I have experience in developing in actionscript via Flash, FlashBuilder, and FlashDevelop.
Flash is the only tool with which I am familiar for creating the .swf graphic and animation assets to be accessed/used by the AS3 in FlashDevelop or elsewhere. I like to being able to use the free FlashDevelop and not rely on expensive Adobe products, but I don't know of a substitute for Flash.
Is there a free or opensource type tool for creating graphics and animations?
You can use the Eclipse IDE with the Flex SDK to develop swf file Flash applets.
Also, for really simple things there is Ming for PHP.
Apparently, swftools allow you to
make swfs out of pre-created assets including .wavs, .gifs, .jpgs, .pngs, etc.
get information from existing .swfs including strings, imgs, fonts, sounds, etc
insert other swfs into swfs
compile swfs
a few other things
Meanwhile, both Eclipse with the Flex SDK and Ming via PHP allows you to develop applications with Actionscript which compile to .swfs and which could be used to code the drawing of graphics and their animation.
Unfortunately, none of these seem to be anything like a replacement for the drawing/animation capabilities of the Flash IDE.
At present, I have to conclude that though the programming capabilities of Flash are easily handled by freeware tools such as FlashDevelop, Eclipse w/the Flex SDK, and possibly Ming w/PHP, there are no freeware tools that handle its drawing and animation capabilities.
Related
I would like to ask the SO community for the following information:
- Is it possible to compile WebKit for Windows8-Metro Environment, either in the form of a WinRT component or just as a linked library in a C++/XAML application?
- Which are the main steps to achieve this goal?
- Which are the possible things that would make this not possible or very difficult?
- Is it an endeavour someone is working on just now?
- Is it possible to gather interested people so they work on this?
I think you will not be able to just "compile" Webkit for WinRT/Metro Style. Metro Style applications are restricted in the kind of API calls they can make, for example there is no GDI/GDI+/MFC for WinRT. WebKit has several building modes that you can use, you can either build it using QT as rendering engine, or using GTK, or plain GDI, but on all those cases, when you create new builds for Windows OSes you will be using GDI at the very end.
Nevertheless, you could modify Webkit source code and add a new rendering engine that uses WinRT new APIs. You could probably become famous if you do.
As a side note, even when there is a "Windows Store" version of Chrome, by looking at the source code of Chromium it seems to me that this version is just a simple app launcher that communicates with the "normal" desktop version using an IPC channel. It does not appear to be a real Windows Store build of the whole source code.
I am not sure if the WinRT environment will allow this, but there is a project called Awesomium that is a wrapper around Google Chrome and Google Chrome is based on WebKit I think. It also has a .NET wrapper, so you can embedd it onto your .NET app.
I never tried using it, neither I know about if this library is applicable with WinRT, but at least it is a start.
Awesomium
Awesomium .NET samples
DownMakerWPF, an application embedding it to display markdown.
WinRT is a combination of managed and native code, so, you have a chance to port WebKit, but remember - native code have some sandbox restrictions.
Also you can choose XNA instead.
I would like to create a Windows desktop app using HTML5 features, specifically H.264 video,Web SQL Database,FileReader API. I don't want to use AIR (which currently does not support the video tag, instead uses Flash). Ideally I would like an exe file that just wraps the latest version of webkit in a basic window. It should be stand alone, not rely on the user having Chrome etc. installed. It could load an index.html file in the same directory as the exe. That is it.
I have been unable to find anything like this. I was going to build it myself using QTWebkit but the latest version (4.8.0) does not support the Video tag due to some kind of build issue. I assume the 4.8.1 version will fix this.
Does anyone out there know of something like this that is available now?
For anyone coming across this, Titanium for desktop is no longer supported by Appcelerator, but the project is still supported as an open source initiative. As of today (10/14/2012), it is called TideSDK. According to their Twitter account, they're behind in the 1.3 release due to some sponsored work that will end up in the code base.
Additional options not yet mentioned include AppJS (OSS, requires node.js) and Sencha Desktop Packager (quite pricey).
I think titanium is not totally gone. There is this stuff called tideSdk
I couldn't try it out yet also , so video support and the codec are open for your exploration. Here is how they say:
Create multi-platform desktop apps with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript
TideSDK is the new standard for creating beautiful and unique desktop
apps using your web development skills.
I recently thought about doing the same thing, you can still do it with air without using flash, but you could also use Chrome Packaged apps, mozilla prism (although inactive today) or Microsoft HTA (html application).
You can think of using a framework that does the browser embedding for you like Titanium. It's mostly used for creating apps that can be published to iphone, android, and windows devices. It will create a windows MSI install.
Another option is to use the CEF project ( Chromium Embedded Framework for C/C++). I havn't looked at it much, so I can't tell you how difficult/easy it is to work with. Their main site also has wrappers for Java, .NET, and other languages.
I am thinking about something that would allow to develop applications independent of the GUI library, but allow Qt and GTK being plugged in as needed.
I'd just use Qt. It includes a Gtk-like style, mimics Gtk standard dialogs and even uses Gtk file dialogs if run under Gnome, so basically it integrates itself into Gtk as good as anything (except Gtk of course), or at least it integrates itself better into Gtk than Gtk does into Qt.
You can try to use wxWidgets but you tend to get "lowest common denominator" if you go that route. Your better bet is to design your software such that you can plug in an implementation of the necessary "views" in the desired toolkit, and keep your core UI toolkit independant.
Obviously this is more work, but if there is a strong business need, then so be it.
I don't know of any framework doing something like that (I don't know how it could possibly be done without suffering from a heavy "lowest-common-denominator" syndrome), but I do "cross toolkit" development (applications that use more than one GUI toolkit) and I wrote an article about why and how to do it:
http://www.hardcoded.net/articles/cross-toolkit-software.htm
You can try Tk, which supports themes. There is a tile-qt and tile-gtk theme. There is a 2010 Google Summer of Code project to improve these themes. And, of course, when you use Tk you also get support for Windows and OSX out of the box.
Qt is a framework, it uses GTK underneath (at least on Unix).
There was a mobile toolkit that let you write everything in JS but compiled to the native code on each platform. I forget the name but it was a victim of the iPhone lockdown.
I'm trying to find an all-in-one IDE for flash, one that can deal with various flash related files.
I just read this answer and it recommends fdt, but seems fdt can only deal with scripts but not .fla ones.
Which IDE should I use so that I can use it to develop various files involved in flash developing?
I am fairly certain it can not. Is there any particular reason you need this? Most developers code in external .as files. This way code is in one location and not buried in the timeline. Also the code can be placed in source control.
For an all in one solution, Adobe Flash CS5 is probably your best bet. They have somewhat improved the IDE and added things like autocomplete.
Flash Builder 4 and Adobe Flash CS5 have finally solved this problem - you can now create an FLA in Flash and then use the wizard to easily create a Flash Builder project around the .fla. All of your classes have access to library exports etc, and you can set it up so that when you click to edit a Class file in Flash it automatically opens the file in Flash Builder.
I really like it.
I'd like to develop a stand-alone desktop application targeting Windows (XP through 7) and Mac (Tiger through Snow Leopard), and if possible iPhone and Android. In order to make it all work with as much common code as possible (and because it's the only thing I'm good at), I'd like to handle the main logic with HTML and JS. Using Adobe AIR is a possibility. And I think I can do this with various application wrappers, using .NET for Windows XP, Objective C for iPhone, Java for Android and native "widget" platform support for Mac and Windows Vista & 7 (though I'd like to keep the widget in the foreground, so the Mac dashboard isn't ideal). Does anyone have any suggestions on where to start? The two sticking points are:
I'll certainly need some form of persistent storage (cookies perhaps) to keep state between sessions
I'll also probably need access to remote data files, so if I use AJAX and the hosting HTML file resides on the device, it will need to be able to do cross-domain requests. I've done this on the iPhone without any problems, but I'd be surprised if this were possible on other platforms.
For me, Android and iPhone will be the easiest to handle, and it looks like I can use Adobe AIR to handle the rest. But I wanted to know if there are any other alternatives. Does anyone have any suggesions?
You might be interested in Appcelerator's Titanium. It's an alternative to Adobe AIR that lets you build native mobile and desktop apps using HTML and JS (with the WebKit rendering engine, so you can take full advantage of HTML5 and CSS3). It also satisfies your two sticking points:
SQLite is available for persistence storage.
There are no restrictions on cross-domain requests.
I used Titanium Desktop for a recent project and it was a relatively smooth development process. It's also open source so you have access to the full application at all times.
Check it out and let me know if it works for you.
You can create a desktop application with HTML, CSS & Javascript using either of the following two frameworks
TideSDK
AppJS
For mobile you can use the similar HTML and Javascript using PhoneGap