Ok, here’s the last day’s news digest on the MumboJumboT project.
Unfortunately on the first day I was not really working as hard as I would need. Mainly because I finished a large project yesterday morning and I was not so fresh. I need to concentrate more during next few days, so I won’t be a promising looser.
But there were few things I’ve successfully done. First, I made a Twitter account. Pretty sweet, huh :]
Then there was the logotype. The application is based on a concept of a robot blabbing nonsense. Because I’ll use Away3D library, everything will be somewhat raw – boxes and angles everywhere. That should be OK for a robot, except Eva from Wall-E nearly all robots are made of boxes.
Logo
I was not entirely happy with boxy look, so I needed to make it softer somehow. Hence I added the key to the right side. My robot, MumboJumboT, will have a similar key, hopefully rotating while playing.
Then I needed to come up with a Twitter background and of course an avatar. Here’s a screenshot of current state of MumboJumboT’s Twitter home:
Click the image to see the full resolution.
As promised, here you can have PSDs I created.
Source code
Yesterday I was also happy to prepare a functional AIR source base I can use now. It’s deployed to the GitHub repo I’ve prepared for the project.
So now it’s the second day and I need to continue. Today I want to prepare all graphics assets I will need. Watch the MumboJumboT’s Twitter stream at @mumbojumbot for more information about the progress.
Update
MumboJumboT project is done. Read more here.
MumboJumboT: Done.
I am finally done with the MumboJumboT project.
As you may know from this blog, I recently wrote a few paragraphs about progress of the project. And there is even MumboJumboT’s Twitter stream with more detailed tweets. But — believe me, it’s hard to tell — now I am not very happy with the results and I have to confess I failed on several places.
First, as usual, I was way too optimistic. I thought I’d be able to code more and harder, but it was not really possible for several reasons. Just a few hours before I started the project I had finished another long term job and hence I was somewhat tired. Our kids were sick two days as well and on the end I was lazy too :) As you may know I planned to create a blabbing machine. And… Failed. Sorry about that, next time I’ll think twice before I start a project like this one.
But! I think even with my failures I’ve got something for you. The MumboJumboT project lite. Very lite. If you’re interested, I’d be glad to show you my humble Adobe AIR application, which you can install by clicking the badge here.
So what is it all about?
This is just an eye candy and mainly a tutorial AIR app. You can click links below to read more on how the project was done and meanwhile you can play with it.
MumboJumboT allows you to:
Load a sample song (thanks to Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac for The Sphere song from his Organic album, the other song done by me),
Load your very own Ogg Vorbis file (info on Xiph.org as well),
Play an Ogg file — actually it was not possible before, because Flash knows just MP3s. If you don’t want to get into dirty details on the Wiki page, you just need to know Ogg provides much higher quality on lower bitrates. The playback is done by Branden Hall‘s Ogg Vorbis Alchemy port, heavily altered by me for purposes of this app,
Somewhat visualize the playback.
That’s pretty much for now, so let’s continue on the code stuff.
MumboJumboT code
You can read everything about the project’s code on the documentation page of the MumboJumboT project. Please don’t forget to visit its GitHub repository.
What you will learn:
PureMVC and Startup Manager
PureMVC is a cool Model-View-Controller framework aimed to help you to create cleaner code in several languages. And its Startup Manager is a good way how to put initialization of your application in a queue, while following each Proxy requirements.
Config files
Here you can see my Proxy helping to easily parse config XML settings. The online flavour allows you to merge parsed settings with FlashVars. You can localize the app from the config XML as well, you know, it’s not a good thing to have any static text in the SWF (it obviously doesn’t apply to the logging output).
AIR Updates
Adobe AIR platform allows applications to self-update when there’s a new version available. See the code below to see how to do that:
Away3D
Away3D is a well known 3D library. And its new Lite flavour finally provides hardware acceleration via Flash 10 postcards in space acceleration features.
OGG Decoding
As I wrote above, thanks to Branden Hall I was able to use Ogg Vorbis files in the app, even it was not possible before.
Advanced mouse controls
You can see there’s a somewhat sick mouse handler allowing you to drag-and-rotate so called Spinbox.
Skinning
Here you can see how to skin the app with my vancura-as3-libs library. Download the skin folder here.
Mocking up
Just to revisit what was written in previous articles, here’s an archive of PSD files you can download. Just in case you’d be interested on how the GUI part was done.
You can watch a screencast of the mocking up on Vimeo.
Legal stuff
Licensed under Attribution-Share Alike (CC) license. OGG Alchemy Decoder by Branden Hall and Xiph.org Foundation. More info RaveIN font by Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac.