In my Multimedia Design Class, we finished off the semester by designing an interactive mock-up of an app, with two functioning buttons, for Wake Technical Community College:
Wake Technical Community College App
I had a lot of fun with this one. I like to get down into the code and play with the bits that I know how to play with. Luckily Action Script is fairly close to other coding syntax’s I’ve used before (VB.net, JS, TI-84) and someone on the net was saying how remarkably similar to PHP it is, which I am not as familiar with as I would like to be.
Any who, the navigation coding was pretty basic: “gotoAndStop(*frame number*);”
So I tested Action Script a bit to see if I could call a function from another frame, using the Home button’s mouse click event handler, which had been previously defined. Low and behold it could be done! Having successfully reinvented the wheel (as I’m sure this was documented well before the release of AS1.0) I moved on to play with the map code.
We had been give a script for using StageWebView to create a ViewPort that would open up the Google Maps Mobile site on the stage. I copy&pasted it in my map frame AS layer and when I tested it, it worked! So I was happy that I got to play with changing the size and positioning of the view port. I figured out the sizing right away, but brain farted on adjusting the positioning. As I started to google for the AS Rectangle documentation I had a eureka moment and realized I was forgetting the two similarly numbered parameters that were obviously X and Y coordinates. Got to love it when you solve your own problems.
The unfortunate part came when, after thinking all my ducks were in a row, and having waited until the final day or two to export and test the SWF movie outside of Adobe Flash CS5.5 test player. Everything would work flawlessly in AFCS5.5, but when I published it, the player decided that no, I had not typed in any “stop();”s or “gotoAndStop();”s in the code, which simply wasn’t true. The little terminal showed me that my beloved StageWebView was the culprit. Essentially, the tester was able to call the StageWebView library, but the final published result was not able to (AIR 2.6 defaults vs. Flash9 defaults). I thought it may have had something to do with not having an Developer Certificate, so I found one and tested that theory, and having successfully created a WTCC_App.ipa (iPhone Application File) I proved that wrong, which took too long. I searched and found the solution to be a bit too complicated for me to implement with the deadline approaching. It involved using the projects tab (which I don’t have any experience with, seems browser-esque from the little i fooled with it) to force the SWF to call the appropriate player with the appropriate libraries. I had tried the version of this that involved copying and pasting code which involved file paths, since it seemed quick and easy. Unfortunately, it only solved half the problems that StageWebView had created, so to have something that was “average” I screen capped and ‘shopped together and static maps page of Wake Tech main campus.
All in all, I feel very positive about it and had an excellent learning experience with coding apps and app mock-ups.