Adobe have put up a recorded version of their hour-long Creative Suite 4 launch broadcast over at Adobe TV:
There’s also a load of feature tours across the whole suite, demonstrating the specifics for Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop etc, that I spoke about on Wednesday.
I managed to catch half of an Adobe webcast yesterday, previewing Creative Suite 4. It seems their main focus with the release is to improve workflow, easing the integration through the software family, across the whole suite, and with that improve the production process faced by designers and developers alike.
From the outset, their recent press release promises:
“Hundreds of feature innovations.. Delivering radical workflow breakthroughs that bring down the walls between designers and developers.”
So what were they?
Well from what I saw, there’s more ‘live updates’, some things I’d seen intended for CS3 that never quite made it. There was a good demo of Dynamic Link, their platform to facilitate these, which moved video clips from Premiere to After Effects and back, in this case, without the need to render a thing – a process that would ‘usually take fifteen minutes’ takes fifteen seconds in comparison.
Illustrator can now handle multiple art boards at once, embedding them into a single workspace. Meaning others’ updates are synchronised to your working environment. These could then be imported, for example, into Flash – still in their accumulated state.
A lot of Flash and Flex events I’ve attended recently seem to have presented the same message, their attempts to converge the designer and developer, or at least bring them closer together. The new skinning and design options in Flex 4 (Gumbo) for example, or even Thermo as a complete authoring tool, seem intent on doing this.
But I’m undecided, half of me won’t trust the code any ‘WYSIWYG’ editor writes for me. I wonder if designers might soon experience a similar dilemma – Photoshop CS4 has a ‘content-aware scaling’ tool that determines for you what ‘objects’ in a flat image should be resized, or otherwise maintain ratio. See it in action here.
The other half thinks that Adobe aren’t trying to dictate my working environment to me, or forcing me to change a thing. Instead, more trying to accommodate others that might struggle and/or are new to the software, or in my interest, interactive development.
Colin Moock recently presented the ‘Charges Against ActionScript 3.0‘ at InsideRIA, continuing a discussion into whether Actionscript 3′s ‘hard’ reputation is deserved. He criticised CS3 for making ‘simple interactivity hard’ – his example proves his point, the on() and onClipEvent() handlers are no more. But it’s not so bad, just that even the most simple animations require a little more structure now.
But in comes the demonstration of the new animation features of Flash CS4, including tweening by dynamic bezier-like paths with easy and intelligent ways to modify them, ‘scalable’ timelines which automatically reposition keyframes and even creating ‘skeletons’ for MovieClips to quickly animate what would previously have required tedious dissection and some fiddly manipulation.
There’s even 3D effects in the authoring tool – effects being the keyword. I can’t help but think this is the direct result of the impact and rise in popularity in some powerful open source 3D engines, like Papervision and Sandy. The demonstration didn’t impress at all compared to some of the samples from the aforementioned. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a similar vein, some ‘light’ physics simulation could soon be introduced.
The repeated message from Adobe; what previously took the time of a developer to write parameter-based code, whether for interaction or animation, can now be done by a designer in half the time, what they almost suggest, for half the price – because it’s now twice as easy.
I’m sure there’s some more showings today for southern hemisphere timezones, but a whole load of video tutorials are playing over at Adobe TV that are well worth checking out. Everything else can be found at the CS4 homepage.
At the beginning of April I was invited to the most brief and preliminary of development meetings concerning a forthcoming project, then only a concept for a web-based, live mass-participation game show. We were told it would be exclusively online, combining a high-quality live video feed of a presenter-led programme, facilitating up to 1,000 paying contestants to simultaneously compete for real money prizes with a number of interactive games.
I was invited because the primary candidate for deployment was using Flash Media Server, which I had a intensive experience with in my final year of university. Primarily I was asked whether the project was feasible, achievable and did I feel using the FMS the right approach technologically, because no one else on our team had previous dealt with it. Although less than a year since my work at uni, it was quite apparent that the scale of the project was going to be significantly more demanding than anything I’d worked on before, but I figured I say yes anyway.
The project itself is deceptively complex, but stubbornly never so in explanation. Essentially, it’s a enriched online port of the infamous interactive game shows despised on late-night television – you know the ones with premium rate numbers and supposedly con viewers? They’ve all pretty much been scrapped now, so this idea was (and because it had to be) a completely new format – the idea of a game of skill, with straightforward general knowledge and trivia as opposed to frustratingly ambiguous questions; without the premium rate number to join a queue of callers, instead, an approx. 25p entry fee that goes to an accumulative pot entitling you to answer all questions posed. The eccentric presenter remains, the live video stream remains as-near-as-we-can-to-broadcast quality – the exception being the intended hundreds of players compete simultaneously, meaning every question and answer must be timed, recorded, logged and audited with a robust and secure system.
I only truly realised the scope of the thing after so eagerly agreeing to build it when I began to comprehend the vast difference between this project and that I’d previously built at uni. We had a substantial amount of R&D time to really consider whether FMS was our best option, it’s capabilities, limits, the licensing – and being the only member of the team with any experience with the FMS, we were cautious to commit if it could be achieved some other way we might feel more familiar with – an open socket model with Java or PHP maybe – but FMS eventually won through.
The project required was a standalone engine to run, load and dispatch data, make remote procedure calls to server-side scripts, all independent of any administrator control unless commandeered. At this point, looking back at Talkboards which stored all dynamic data in persistent shared objects the user simply subscribed to, its entirety was equal to the live chat ‘feature’ alone.
Building this engine immediately began to highlight Adobe’s lack of development with the Media Server since obtaining it. It’s still pretty much Actionscript 1.0 – or near enough, their API confesses ‘Server-side Actionscript’ is just their name for JavaScript 1.5. So OK, back-date the code – and no type declarations unless you want the app to silently unload, but there’s also no use of the Delegate or EventBroadcaster – arguably the backbone for Actionscript development. I also wanted to avoid using prototype functions where I could and try to divide the code into some kind pseudo-class system – not only to be more logical and readable, but for any later hand-over or joining of other developers to the process. But this could only really go so far to contextually separate ASC files that all load from the app’s main.asc anyway.
Problems with the absence of the Delegate and EventBroadcaster are obviously not uncommon. Peldi ported the classes to ASC files in his handy Flash comm server book, some hosting services, such as Influxis, bundle their own frameworks with hosting packages. But the more complex the objects and lengthy the extensions from the top-level Client and Application classes, the more scoping errors I encountered.
Jesse Warden wrote an interesting article concerning the Observer pattern experiencing the same problem developing Flex applications:
“With a little work… you can implement FMS server-side components into Cairngorm 2. For ever server-side component you create, you merely create a client side equivalent as an Observer. It listens for NetConnection or Remote SharedObject sync events and dispatches events. These events run Commands which in turn set data… just like normal. If your Views are bound to said data, boom, you’ve got a nice, clean separation.”
Ultimately we devised a model that essentially handles quite a complex (application) data object, passing itself around via prototype functions, making amendments and modifications and passing itself on. Each client has their own (client) instance (that extends the Client class), enabling their unique connection to call server-side methods – and vise-versa – without needing to loop around the application.clients array.
And finally, last Saturday was the pilot launch. Initially a beta test group of 100 competition winners and by and large, it went extremely well. Surprisingly, the biggest infringement was on behalf of our PHP/MySQL host, who happened to have hardware difficulties that day. So although all still proceeds to go well, I won’t count my money at the table, episode number two is tonight – with an increase to 300 users.
So last night I was able to attend the my very first London Flex User Group meet, organised by the guys at Emak Mafu, kindly hosted by those at Poke.
First up was meant to be a walkthrough/demo/first look from the people at doof.com, who’ve developed a fully Flex-based ‘casual gaming and social networking site’, but a beta bug meant their presentation was prematurely cut short. I’d already had a play beforehand anyway without a hitch and it’s pretty nice. They’ve gone further than a lot of other Flex projects I’ve seen, it’ll be good to see it at full tilt when all the bugs have been ironed out.
Simon Gladman took over demonstrating WatchFaceBuilder, a CAD-like application process for designing custom built watch faces. His self-proclaimed debut outing in Flex, it also uses Cairngorm, which I first encountered a while back. I was surprised how easily Simon claims to have emigrated from Flash to Flex and how much of this he puts down to Cairngorm.
The night’s main event was a comprehensive an insightful talk with Mike Potter from Adobe’s Flex product marketing team. Running through the top picks in recent Flex and AIR development, he covered a fair amount of the usual apps as expected, but also some that deserve far more attention.
Firstly on behalf of Adobe, there’s Photoshop Express, essentially a lite Photoshop in the browser, online, but as he admits there’s already Picnik doing very well – which personally was probably the first Flex app I’d ever seen and catalyst to start learning. But he compares Photoshop Expresss to Premiere Express, Adobe’s parallel Flex/brower-based video editing software, which already powers YouTube’s video editing and MTV’s Remixer contest. Where a number of independent Flex apps lock features for premium users, Photoshop Express could be a angled as a could-be de facto standard to power any kind or number of image manipulation online platforms.
There’s Bluestring, from AOL, which lets users upload, store and share files, video and images, as if we need another, but what’s more interesting is even if the idea might be already becoming redundant, companies the size of AOL are investing considerable amounts in Flex.
Buzzword is impressive, this is basically for word processing what Picnik is for photo editing. Far more responsive and comprehensive than say Writerly, it pretty much is what-you-see-is-what-you-print unlike a lot of other online word processors. Needless to say, it handles Word .doc files and has an amount of saving/sharing options to boot.
Other links of interest, the Flex showcase (generally), Mike’s new blog RIApedia, Adobe Share (more file sharing), the new Adobe DevNet, the Adobe Media Player and eBay’s desktop/San Dimas project can now be found at http://desktop.ebay.com.
Followed was a lengthy, pretty sincere feedback session for Mike to take with him back to Adobe. Overall an insightful evening, good stuff.
Oh and free beer and FLEX STICKERS? – Sold 