For those of you who saw my Apollo presentation at FiTC, you’ll probably remember the little sheep that runs around the screen – it seemed to be the one thing people talked about afterwards. 🙂
Well, Ralph Hauwert sent me a link to some better sheep graphics – from the Worms game – and I dug up a sound file for it, and upgraded it a bit. One thing I discovered is that if you import an animated gif into Flash CS3, it imports the whole animation as a series of keyframes. Now, that may have been a feature introduced in Flash 3 for all I know, but it is new to me!
Anyway, if you want the source for the whole project, it’s here: http://www.bit-101.com/fitc/2007/DesktopToy.zip
Or, if you just want the Apollo installer, that’s here: http://www.bit-101.com/fitc/2007/DesktopToy.air
It should go without saying that you’ll need Apollo installed to run the program, and the Apollo extensions for Eclipse in order to build the project.
This is just plain fun! Only improvement would be if it supported a physics engine.
Source is all there. Go for it!
now just add the gun shot stuff, and man you got something here
PS> Re-installing the apollo runtime fixed the error I was getting about the DisplayState
The biggest problem I am having with Apollo is that the number of examples I am installing has pushed the Application menu from the start bar off the side of my screen. Maybe we could come up with some sort of naming convention for examples – or I guess I could stop being lazy and organize them into a folder. 🙂 Love this one mate, If we could get some talented artist to do a Mike Downey/Mike Chamber’s version that would be sooo funny.
Yeah, now that I think of it, I’ve embedded the animated sequences, but it would be easy enough to load them in dynamically as swfs, and let people customize them. Anyway, like I said, it’s open source. I just made it as a quick example for my talk, but anyone feel free to hack away at it.
And you just gave me another idea for an Apollo app: an Apollo App Manager. It could remove all the links from the start menu itself, and just list them all in its own panel.
That sucks. The sheep only runs across my primary monitor and not ALL THREE. I want my money back. 🙂
Seriously, I’m pretty sure this isn’t exactly what Adobe had in mind when they were working on Apollo. But seeing as though a lot of the Apollo crowd come from a Flash animation background I think we’ll see lots more of crazy apps such as this. So much fun. So little time.
This is totally not what Adobe had in mind for Apollo, which is of course, why I had to do it! 😉
Love it, reminds me of the Felix the cat from a few years back.
One thing i had to use the task manager to “kill the sheep”, i can see that being a problem if its not just me, saying that its still an alpha so bugs should be expected.
This reminds me of a certain purple gorilla.
Keith, sorry for off-topic but you had once a JSFL script named ‘Layout Assets Frame’ for download on your blog. It seems that it’s not available anymore. Is there any chance that you could make it available for download again?
I can see adding a feature to this app that would bring new meaning to the functionality of “cleaning up un-used icons on your desktop”. 😉
Can you post your mxml source? I only see the *.as files. 🙁
Wes, you obviously didn’t see my talk, particularly the slide that says, “Flex sucks…(just kidding)” 🙂
It’s all AS3, no mxml.
LOL, no I missed that. I was only wondering how the alwaysOnTop works? It’s not in your *.as source …
always on top is not in the current build of apollo. I think it’s in there, but doesn’t work yet.
Nice one.
And about the Apollo Application Manager, yup good idea 🙂
Then how did you get your nifty little sheep to always be on top?