PHP: Display an RSS/Twitter feed on your site with RssRepeater
by Gritfish on July 20, 2011
Rss is great – it allows your sites content to be loaded and shared by just about anything. It also lets you pull together content from many sources and display them in a single page.
Last year I built http://www.blaggregator.com as a way of teaching myself all the ins and outs of html, php and css. A big part of the functionality of Blaggregator (aside from merging and re-sharing rss feeds) is taking rss feeds and displaying them as html. This can be done with twitter feeds, blogs, and anything else that outputs rss. To aid in showing rss feeds on my own websites, I isolated the display code into a single php class.
Download the php file here
Boxy2D Physics Engine running on iPad, Android
by Gritfish on July 15, 2011
I mentioned in part one that when developing for mobiles with boxy2d, that you should use the “no events” branch of boxy2d. When developing for mobile devices, memory is in short supply, and flash’s event class can become a bit of a memory hog if not managed very strictly. The no event branch handles this for you, so you can have around 50 boxy objects on screen at once, although I’d still recommend techniques like object pooling if you’re going to push things.
Code and videos after the jump
ADT Batman: The Utility Belt for the AIR Command-Line Compiler
by Gritfish on July 11, 2011
Over the last few months I’ve been playing around with Adobe AIR on my iPad and Nexus S. The performance increase has been phenomenal between 2.5 and 2.7, and with the rewrite of boxy2d’s event system, I’ve been getting around 50 physics objects on screen without any slowdown whatsoever.
My biggest gripe, though, is with Adobe’s lack of updates for AIR publishing in flash.
The Adobe ADT (link) is a great tool for packaging AIR applications, but getting my head around using it instead of publishing from flash was one of my biggest headaches getting started, and it’s a massive hurdle when you’re taking your first steps and playing around with mobile development.
Trying to remember all the options for the ADT was a chore, and so was opening up a terminal window each time when all I wanted to do was push a button and have it WORK.
To speed up the process of coding > packaging > testing, I wrote my own generator to put together a .bat script file.
The ADT .bat maker is free to download, use and share. I hope it’s as useful to you as it is to me. If you find anything that needs correcting, leave a comment or contact me here.
Giving Boxy2D Some Muscle
by Gritfish on July 10, 2011
Last time we took a brief look at the drag and drop physics engine, boxy2d. Now I’m going to show you how easy it is to add a bit of polish to our game and show just how well boxy plays with tweening engines. Here’s an example of the finished file:
A word on tweening engines
This post assumes some basic knowledge of tweening. In this example I’m using tweennano, because of its small file size, and small memory usage. There is nothing preventing you from using another engine like tweener or gtween, but some of the code will need to be replaced.
5 Snippets: Five Things That Really Should be in Your <head>
by Gritfish on July 4, 2011
- IE / Non-IE CSS
- Basic Metadata for SEO
- Metadata for Facebook Like Buttons
- iOS and Mobile CSS
- Icons