You might recall Adobe introduced this great new functionality earlier this year with Flash CS5, allowing Flash developers to build  apps in Flash and then compile them quickly and easily to run on an iPhone or iPad as native apps.  Apple then issued an announcement on almost the same day as the launch that it was changing it’s T’s and C’s so that apps compiled with 3rd party tools (such as Flash) wouldn’t be accepted into the iTunes Store.  There was quite a bit of noise around this at the time as Apple had basically squashed the single biggest new features in Flash CS5 in one go.

Well the good news for Flash developers is that Apple has now reversed this decision having “listened to our developers and taken much of  their feedback to heart”.

It’s never easy doing an about turn and this was a fairly high profile and vocale debate at the time, so the change of direction is great news for Flash developers and will make their life a lot easier (and in my opinion good for Apple, who will have even more people developing iPhone apps now, albeit they had quite a few already).

Over the next month or so we will be finishing off a new one day course on “Developing Mobile Applications with Flash” which will make full use of this and other features.  If you can think of anything in particular you would like to see covered in this course then let us know, as we are very open to suggestions.

I have also given it a bounceEffect() and bounce() public methods.

These will give a bounce effect when it hits a boundary and the latter will make it move and bounce from the boundaries.  The boundary at the moment is just stage.stageWidth and stage.stageHeight, but I plan on allowing an object to be sent so that the instance can use its hight and width as the boundaries for bouncing.

There are also some getters and setters dealing with colour and radius, etc.

To stop the movement I created a haltObject() public function.

I just threw this together in a few minutes but I find it very useful so I thought I would share it with everyone.

Ball

Here is an example of its use…

var myball:Ball = new Ball();

addChild(myball);

myball.bounceEffect();

myball.bounce();

If anyone finds any issues, please let me know and I will update it, and if you find it useful let me know as well. I am sure that it is not perfect

Any thoughts on improvements and additions I will also be happy to receive.

Also note that i have zipped up the file as a Flash Builder project, so that you can just import the whole project if you use Flash Builder. Otherwise just go to the src folder and dig out Ball.as

Here are some particle systems that I came across in the process…

Flint
Pulse
Desuade
Stardust

…the latter is a new system, and I must say that I am impressed.

It is a nice system, easy to use, good documentation, and some lovely demos.

In particular, have a look at this one…

Butterflies

Check Stardust out, you will not be disappointed.