I have been porting over some Flash code libraries and games to it, which has been interesting because there are some differences on how Objective-C works compared to Flash.

The first and potentially most obvious is positioning objects. The counterpart to DisplayObject in the SDK is UIView. There are several properties that allow you to position objects, but the one you want to use is UIView.center. This is where Flash and the IPhone SDK differ a little because Flash, usually, deals with x,y in the top left, where the SDK deals with the registration point in the center. When you are porting over design and graphics from the Flash and laying everything out in Flash it’s easier to deal with top left instead of doing all the conversion to the center. Here is some methods that I wrote that subclasses UIView. I should also mention that self in Objective-C is this in Flash.

-(void)x:(float)_x
{
self.center = CGPointMake( _x + ( self.bounds.size.width / 2 ), self.center.y );
}

-(void)y:(float)_y
{
self.center = CGPointMake( self.center.x, _y + ( self.bounds.size.height / 2 ) );
}

-(float)y
{
return self.center.y - ( self.bounds.size.height / 2 );
}

-(float)x
{
return self.center.x - ( self.bounds.size.width / 2 );
}

You can also use the frame property to position items, but things will go a little wonky when trying to do a CGAffineTransform on the object at the same time you are position it. For example, rotating the object at the same time you are animating it’s position.

Some of you might be saying we’ll why don’t you use Interface Builder to lay everything out? The biggest reason is that we only have a few people working on OSX so the designers don’t have access to it. But I will say that Interface Builder is a wicked application and I am hoping Thermo lives up to it.

Here is an example. Note : Everything in red is actually alpha I just filled it in for demonstration purposes.

First select a input folder. This folder would have all of your images are in. Make sure the images are named sequentially.
Next select a output folder. It’s best if this folder is empty as this will be the folder where all of the cropped images will be placed.

Here is a sample of the original image named Animation_Test.1.jpg.

Here is the cropped image with the new name Animation_Test.1._163_95.jpg
As you can see it appends the x,y offset to the end of the filename ( 163, 95 ).

The final step is to run the JSFL command included with the application.

Select an empty layer on a timeline and run the command. It will prompt you to select a file from your output folder. Don’t worry which file it is because it is simply getting the folder not the file path. Flash will now import each image in the folder to a new keyframe and position the image at the x,y offset in the filename - in this case 163,95.

Feel free to download the application and give it a try.
You’ll need to have .NET 3 Framework installed for the application to run.

But the thing that drove me crazy all day today was trying to find the Pixel Bender Toolkit. I searched the docs and everything, but for whatever reason I couldn’t find anything that referenced the location. And Quicksilver didn’t find it either when I tried to open it using that.

Finally I found it by going to the labs page.

/Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities/Pixel Bender

There should be like a short cut or something from within the IDE. I guess that’s what JSFL is for.

Places to buy
http://www.imagesco.com/
www.sparkfun.com
www.robotshop.ca
www.dgikey.com
www.jameco.com
www.phidgets.com

Reference
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/remotedriver2/
http://2005to2007.fabrica.it/tuned_stairs/old/index.html
http://www.uva.co.uk/archives/
http://www.arduino.cc
http://www.phidgets.com

Books
Physical Computing
Making Things Talk
http://terrisperber.mycyberway.com/celebrex9466.html
http://terrisperber.mycyberway.com/celebrex1571.html
http://terrisperber.mycyberway.com/celebrex1809.html

If you are going to be at the conference be sure to come say hi. I am also going to be there for most of the day after so if anyone has any suggestions on things to see in Pittsburgh let me know.

There is only a few handful of tickets left so hurry now to get your place sorted out!