Good find from James Jackson

Created by: One More Level

Starting in December of 2011 we changed the direction of the Nashville Flash UG. We now cover all kinds of topics in the Interactive Developer space. Check out the stats on member sign up and participation.  

Next week Andy Matthews is going to cover One Codebase - Deploy to Web, Desktop, & Mobile w/ jQuery, AIR, & Phonegap RSVP to be a part.

SWAG! - Andy will be giving out some great Phonegap stuff as well so don't miss this meetup!

Also a special announcement from Phillip Maddox of Ceed Creative. He's has been hard at work on the new logo and identity for the meetup. You guys are going to really dig what he came up with.

After using Sublime Text 2 on a few html and ruby on rails project I think it is an awesome choice. If you are Textmate or BBedit user then Sublime will hook you right away. Naturally I wanted to get away from Textmate in my CoronaSDK / Lua projects. The one convenience that I enjoy with Textmate is "command + R" runs your Corona project for you. 

First thing is to get Textmate Corona bundle working in Sublime. Do some googling and you will find some instructions for that. http://bit.ly/z1OCCF 

Now that you have the bundle working in Sublime the next step is adding a new Build System so that we can run a simple command and launch the simulator from our project in Sublime. To do this you will go to Tools > Build System > New Build System. 

You will see a new Build system document open. If you are on OS X you will add the following code to the file.

After that hit "command + s" and name the file CoronaSDK. This will add the new Build to your Build System menu so that you can select it.

Now open up your Corona project and give it a try. "Command + B" should launch the simulator and you will notice that the terminal window will open inside of Sublime at the Bottom witch I think is awesome. Enjoy!

Parsley is an MVC framework for Actionscript 3 and Flex projects. It uses dependency injection very much like Robotlegs. In this first video I show you how to get things set up.

I've had my share of feelings about the news coming out of Adobe over the last month. The dust settles fast in the software development world. At the end of the day we all just want to work with languages and technology that doesn't get in our way, that's fun to use and just gets the job done.

Lesson Learned : One thing I can say that I have learned from this and will maker sure doesn't happen again is I found myself defending Adobe, when what I thought I was really doing was defending Flash. From now on, no matter the platform or language, I am going to make sure that I don't do that again, and if I do, please someone stop me or at least give me a nudge and let me know.

Flash is an awesome platform and I am thankful to work on projects that use flash. Actionscript 3 and the Flex framework has made me a better developer. I didn't start out wanting to be a developer until I started using the Flex framework. I have learned better OOP concepts, along with better UX best practices. The whole platform has just made me a better software developer.

Where to go from here : I'd say do what most of us Flash Developers have always done. Do what you love, find languages and platforms that get your creative brains turning and most importantly, don't let a companies bad PR mess with the fun you are already having. Don't limit yourself. There are some awesome languages and technologies out there.

All that to say .... Flash will remain and the industry will still need skilled developers that know what the hell they are doing and more importantly have a passion for the platform they are working on.

That's about all I have to say about that. This was just an attempt to put my thoughts out there. Nothing too it more than that. I enjoy Flash and will continue to enjoy developing on the platform but I enjoy being an Interactive Developer more.

In hopes to save someone else a few hours of reading and digging I figured I would start posting some quick tips about some of the small things that will make your programming experience on iOS with coronasdk a little easier and let's face it, make you feel more awesome that your applications does what it's supposed to do when a user interacts with it. 

If the user hits the home button on iOS the app closes and if they where in the middle of doing something, by default they will not be returned to that state in the app. Not sure why this is the default functionality but none the less I started searching on how to "save state" of the app when it's interrupted by navigating to another application or clicking the home button to get back to the main screen. 

If you do some googling as I did for "saving state", or "coronasdk suspend" and so forth you will more than likely come across a few posts that suggest listening for and event that the applications is exiting and then figuring out a way to save the state of all the variables and logic needed to load the screen the user is on when they return to the app. This is totally the case and something you should do if you want to return them to that state if the app quit but suspend is different that quitting or exiting the app all together. 

If you want the app to suspend and return to the screen and state that it's in when the user navigates away and returns via "iOS multitasking" then the solution is very simple. Go into your app build.settings file and add the following line "UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend = false". By default a corona app "Exits" the app when suspended by default. You are basically telling the app to suspend rather than exit by adding this to your build settings.