.updateProperties();

That's about it, not too hard but the key is to test it out. Tabbing is easy enough you can test it straight from Flash, just make sure the Control>>Disable Keyboard Shortcuts is turned off

Testing the alt tags is trickier. You'll need screenreading software. I use a demo version of Windows Eyes. JAWS has also been recommended to me.
The demo only lasts about 30 min every time you open it, so I have it in a virtual machine which I restart whenever I need without rebooting my computer.

So far I've found one bug with tabbing. If you have tabbed onto an object and then set its ._visible = false; the tabbing order (sometimes) will skip ahead of the expected next object. I did some testing and so far I've found that if you use unloadMovie instead of _visible there is no problem.

FYI if you remove an object that you are currently tabbed to, the expected result of removing it or making it's tabindex = undefined is that the next object will be the one with the lowest tabIndex (the first object in the tabbing list).

To remove tabbing from an object:
someObject.tabIndex = undefined;

To stop alt text from being read by a screen reader, either
someObject._accProps.name = "";
Accessibility.updateProperties();

or

someObject._accProps._silent = true;

Here are some techniques I use for controlling accessibility:

I make variables to act as switches for tabbing and screen reader accessibility.

The tabbing var I set to false, then if tab is pushed I switch it to true.
The screen reader var I set to false and then set to true using Accessibility.isActive();

I usually set the screen reader switch within a keypress handler or some other function that runs soon after the movie is loaded. I do this because if you check Accessibility.isActive(); first thing, you may get a false negative.


Here are some useful links for reading up on Flash accessibility:
AS2:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001895.html
(try the white paper below for a better list)

AS3:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/accessibility/AccessibilityProperties.html

For a good source of accessibility answers for Flash check out:
http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/

The white paper by Bob Regan is an excellent read for getting a better understanding of what accessibility means and how to make Flash accessible.

I ♥ caller

Since I posted about the wonderfulness of the Delegate class for AS2 I've learned a little bit more useful info I'd like to pass on. As you may remember, the Delegate class is very useful for managing the scope of your code. The biggest problem I still ran into though was passing and accessing variables from my the custom handlers I made with the Delegate class. Thankfully , there is an easy way to pass variables. Simply add it as an attribute to the event handler.
E.G.

//import the Delegate class
import mx.utils.Delegate;

//add a variable to pass to your handler
something.onPress = Delegate.create(this, someHandler);
something.onPress.myVariable = "pass me";

//now to access that variable use caller
function someHandler(){
var passedVar= arguments.caller.myVariable;
trace(passedVar);
}

Voila! Now you can enjoy the satisfaction of passing variables to your custom handlers.

Chumby

Recently I came upon a device called the Chumby. If you haven't heard of it, the Chumby a compact computer that displays information from the web via wireless. It has a touchscreen, 2 usb 2.0 ports, an accelerometer and a squeeze sensor. Best of all, it is designed to be easily hacked both for software and hardware. Anyone can make widgets for the Chumby using Flash Lite 3.0 as well as a variety of other languages (Chumby is Linux based). The screen is 320*240 and the recommended framerate is 12fps. Looking over Chumby.com's wiki, it looks like things are very well documented with example files to download and try out.

I think the idea of the Chumby is very cool and I'm excited to try it out for myself. At $179.95 it is a little pricey but, it is exactly what could integrate the internetin new ways to affect our daily lives (especially with web 2.0 technology like RSS). Imagine having a Chumby in your kitchen, you could get recipes off the intenet, watch online video, listen to internet radio, check the weather and traffic while you have breakfast, and read the daily news. I myself would be interested in a Skype widget so I could use it like a phone.

There's a bunch of cool widgets and features already available for the Chumby at the official website: www.chumby.com.
So check it out for yourself.

Making Flash games for the Wii

Recently I was shopping at Circuit City and found something interesting. It was a program called my Wii Manager. This software that allows you to download, edit, and share your Mii characters; so far you might not be impressed. But what the software actually is, is much different. It includes a programmable input emulator with an archive of programs for using the Wiimote on the computer. So it allows you to relatively easily connect your Wiimote to your computer and receive and use its serial input to control your mouse. It runs without a UV sensor so all moving is done by tilting the Wiimote; the cool bit is that it can detect tilt, thrust, and some other movement as well as make the Wiimote vibrate and light up its LEDs.


The real reason why I bought the software was that it came with a Bluetooth dongle and the whole thing cost about $20. When I was searching for a single Bluetooth dongle, the prices were usually closer to $30. So with this software you not only get the dongle but the emulator with program archive and some documentation. For my money, this is a pretty good deal. The main thing that had been keeping me from playing with making Flash games for the Wii, was that it was too much work to figure out how to set everything up and get it working reliably before I could get to making games. So if you're curious about making Flash games for the Wii, check out my Wii Manager.

After setting everything up (took about half an hour of reading and fiddling about) I played with a couple of old Flash toys I made. The results were pretty encouraging. A while ago I started working on a gesture class that maps various types of mouse movement to specific gestures. The goal was to add a greater sense of immersion to gameplay through more familiar and intuitive interactions. When I tried playing with the old toys I made using this class, they mapped wonderfully to the Wiimote and the interaction felt nice. So I've decided to slowly make a bunch of minigames using the class which later on I'll put together in one larger game. This will take a while though since I'm still in the middle of redesigning my website. Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze in a minigame or two along the way. Once I've finished a couple of minigames, I'll post the code and the games at my website.

The Delegate Class: Brother where have you been?

Eureka! I've had a specific problem when writing AS2 classes for some while now. Namely, whenever I use code to make an interactive element (Let's say a movie clip that bounces away when you click on it), I have to nest the event handler's method. The problem is that this changes the scope and so the handler method can't access my classes base methods. The way I used to fix this was by making the methods I want to access Static, and accessible by anything in my class. The problem with this is that if I make a method static I have to make its variables static, and that can create a domino effect of making things static just to solve the original problem. This is pretty wordy so I'll post code that is easier to follow. Here's the old way I did things:

class SomeClass {
//constructor
public function SomeClass(someMC) {
//initialize object
initialize(someMC);
}
//this is static so the onPress method can access it
private static function doSomething() {
trace("Ok, I'm doing something");
}
private function initialize(someMC) {
trace(someMC);
//define what it needs to do when it loads
someMC.onPress = function(){
doSomething();
}
}
}

This is a very simple version of the problem. In reality the method my handler calls would probably be called by other methods and use variables that all would need to be made static. I knew this was not a good way to do things but until now I didn't know what else I could do.

Thanks to the Delegate class though, I'm able to specify the scope and therefore access the methods at my class' base level. Here's the same code as above but made with the delegate class:

//import the Delegate class
import mx.utils.Delegate;
class SomeClass{
//constructor
public function SomeClass(someMC) {
//initialize object
initialize(someMC);
}
private function pressHandler() {
trace("You pressed it.");
}
private function initialize(someMC) {
//define what it needs to do when it loads
someMC.onPress = Delegate.create(this, pressHandler);
}
}

Now there is no need for static so things are much easier when I need to tweak things later on.
While I was researching how to solve this problem I found other possible solutions but this was the one I understood best and was able to easily implement.

You can read all about the Delegate Class here: http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/205/1/The-Delegate-Class/Page1.html

This is all great to know but this problem has been resolved in Actionscript 3 thanks to its addEventListener method. Still if you're using on Flash Lite or like me your work doesn't want you to use AS3 until the Flash PLayer 9 adoption rate is higher you may find this very useful.

Good luck using the Delegate Class, and if you have other solutions I'd love to see what you have come up with.

Tip for Text in Flash

I was working my way through the hefty, 900+ page book Essential Actionscript 3.0 with the hopes of finishing it by the month's end when I learned something new. It has happened to me before that I wanted to use some dynamic text as part of something that rotated, skewed, or changed transparency. This never seemed to work so I always resorted to breaking the letters apart into graphics and abandoning the idea of dynamic text. Today, as I was reading page 705, I learned that dynamic text can be used in all these wonderful effects as long as you embed it. I did some tests and it is indeed true. Just make sure that you embedded all the symbols necessary, otherwise your text might be missing things when you render the swf.

You can see this in action in the new widget I've made for this blog, my Flickr Image viewer. This widget gets the 20 most recent pictures I've uploaded to my Flickr account and makes a cross-fading slide show with captions. As you can see I have embedded the font I use so the text as well as the images fade in and out. I made this widget with the help of the SWX technology created by Aral Balkan which allows Flash to easily access Flickr API (and others) easily without writing any server-side code.