Flash and Facebook Platform examples

The Glee Your Life Facebook application, developed for FOX Home Entertainment, promotes the release of Glee: The Complete First Season on Blu-ray and DVD. The goal of the application is to allow you to discover your "Glee Theme Song", either by taking an interactive quiz or by allowing Sue Sylvester to read your Facebook profile and decide on the best song for you.

The application was designed and developed by Trailer Park, Inc. for FOX Home Entertainment. FOX holds all copyrights and trademarks on the media used in this application.

Technical description

Glee Your Life is a collection of two different Facebook apps—the quiz and the profile scrubber. A small FBML menu screen ties the two apps together.
The first is a straightforward 5-question quiz, developed in Adobe Flash CS4, that determines the best song for a user based on his/her quiz responses. There is no significant Facebook API integration in this part.
The second part, the profile scrubber, interacts with the Facebook Graph API to read a user's profile and applies a sophisticated algorithm to determine the user's song. This app, also developed in Flash Professional CS4, queries 13 different fields within the users' profile and takes over 175 different variables into account. At the conclusion, it returns the chosen song to the user and plays a video from the show.
In either version, the user can then share their Glee song (the video will play directly in the user's news feed using a Flash video player, as the domain hosting these has been whitelisted by Facebook).

Why the Flash Platform worked

• Flash allowed us to create a much richer experience than with other technologies—we were able to seamlessly integrate animation, video and interactivity in a modern, user-friendly way.
• Easily configurable for multiple languages and regions.
• Flash content renders identically in all browsers and platforms, cutting QA time and eliminating compromises often needed to accommodate old browser versions when HTML-only apps are deployed. 
• The new ActionScript 3 Client Library for Facebook Platform API opens up the richness of the new Facebook Graph API to Flash developer.
• Adobe Dreamweaver allowed for quick and easy editing of the HTML, FBML, and XML files that were a part of this project. 

Experience the application

Playfish, a leading developer of social games, used the Adobe Flash Platform and Facebook library to create its first sports game, FIFA Superstars. As the first social gaming entry point in the popular FIFA game franchise, FIFA Superstars enables players to build and manage a team of the world's best soccer players and play against their friends on Facebook.

Why the Flash Platform worked

• The Flash Platform allows us to deliver a consistent experience to over 50 million users each month across multiple platforms and browsers.
• The Flash Player is the best solution to create games on social networks with our recognized high production values.
• Developing with ActionScript and Flash is fast and easy, providing seamless integration of animated graphics and game code.

Technologies and ecosystem

Flash Player

• Most widespread web player for rich content and games.
• Fully backwards compatible and trivial to update.

Flash Builder 4

• Powerful debugging capabilities allow tracking down and solving bugs at the high pace required when running games as a service.
• Simplistic navigation of hundreds of class files per game.
• Integration with Ant and other Eclipse plug-ins

Flash CS5 Professional

• Development tool both artists and programmers are comfortable with, leading to cross-team editing of assets.
• Facebook Platform Graph API
• Communicates directly with Facebook, reducing load on game servers and sending and receiving instant social data.
• Graph API library is lightweight and makes calls and responses more transparent than before, simplifying development.
• The Open Graph enables sharing of social data between the user and the app while keeping authorization in the user's hands.
• Using the Graph API is the only way to keep up to date as new features are added to the Facebook social platform.

Kick off FIFA Superstars here!