Flash Lite Community for XO, Gnash, Free RIA Tools

[Carlos Nazareno]

Hi guys!

Just made an invite to the Flash Lite community to work on Flash for OLPC and am
starting to get a trickle of volunteers.

I take it back about AS2 as a dead-end technology that should be
abandoned. It's much easier to learn for newbie-coders & AJAX/DHTML
devs since it's Javascript (AS3 syntax is more or less Java), and all
the current phones that have Flash Lite still use AS2. Processing
non-coder enthusiasts should have an easy time w/ AS2.
Also, Gnash support is important and bleeding edge SWFs do not run on Gnash.

Also, forwarding from Rob Savoye of Gnash. This is very important for
Flash Dev on the XO, can you guys see about this and getting the Gnash
packages on the latest OLPC builds updated? I'm not on the Gnash dev
list since the 99% of the under-the-hood Gnash discussions are
gibberish to me, so maybe John Gilmore can liaise.

>From Rob:
> > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Flash_Gamedev
> > (sorry, needs to be updated. haven't touched  it in a while. will try to
> > update it this weekend) -Naz

  I see one thing I should point out on this page, Gnash 0.8.3 is
ridiculously ancient, and should be avoided. Much of the problems of
Gnash on the XO are because the packages on the XO are *years* out of
date. :-( If you'd upgrade, most of the problems mentioned go away. This
has been a continual problem with the XO and Gnash functionality.
Seriously, 0.8.3 is so old, I wish it wasn't shipped at all as it just
makes for a bad experience.

  So I have an rpm repository where I build weekly packages for the XO.
Go to http://www.getgnash.org/packages/, (the XO packages are listed at
the bottom) These have fully working sound, etc... much better AVM1/swf
v9 support, better video performance, many compatibility bugs fixed,
etc... I strongly recommend using a newer Gnash, it just works so much
better...

  Just as a note, the Gnash team loves bug reports, we just prefer
they're on a recent version... Bug reports can go here:
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnash

	- rob -

---
Finally, I just remembered: Flex Builder (the Flex AS3 IDE, aka Flash
Builder) is free for non-profit educational use.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/free/index.html
"We provide free copies of Adobe Flash Builder 4 Standard to:
Students, faculty and staff of eligible educational institutions"

There's a Linux beta of Flex Builder, not updated to the latest
version, but good enough for a lot of stuff I think. Haven't tried it
out since I'm not really a Flex Person, I use the Flash CS Pro IDE
mostly for my projects.

I'm asking if OLPC & the deployment teams as well as the kids are
elegible for this.

-- 
carlos nazareno
http://twitter.com/object404
http://www.object404.com
--
Core Team Member
Phlashers: Philippine Flash Actionscripters
http://www.phlashers.com
--
"if you don't like the way the world is running,
then change it instead of just complaining."