Here you have an easy way to detect shakes on mobile devices with equipped accelerometer:

var lastShake:Number = 0;
var shakeWait:Number = 600;
 
var acc:Accelerometer = new Accelerometer();
acc.addEventListener(AccelerometerEvent.UPDATE, onAccUpdate);
 
function onAccUpdate(e:AccelerometerEvent):void
{
	if(getTimer() - lastShake > shakeWait && 
			(e.accelerationX >= 1.5 
			|| e.accelerationY >= 1.5 
			|| e.accelerationZ >= 1.5))
	{
		shakeIt();
		lastShake = getTimer();
	}
}
 
function shakeIt()
{
	trace("device has been shaked");
}

Enjoy!

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 🙂

Update:
I made a jQuery version on Codepen.io

This is text shuffle class that will help you make a nice flash menu for your site or your applications. You can use it for open source or commercial projects (do anything you want).

Flash Version:
TextShuffleMenu.swf

  Shuffle Text (20.8 KiB, 2,421 hits)

Last night I was browsing around 365psd.com and I found a very interesting design for an mp3 player. Then I thought it would be a good idea to make it functional with Flash and ActionScript 3.0 and then share it for free on my blog 😀

Source files:

  mp3_player.zip (1.4 MiB, 9,957 hits)

Just wanted to let you guys know that I’ve been working on a YouTube playlist reader (based on the ActionScript 3 YouTube API). With this custom player you can send a YouTube playlist ID and the player will generate the list of videos with thumbnails and other info about the videos.

Just check it out and let me know what you think 😉

UPDATE: HTML5 Webcam Photobooth Web App

Two days ago I made a little Flash app that will allow anyone to take a picture with a webcam connected to a computer. Everything worked fine in AS3. It was only when I got to the PHP part of the project when I felt like I should ask for help. And I did, I asked a friend or mine (Mihai Bojin) who in a few minutes explained to me exactly what I needed to know in order to get this project working as it should (a big part of the PHP code is made by him).

The project is now open source and you can find the code and the source files underneath 😉

This open source project is release under the MIT license.