http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/feed Copyright 2013 http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2013/04/21/deploying-cpp-to-javascript-using-emscripten/ If you paid attention during the post-GDC news, you probably heard that Epic Games and Mozilla teamed up to get the Unreal Engine running in the browser, without plugins, in a matter of four days. The secret? Emscripten. Alon Zakai has worked three years on Emscripten, and its an amazing piece of software. Literally, you [...] Sun, 21 Apr 2013 12:41:35 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2013/04/06/how-to-deploy-html5-applications-for-blackberry-10/ When I test HTML5, I prefer a device over a simulator. In order to build an HTML5 application for BlackBerry 10, there are a few steps to be followed. Do not worry, it is not too complicated, but there are a few pitfalls you will want to avoid. Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:10:38 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2013/04/06/hello/ Over the past few months, I have traveled all over North America – Toronto, San Jose, Boston, Nashville, Vancouver, Los Angeles, New York – connecting with all kinds of developers, recommending frameworks or tools to help them feel productive and accomplish their vision, delivering sessions and providing unofficial demonstrations of my BlackBerry Z10. Nowadays cross-platform [...] Sat, 06 Apr 2013 17:59:58 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/11/18/actuate-now-with-bezier-tweens-again/ Anyone who used the old Actionscript version of Actuate may know there used to be a “motion path” tween. In the translation to Haxe, this is something I never ported. I am happy to announce that Actuate 1.50 has just been released on haxelib, including a new and improved version of the motion path tween! Sun, 18 Nov 2012 11:52:06 CST http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/11/14/html5-benchmark-scores-nme-runnermark/ If you are on Twitter, you may have seen links to RunnerMark, a benchmark that tests rendering performance of Adobe AIR and NME. We have been improving the performance in the (beta) HTML5 target for NME, so I am happy to share some of the results. These improvements will be released with the next version of [...] Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:18:35 CST http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/10/09/benchmarking-html5-using-piratemark/ Nowadays, it is not possible to reach the majority of users on the internet using Flash Player. Mobile devices that support Flash Player are dwindling, support for a standard Linux plugin has stopped and Windows 8 is going to only provide Flash Player support for a whitelisted subset of the internet. NME and Flambe are [...] Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:48:14 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/10/05/glossary-of-haxe-error-messages/ If you are new to Haxe, you may encounter new or unfamiliar error messages. Recently, I converted a large library from ActionScript 3 to Haxe. I took the time to write down the errors I encountered, and their solutions. Perhaps this will be useful in your projects. Fri, 05 Oct 2012 08:12:59 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/10/04/nme-rendering-methods-benchmarked/ This morning, I decided to fork BunnyMark to find how each of the NME rendering methods compare to one another. I was surprised by the results. I suspect that some of these tests can be improved, so feel free to send pull requests. Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:29:57 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/10/04/pragmatism-over-perfection/ I used to be a perfectionist. When I did anything that fell short of my unwavering, unattainable “standards,” I would push and stress until I reached the very end of what I could accomplish, often because of exhaustion or external factors, not satisfaction. That is a very difficult way to live. One thing I learned [...] Thu, 04 Oct 2012 08:25:28 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/10/02/using-the-remote-control-library-with-nme/ Yesterday we published an NME native extension called “remote-control” This makes it really simple to add Apple Remote support to your NME games or applications. To install, open a terminal or command-prompt and run “haxelib install remote-control”. To add it to a project, open the NMML file and add <haxelib name=”remote-control” /> Then it is [...] Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:24:27 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/09/20/free-passes-to-blackberry-jam/ Next week, the annual BlackBerry developer conference starts in San Jose. I will be giving an introduction to the Native SDK on Tuesday, going through the basics of C++, Cascades and NME development. That same morning, Thorstein Heins, Alec Saunders and more of the leadership team will be unveiling more details about BlackBerry 10. I [...] Thu, 20 Sep 2012 01:43:22 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/09/14/adding-inline-cpp-to-haxe-code/ On the NME forums this morning, redannick asked if it was possible to get the current timezone offset, using Haxe. Unfortunately, I discovered that getTimezoneOffset() is not part of the Haxe Date class. Perhaps this will be available in Haxe 3. For the meantime, I found a solution using the @:headerCode and @:functionCode tags. This [...] Fri, 14 Sep 2012 09:01:34 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/08/24/using-threads-with-nme/ There has been a good amount of discussion recently about concurrency (multi-threading), now that Actionscript has added support in the new Flash Player release. Haxe already supports threading when you are using the C++ or Neko targets. The following samples will not work for Flash or HTML5, but will create and manage communication between threads [...] Fri, 24 Aug 2012 09:42:35 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/08/14/changing-the-flash-ap/ I came across a devious discovery. I found that I can change the Flash API. Conditional compilation and typedefs are two features which are available in Haxe, but not in Actionscript 3. NME uses these features to alias “nme.display.Sprite” and other classes to “flash.display.Sprite” and our backend classes for the native and browser targets. This [...] Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:05:42 CDT http://www.joshuagranick.com/blog/2012/07/23/stage-focus-and-activation-in-nme/ When you are developing for the desktop or a mobile device, it is important to consider the activation and deactivation of your stage. This isn’t a huge, complicated principle to understand, but it can really make a difference for the user. The nuances vary between platforms, but the basic principles are similar. There are two [...] Mon, 23 Jul 2012 10:03:45 CDT