Tag Archives: Cookbook

ActionScript3, Adobe, AIR on Android, Articles and Guidelines, Facebook, Flash, Flash Platform, General, HTML5

Flash Facebook Cookbook Review

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Facebook IS building the social web! It has more than 800 million active users and connects more than 500 million users monthly on its Facebook Platform through devices, apps and websites (source Facebook Statistics).

With such a huge demand for content on the Facebook Platform, the requirement for developers has also grown, thus leading to more learning material being available; material especially related to tips, best practices and simple guides to help one progress with the platform.

One of the newest resources for Facebook Developers is – the Flash Facebook Cookbook by James Ford. I received a copy of this book and decided to write a short review for it while reading it.

The Flash Facebook Cookbook contains around 60+ recipes for integrating Flash applications with the Graph API and Facebook. The recipes are simple and start with the basic explanation of Facebook and Flash integration. It graduates to moderate and complex examples such as News Feeds, working with the photo albums, uploading pictures, working with events and integrating HTML5 geolocation capabilities etc.

The book does not expect the developer to know the Facebook platform, but does expect some knowledge of working with Flash Builder and the Flex framework. It uses the Facebook Actionscript 3 SDK available from Github. Apparently this version is supposed to be more community driven than the official Facebook Actionscript SDK supported by Adobe and Facebook on the Google Code repository. I’ve always worked with the official version of the SDK, so I didn’t try using the Github version with the receipes.

I think it is fair to say that the book is a good resource for Facebook development on the Flash platform for the web and desktop. It does not cover the mobile platform, although a refined developer will be able to adapt the knowledge gained from this book to multiple Flash supported platforms.

Mariam

 

Adobe, Flash Lite

Mobiles and Devices Cookbook..something to look forward to?

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While browsing through the Adobe Devnet for Mobiles and Devices today, I came across a new tab which said “Cookbook (Beta)“. Getting excited about this new addition, I clicked on the tab, only to find an error message being displayed. Well, that was not the point I was trying to make. What’s great is we “Mobile Developers” working with Flash Lite will actually have a Cookbook of our own (in development now I guess).

I always looked at the Cookbooks of other platforms (Flex, Air), and wished that the the MaD folks also had one. I feel it’s a great place to have access to all the information one can need about learning a new technology or enhancing present skills, contributed by the community itself.

For those who like to know what a Cookbook is, it is a place where you can share a piece of code with the community (by submitting up a form) and it may also include an option to be considered for O’Reilly book publishing of your post.

So is a Mobiles/Flash Lite/call it everything Flash Mobile Cookbook is what we can look forward to?

Mariam