Sandro talked about his terrific implementation for making one of the first (I'm sure, but can't proof it ..) fully accessible Flash games out there. It got the highest rating by Access for all and they blogged about it.
In this two-part blog post i will cover the technical, as well as overall aspects of this endeavour. Go here for the first blog post on accessibility. This second part will cover all the technically nitty-gritty, blood and tears that went into implementing accessibility for this project. :)
The greater part of last year i was heads-down-busy developing the EventManager Game which we had the pleasure to build for Postfinance. EventManager is an educational but fun game, that approaches topics such as budgeting, financing and investing in a modern way (read: not boring you to death).
Today i want to talk to you about the new iteration of the game that we just released a couple of weeks ago. What is new you ask? How about: Accessibility!
In this two-part blog post i will cover the technical, as well as overall aspects of this endeavour. This first part will cover a brief history of accessibility within the Flash Platform and its current state and hopefully useful insight if you are considering to add accessibility to one of your projects.
The 28.th User Group Meeting of the SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) will take place next Tuesday, October 20th, at the Liip office in Zurich.
Michel Wacker, Sandro Ducceschi and other members of the Liip team will attend as well, and are looking forward for you to join us to discuss the latest news from the Flash world:
Topics are:
1. Showcase: "Postfinance Eventmanager" - Sandro Ducceschi (Liip AG)
2. Review: "Adobe MAX 2009" - Tiago Dias und Marcel Vogt (both Publicis AG)
More details can be found here.
New group-members are more than welcome, just come by and join us! See you there.
I am very excited to announce that local.ch granted us the possibility to open source the coverflow clone we created for them under the "Simplified BSD License". So first of all a big thanks to them, you guys rock!
A long long time ago, years before playing funny X vs. Y games and the merge to Liip AG happened, I never imagined that Flash will play such a big role in this company. Now, it's completely different. Flash is an important part of our portfolio and projects depend on it (with good reasons, by the way :) ). Of course, this doesn't mean, that we're now just doing fancy flash intros or are doing the next flash based video player (gääähn ..), but that we are building serious object orientated flash applications on the basis of ActionScript, Eclipse as IDE and some other cool tools. Developing Flash nowadays looks therefore pretty geeky, it almost makes me to want to learn it :)
To cut a long story short: We're looking urgently for good, serious Flash experts to expand our Flash team, please check our job page for more info.
In my ongoing quest for replacing flash wherever possible ( :) ) I found ExplorerCanvas, a JavaScript library which emulates the canvas object of Firefox, Safari and Opera (whatwg specs) in Internet Explorer. It's not the fastest thing on earth, but for little tasks (like rotating bitmap images and drawing graphs) it could be a useful library. Here are some examples (works in IE, Safari 1.3/2.0, Opera 9 and Firefox 1.5):
Despite the very hot and sunny weather last tuesday approx. 15 people came to listen to gere and me talking about (again) Flash vs. Ajax. The slides are here, and a pretty good summary (in german) by Leo is also available.
Tomorrow evening, another webtuesday. Once again at the Bitflux HQ with the hot topic: