Anyone here who still writes FlashLite Apps/Games? Err, none? Not even for US$15,000? That’s around P700,000 we’re talking about here.

That price could have already given you the boost to start your contest piece.

Now here are the categories as posted from the FlashLite Developer Challenge website:

1. Game — Enter into this category if your Flash Lite application is fun, interactive, and addictive and vaguely looks like one of the nominees or winners of the International Mobile gaming Awards. If you have an addictive cross platform game, allowing people to play from OC to phone, this is the category for you. You can also check out our sponsors’ websites for examples of games: Thumbplay or GetJar

2. Infotainment — Infotainment is a combination of Information and Entertainment. It therefore refers to Entertaining Information, but it can also refer to Entertainment News. Or even entertaining entertainment news! So if your application is an entertaining information service for mobile, this is your category. The more entertaining the service and the higher the information value the better.

3. Lifestyle — If you provide a service that helps people to decide what to wear, where to hang out, what to eat how to decorate their homes, what music to listen to and which movie or play to go see, this is your category. The more fun the user interface the better!

4. Sports — Any information service on any type of sports or any application for consumers doing sports or fitness enters into this category. Think also about applications that may enrich the experience of watching sports on TV in a stadium or outdoors.

5. Social Networking — Allow users to keep in touch and to interact with their social networks in an attractive way, using the device they always carry with them.

Can’t choose which category to join in? Well, you better pick now before the May 31, 2009 deadline.

This tool doesn’t need introduction. Go get the latest FlashDevelop now.

Here’s the official list of changes:

• New events and comments added for plugin developers.
• New installable filetype (*.fdz) to deploy files in FD world.
• Slightly revised snippet editor and now it’s directly included in FD.
• New FlashLogViewer plugin which basicly is an extended version of Andrew Lucking’s FDTracer plugin.
• New dynamic arguments and a dialog to fill them just prior to template creation (was Enhanced Arguments plugin by Mike McMullin).
• Added an option to save UTF-8 files without BOM. To get this fully working like FB set the callback encoding to UTF-8.
• Many new options to the UI and processes in FlashDevelop.
• Newly generated fixed completion intrisic files.
• Updated AIR 1.5 templates.
• Lots of bug fixes and other small improvements.

WonderFL is starting to gain popularity among Flash developer communities. It’s providing online service to compile your ActionScript 3 codes — yes, right from the browser.

What about external Flash APIs? Well, they have quite a few — including 3D APIs like Sandy and Papervision3D.

WonderFL does not just provide this online AS3 compiling, it also hosts a place for users/coders to exchange codes by “forking” someone else’s script.

“”There are a few 3D engines out there - Papervision, Alternativa and Away3D - and they are developing rapidly.” — Mr Raph Koster, Is Flash lighting the way for future media?

Noticed how Sandy was not mentioned? There are many reasons why Sandy is not having the same media attention as it did before but the Sandy community is making sure that it will stay alive — if not popular.

Sandy, being one of the first open source 3D API for Flash, is coming out in the shadows with faster and smarter renderer. Get everything you need to start writing Sandy 3D Flash applications — and games:

• Sandy 3.1
• Documentation
• Flash CS3 Examples

A new blog post by Jesse Warden on parsing & rendering lots of data in Flash Player:

“The first is parsing an ungodly amount of data. I used to make fun of the people who’d bitch and moan on the Flex list about how putting 10,000 records into a Flex DataGrid didn’t perform so well. My, and others, retort was why in the heck did you need to display that much data? Surely there are better visual and more efficient ways of doing so. Now, here I was in a similar situation. Except, it really wasn’t that much data… it’s just that we off-loaded the creation of it from the server to the client. In past projects, I’d get really verbose XML, or deeply nested AMF class objects. The data was human readable (by a developer), and you could make sense of it immediately. However, what I never cared to ask about was the cost that went into creating that format. The cost in server resources.”

Read the entire article at his blog.

Via Andrea Trento and Quasimondo, the Flash API for Sid Meier’s acclaimed microbiotic to galaxy-ranging game, Spore, is now available at this location. There is also a contest for the Spore API and it ends April 16th.

Via InfoQ, “Debugging tools are essential for software development in any computer language and runtime environment. Adobe Flash platform-based rich Internet application (RIA) development, either in Flex or AIR, is no exception. While the Flex/AIR is maturing, more debugging tools are emerging. Arthropod is one of them. Arthropod is a debugger tool for Flash or AIR application development. InfoQ spoke with Carl Calderon, lifelong Flash developer and Arthropod creator, to learn more.”

Read the entire article here.