2016, what a year to be a Flash developer!
Before I start, I want to thank everyone that helped me this year, including donations, freelance jobs, feedback and engagement in social media (your likes and retweets really are appreciated).
I really enjoy helping and engaging with the community that has given me so much in the last 10 years.
This was a great year for me, I actually was able to fulfill all the goals I set myself.
One of my goals was to develop a FOSS (free and open source) project each month.
I published 11 new projects and gave maintenance to all of my old ones. I was short on one project but some projects were too big that they might as well count as 2 ;-).
I broke the top 100 mark at GitHub Awards:
http://github-awards.com/users/search?login=PhantomAppDevelopment
Thanks to the ActionScript community I was able to get enough recognition to break in the top 100 developers in GitHub that use ActionScript.
I also learned 2 new programming languages: C# and Dart, I'm not good enough to develop something useful with them, but I plan to improve on them for the coming year.
What's coming for the next year? Very exciting stuff:
Just today I published Earthquake App, a very simple but good looking mobile app that explains how a mobile app is developed with Feathers and Starling.
Some months ago I mentioned on Twitter that I wanted to write a book on how to make mobile apps with Feathers, I'm now ready to write it, expect it for the first quarter of 2017.
This year I developed a lot of business apps which use a broad range of web APIs and some AIR specific APIs such as Geolocation, CameraUI and File. I'm getting a little bored of it and I will spice it up by going back to my roots as a game developer.
I'll start developing some simple games and make use of ANEs such as Game Services (Achievements, Leaderboards, In-App purchases), Push Notifications, realtime multiplayer, etc.
I plan to repeat my 2016 goal and publish one FOSS project a month, this time I will open source both games and apps.
Last but not least!
In the past months I have been working on an app kit that consists on 2 parts, a client app and an admin panel.
This kit allows any small to medium businesses to have a mobile app for iOS and Android and to being able to modify its contents without needing to update it. They will just need to open the admin panel, make the changes they want and the app will automatically keep up to date with them.
This kit will be available in mid January and will of course be free and open source.
That being said, I wish everyone a healthy and successful year 2017.
Your friend,
George
