Much is said about the Android platform’s fragmentation problem. However, the fact that there are a lot of politics and conflicts of interest at play creates an echo chamber that is difficult to wade through – especially if you reach articles by websites with an obvious bias. The reality is that fragmentation is a serious […]

One of the most baffling things for me when I started messing around with Android was dealing with XML files, especially parsing them. In Actionscript, parsing a XML is simple enough: var xml:XML = new XML(“<root>Some-stuff</root>”); And you can get children pretty easily using E4X, or the standard syntax. For example, to get a list […]

Multithreading support – the ability to run different blocks of code separately, in parallel – has always been a requested feature in the Flash/ActionScript community (and it’s, indeed, coming). But the reality is, due to the way the platform is designed, reasons to use concurrency in Flash are very rare. I’m sure some exist, but […]

The first thing that made me pause when working with Java is discovering that it doesn’t have event listeners – at least not in the sense that I’ve come to expect based on my ActionScript experience. In ActionScript 3, you attach an event to an object like so: myObject.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, onMouseDown); protected function onMouseDown(e:Event): void { […]

I’m just in the process of finishing the development of an Android application at work. This reminds me that since I’ve been a dedicated Flash developer for more than a decade, switching to a different platform was an interesting challenge, and one worth sharing. Luckily, I saved a lot of notes in the process, and […]

With Kana Mind released (even if still in beta form), I figured I’d talk a little bit about the experience of writing a mobile application using Flash (and Adobe AIR) as a platform (there’s also the weird timing of Adobe announcing they won’t be updating the Flash plugin for mobile devices anymore, focusing instead on AIR apps). The […]

Almost 20 years ago, I decided I wanted to try and learn Japanese. Other than studying the language’s grammar and vocabulary, I also had to learn the basic symbols used by the Japanese language – the Kana – so I could read Japanese properly. The Kana consists of 96 symbols (plus variants) which are to […]