With a new project comes learning a new programming language, Flash.  Or more specifically, the scripting language that drives the Flash runtime, ActionScript.  Before starting up with Thinglefin, I didn’t know the first thing about it, so the last few weeks have been quite the learning adventure.

After the break, this post will get down in the programming weeds, but of general interest may be my first ActionScript app.  While starting to learn a new language, I usually start with a simple Hello World program, then add little things to it to try out bits and pieces of the language.  Since this is Flash, though, my “Hello World” program is a bit, um, flashier.  You have to click a moving target to get it to say “Hello World.”  Try it out: Hello Flash!  (Credit: about 75% of the code in this program came from this online tutorial.) 

(You may need the latest version of Flash Player installed too: get it here.)

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It’s been pretty quiet up here on the website, mostly because we’re all hard at work down below, in the dark bowels of the company, working on our first public release. While we do that, feel free to sign yourself up to our new email announcement list, the Thinglefeed. There’s a form to do so over on the left hand side of the screen. Once you sign up, we’ll let you know as soon as there’s something you might be interested in taking a look at.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Eh, I’m not going to give these clowns my email address. They’ll probably send me several gigs of monkey porn, and then sell my address to Clear Channel.” If you are thinking that, that’s kind of weird, but ok, I can dig. You can always just subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, I suppose. BUT… I’m not going to make any specific promises at this point, but it seems highly likely that we’ll want to create some kind of special “early adopter” bonus for certain accounts, and being on the Thinglefeed may well be your only chance to get it! Just think of that sweet bonus and how much you want it! I signed up myself just now so I would be sure to get it.

We have a press release going out tomorrow. Its mostly boring stuff concerning our financing, but it does mention a couple of newsbytes on the game we’re developing. If you’re reading this blog, I imagine you’re a hip netizen, searching for the next juicy gamedev morsel. Or more likely, you’re Ryan’s Mom. In any case,  I thought I’d scoop our own press release, and spill the little bit of game-specific information it contains.

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