It all started more as an experiment a few years ago. I made the first Christmas countdown app and uploaded it to my website. The app was also added to the Google Chrome webstore. In December 2014, I noticed a lot of traffic on that app, it got popular! That’s when I decided to start working more on the app and also make mobile versions of that app so people can have it on their mobile devices.

The version of the web app available in the past few years was developed using Adobe Flash. Since Flash is almost dead, I decided this year to make a better, more beautiful HTML5 version that will work on all modern browsers, including mobile browsers. That’s exactly what I did in the last few weeks.

Now, the new Christmas Countdown app is available and ready to be used. The app includes a list of Christmas radio stations with beautiful Christmas carols that you can listen to all day long.

I will keep improving the app with things that might make it better. If you have any suggestions, please add them in the comments section below. Thank you and enjoy the app!

Yesterday I spent some time and made a cool little application with Adobe AIR technology, a simple application that will count down the days ’till Christmas.

Today I made some experiments with AIR for Android. The process was very smooth and I like how simple everything is, in just a few minutes I managed to compile an application and play with it on my Android device. Totally love the way that I can reuse the ActionScript 3 code and make beautiful applications for Android!

Not so many good words about the Android Market. I started an account, then I was asked to pay a fee of $25 and then when my account was created I noticed that I can’t really make paid applications for the Android market since Google Checkout is not available in Romania. How messed up is that? You want people to develop applications for your marketplace, you request a fee and then they have no way to at least get some of that money back. It’s not that I can’t live without 25 bucks, but that really sucks, I feel like I’m giving them money so I can develop for their marketplace and help it grow a little more (so they can earn even more money). I love Flash related technologies and Android, but this doesn’t have any logic.

Anyway, I tried to implement an older youtube player into my AIR application so I can test it out and see how it works. The problem was that when I played a video and hit the hardware back button on my device, the video was still playing because the application minimized instead of closing (as I imagined it would). Then I started to search for a solution, and sure enough, I found it very fast on Tom Krcha’s blog. To close the button when you hit the back button you first need to register a handler:

if(Capabilities.cpuArchitecture=="ARM")
{
	NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, handleKeys);
}

Then you need to make the function for that handler:

function handleKeys(event:KeyboardEvent):void
{
	if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.BACK)
	NativeApplication.nativeApplication.exit();
}

That’s it. I will continue to work with AIR for Android and hopefully make some cool apps 🙂

We just lunched UserBooth.com. Please give us feedback so we can develop neat features and build the best flash webcam application 🙂

Last week I finished working on some flash pieces for a client from GAF
First I did the banner/header for this site dorm2dorm.com
Then this little app where I implemented some nice AS3 based animations dorm2dorm.com/storage_boxes

I did a lot of modifications to satisfy the clients requests but in the end I think we got some nice results 😉