Almer/Blank Labs

Interactive design and development company Almer/Blank is taking its new photo hunt game,  "Spot The Dogference,"  off the leash and out of its Venice Beach, Calif. studios. The fun, new game fetches two similar, yet different, photos of random dogs for a fast-paced, side-by-side comparison test of your eyes. In a twist on standard "Spot the Difference" -type apps, Spot The Dogference allows dog-loving users to get involved by submitting pictures of their four-legged companions so that they may be featured in future versions of the game.

The basic premise of Spot The Dogference is simple: a player views two seemingly identical dog images which actually have minor differences. The player must find and select all of the "dogferences"  before the timer runs out. The faster the player finishes each round, the higher the score. There are currently three levels of play plus a "Bonus" level, with each one becoming increasingly difficult as a player advances.

Other features of Spot The Dogference:

• Integrated Twitter status. A user may log in and have their Twitter status updated with their Spot The Dogference score - a sort of "high score" board. All scores are also updated on the "Spot The Dogference" Twitter account at twitter.com/dogference.
• Integrated AddThis functionality (formerly ClearSpring). Users can share Spot The Dogference across multiple social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace.
• Mochi Ads. These banner ads, placed within the game play, allow for Spot The Dogference to be self-sustaining and free for users to play.
• Structure: The game was architected using the PureMVC framework, allowing maximum portability and reducing future engineering hours with rebranding.

Sit, stay and then roll over to the site to see how well you Spot the Dogference! www.spotthedogference.com

Roughly one year ago, I decided to sit down and write up some notes, and draft some wires, of where I thought the Flash IDE GUI could be improved to support improved workflow. As I'm sure any power-user of any tool feels, I have my own special beefs with the Flash IDE — some of which I know are silly, and some of which I assume would actually be valuable to a broader audience. But, as CTO/COO of a Flash Platform development shop, where my guys excel in the use of basically every SWF-generating tool there is, I have several opinions based on how I feel, from an operations perspective, the cross-tool Flash workflow should be supported by Adobe's own software.

After thinking over these ideas for a year, one of the suggestions in particular keeps coming back to me. The Library. …read more…

I was recently working on a project in the latest beta release of the forthcoming Flash Builder 4 and wanted to point out the new contextual help feature. What's nice about this feature is that I had just added the highlighted event to the event class and was busy implementing it in a view class and because of FB4's new code-hinting muscle I was able to see everything that I had documented in the event class concerning the event without having to have the event class open. This is definitely a much appreciated usability enhancement. Now, if we could just get editable code (not file) templates (think FDT, Zend Studio, etc), FB4 would be that much closer to being ready for prime time...

I just came across one of the coolest AS3 toolkits I’ve seen in a long time – Hype. Basically, the point of Hype is to make UI design as easy and fast as possible. It includes commonly used algorithms used in visual and audio design such as grids, shapes, random placement, chaos patterns, and audio spectrum calculations. It’s also capable of calculations such as custom timing (run a callback every 2nd frame, etc) with minimal coding requirements, and a callback system that is much more efficient than AS3’s native Event system. Another great feature is the use of Object pooling and unordered lists. The concept of this is to minimize Object creation (thereby keeping memory requirements as small as possible) by recycling Objects rather than recreating them on the fly. This is obviously a standard best practice when designing code projects, but Hype will do the dirty work for you and let you focus on the fun stuff. From the looks of the intro video, the toolkit looks to be well-written using a combination of a core framework and an extension package (which is highly flexible and easily built upon). It looks like a minimal set is included for now, but I’m sure additional extension kits will be added along the way (plus allow developers to add/share there own). The framework is slated for release on Saturday, October 31st. Check out the video HERE, and the examples HERE. Happy coding

If you're a Flex developer that's recently upgraded to Apple's latest OS, Snow Leopard, you may run into this prompt when launching Flex Builder 3. This is saying that in order to use the Adobe Update Manager plugin for Flex Builder, you need to install Rosetta. Rosetta which was enabled by default in Leopard, is not in Snow Leopard as Apple tries to push the market towards 64-bit computing. You're perfectly safe to launch/use Flex Builder without this plugin until Adobe releases an updated version. All other application functionality appears unaffected by a lack of Rosetta.