The first flash assignment were to create a picture slide show, with captions and a soundtrack. Using the Adobe flash gui its very easy, drag and drop “programming”.

But as Richard Stallman says “its not a matter of convenience, but of ethics”. So I went looking for replacements. In another course I had no problems using octave instead of matlab, so should this be any different? Yes, unfortunately it seems that its very difficult to get the needed features in free software, well at least in the given timeframe.

HaXe is able to compile to swf, as well as doing a lot of other nifty stuff. I just learnt about it recently from this video.

I didn’t manage to make the entire assignment, (yet?) in haxe, but i did make this :
flash presentation(5MB+)

UPDATE

I did manage to add sound and captions.

So how did I do it?

Well first of all i installed haxe and swfmill. Haxe is able to use the actionsscript api and swfmill can create resources so your are able to refference them in you haxe code.Here is the recipe i used to create this slideshow.

1. create a xml file for swfmill, in order to create a resources for the haxe code.This i something like

 <movie width="480" height="480" framerate="25">

   <frame>

      <library><clip id="img1" import="library/newton001Slide_.png"/>

unfortunately swfmill isn’t able to add sound to a library, so that had to be loaded directly from a file. I had some trouble getting it to function on the server but i think that adding “-D network-sandbox” to the haxe compilation might have done something. ???

2. run swfmill, thats swfmill simple slides.xml slides.swf

now i had linkage names for the image files, and could add them to the movieClip.

3. Create file SlideShow.hx

The main part. The basic haxe syntax is pretty straightforward, but since it uses the actionscript api it were mostly a question of getting a hang of actionscript. I did however strugle a bit with making a anonymous function, for the sounds onLoad. I used “static inline function sndStart(succes){…}” , its a wee bit diffrent than what i would do in java. but it works.

3. compile.

make a “make file” for haxe, compile.hxml

-swf test.swf

-main SlideShow

-swf-lib slides.swf

-swf-header 480:480:25:FFFFFF

-D network-sandbox

The last part -D is a conditional flag and as far as i can tell it shouldn’t do anything, but a saw it in Fmp3PlayerHx and when i added it the sound seemed to work from the server, using a URL :s :s

4. run haxe compile.hxml

5. display the pretty result. (try not to go crazy when wordpress decides to help you format the html code….), at first i tried embedding the flash in this post, but wordpress kept on changing the code, apparently if you add code and have newlines between the tags it throws in a couple og <p> tags …..

Now its on a separate page, then you don’t have to download the 5 mb flash file just to view the page, and I can use wordpress with out getting too frustrated.

sourcecode slideShow.hx

The music is “the free software song” this version is by Jono Bacon , and I personally prefer it to the version by Richard Stallman

I bought myself a new mobile, a Nokia 6300, it’s got all the bells and whistles. Hmm well at least those I could afford. I choose this mobile because it has : Java, mp3 -player, bluetooth and memorycard.

• specifications from nokia
• review from mobilereview.com

I must admit that i might be a bit of a nerd, so I just had to code something for it. And after “hello world” I found a small and some would say useless application to code.

FreeVibes

I must say I got inspired by vibelet and the article in wired ( Hold the Phone, It’s a Sex Toy ). As the title suggest, its well vibrating. I think that vibelet – though i haven’t seen their program, must be making quite an profit. Because getting a java-enabled phone to vibrate constantly, is quite easy.

So now its Time for FreeVibes, a free software version.

That’s the fancy splash screen	And when its in vibrating mode, this little duck is there. And now why a rubberduck ? ( answers )

If you want to try it out, here are the jar and jad files. Just put them on your java-enabled mobile phone. I have just tested it on my telephone, It should work on any new mobile (with java) :

Jad File
Jar File
Source code

Installation

1. Download the jar and jad file and place them on the phone in the same directory.
2. Run the applet
3. Have fun

Technicalities

Getting things to work with ubuntu feisty fawn.

I use SUNs java 6 and the wireless toolkit for the J2me.

Nokia has a nice area with information about coding for their phones (forum.nokia.com). But i didn’t have any success using their eclipse plugin and carbide.j seems to be a windows application. But eclipseME worked like a charm.

When setting up a device for EclipseME i had to make sure that it was MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1. It wasn’t the default and the Nokia 6300 can’t handle MIDP 2.1.

They code and design is inspired by Nokias tutorial on making MIDP 2.0 games.

The images I used are from the openclipart collection, hacked together with GiMP and Inkscape, and I use obexftp to transfer the files to the phone.