I am now working at Creative Donkeys as a Flash Developer.

Woot?

For the past few days I’ve been messing around with the API that Google Maps put out for Flash. It lets you use Google maps in your own Flash/AIR applications and customize them however you want. I’m going to explain how to make your own AIR app that lets you display bus routes and stops using the Google Maps API and ZendAMF.

We’re also going to create a function that lets us see the approximate time the next bus will come to any given stop (ex. “5 minutes until the next bus”).

I’ve started to make an LTC map synced with Google Maps so you can figure out if there is a bus near your position in London Ontario. Right now I have the 21/15 and 17 routes marked. It’s an AIR app, but I can easily port it to a SWF for use with Flash.

Check it out here.

Be warned, there are a few bugs.

Update: Now synced with a MySQL database to find when the next bus will come. (There are only a few stops in there, so if there are some REALLY huge times or it says “bus is already there”, I haven’t put the next time in yet.)

I’ve been working with as3isolib for quite some time now and since I can’t find many tutorials on how to do things, here’s a somewhat simple one to create a terrain with a mario sprite (loaded from an external SWF) to walk around in.

You can view the finished product and the source code here (right click to view source).

Here’s an easy way to parse out the file extension of any file in Flex/Flash using AS3.

var filename:String = ”document.jpg”;
var nameParts:Array = filename.split(“.”);

var extensionless:String = nameParts[0];
trace (“The filename is ” + extensionless);

var extension:String = nameParts[1];
trace (“The file extension is ” + extension);