At Platogo we owe the Open Source community a lot. Our super core is a Spring based web application that runs on Apache Tomcat and communicates via BlazeDS to our Flash clients. Additionally we use lots of Open Source tools and libraries for our day to day work. As most devs of our company are already part of the Open Source community it wasn't a hard decision to start giving back tools and libraries we only used in-house so far.

We do 100% of our Java development test driven and also were able to successfully use this approach for our ActionScript projects. Luckily there are already quite a lot of great libraries available for ActionScript 3 like FlexUnit, ASMock, Hamcrest,... just to name a few.

Still there was one neat little library we missed quite a lot during ActionScript development -> make-it-easy. It's a tiny framework that makes it easy to write Test Data Builders in Java. Until today it was only available for Java, .Net and C#. So we decided to give it a try, spend a few extra hours in the office and ported it to ActionScript 3 as well.

You can download the latest version (1.0.0) from github http://github.com/ripcurlx/make-it-easy-as3.

Feedback and bug reports are more than welcome.

Now it's really easy for you to keep track of all your on-going challenges. Just click on the "Notify me!" button after creating a challenge, accept the e-mail permission request and we will inform you of your next victory.

Additionally, on multiple requests, we've added a search box to make it super-easy for you to find the one special person within your 524 facebook friends you'd like to challenge.

There are a couple of other small improvements like the ability to brag about your victories. Challenge your friends now!

It's a great time to be a player and developer at Platogo!
We've listened to you and we are now bringing more games to Platogo by putting more effort on providing tools for game developers.

If you are a game developer, read on because we have excellent news for you.
You can now enhance your flash games with social features and bring them to Facebook easily using our wrapper.

You can even customize the look and feel by uploading your own graphics. Check out one of our latest games like Veggie Snake or Whac A Pal on Facebook to see what you can do!

We also have a brand new and shiny start page that will give you an idea of where we are going. Even more improvements are on the way like more social networks (Oops! I didn't say that).

We would love to hear your ideas, questions and challenges (and praise, of course). With your help we can do much better! Our feedback page is just one click away.

Get all this benefits now by joining the Platogo Community. It's FREE and easy.

Upon many requests from developers and gamers we decided to loosen the publish restrictions for games on Platogo. Previously, games had to have a level-editor which excluded a good deal of great games that wouldn't fit into the scheme of level-creation.

Now we accept ALL games (that are family-friendly and have a high score integration). Tataa!
The first games making use of this are already online. Check out the unique & very refreshing coign of vantage by our friends at bobblebrook and the very addicting L.A.2 by well-known indie developer Kenta Cho.

Stay tuned! There's more great stuff that we'll announce soon. (maybe around the GDC *hint*)

David Höller (Illustree), Dieter Hovorka (Adobe), Christoph Atteneder (Nullstars), Tom Krcha (Adobe), Florian Landerl (Nullstars)

Last Thursday Christoph & Florian, partners at Nullstars and founders of Alpenflash (Adobe Flash User Group Austria), organized the first Austrian Flex Camp with the help of Adobe. It was held at the office of bwin and was a huge success with 77 attendees watching multiple sessions on Adobe Flex Technology. The camp ended at 23:00 (11:00 PM) but the aftercamp party at the FLEX CAFÉ/DISCO in Vienna Downtown lasted until the early morning hours.

Nullstars always loves bringing people together in order to support and unite the developer community. We are looking forward to the next event where we will propably share some more details of our project Platogo.

Christoph held a presentation on the topic of Coding & Frameworks at the Flex Camp. It gave an insight into the tools & workflows we are using internally at Nullstars. Download the presentation slides.