Category Archives: Air

Before I Forget: Flex Camp 08

I should have mentioned already what an awesome success Flex Camp 08 was a couple weeks back. London’s first go hosting the show, huge well done to the London Flex Platform User Group, the guys at Emak Mafu and everyone else involved in arranging the event. The day was made up of various show and tell sessions, panel discussions and workshops, all for free, needless to say those who couldn’t make it sorely missed out, irrelevant of the free beer and pizza by a long way.

Andrew Shorten, Adobe Platform Evangelist, opened with a keynote similar to Mark Anders‘ recently at 360 Flex (found via InsideRIA), reviewing Flash development since 1993 and looking at the roadmap ahead, toward Flex 4, Gumbo – and tools like Thermo and Degrafa. We got some sneak peeks at Flash Player 10, previously ‘Astro’, not only showing off some cool effects like Pixel Bender, but interestingly with those, further steps made by Adobe toward the more open source development community.

A couple highlights, I enjoyed Justin Clarke and Samuel Williams rattling through their presentation on PureMVC. I’ve used PureMVC before, but as frameworks go, I generally always adopt Cairngorm for the majority of Flash and Flex work, but they’ve definitely convinced me to have another look.

As good was Bryan Hunt of Emak Mafu delivering his brilliantly disgruntled thoughts on working with Flex and Java, something I’m yet to try, but he also touched upon developing with the Spring framework, which I’d recently come across working with Red5 – glad I caught up with him afterwards.

Perhaps the most useful was Peter Elst’s class on using SQLite and AIR, in which he quickly put together an app with a simple straightforward relational database, using very little MXML and Actionscript, demonstrating the SQL database support in AIR as standard with AS3, as well as it’s capabilities in synchronising with online sources.

I’ve seen a couple requests around for any source code or presentation slides from the day, but I’ve yet to find any – if I do I’ll update here, I’m keen to see them myself.

Good Stuff: Joining the London Flex User Group

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 ;)

Source Tags & Codes: Adobe CS3: Creative License Tour London

Yesterday afternoon I attended the latter half of the Adobe CS3: Creative License Tour’s London date at The Vue, Leicester Square. Unsure whether the day would be more of a marketing pitch for buyers rather than demonstrating the software in any kind of depth for producers, I was pleased to find the one session I did manage to get to pretty informative.

Ben Forsaith, a product specialist at Adobe, gave a two and a half hour presentation entitled ‘Rich Internet Applications Development’, given in two parts, promising full coverage of the Web-end software in the CS3 suite.

The first half centered around my new favourite, Flex, and it’s integration with its sister apps. It was good to get the very latest (and also comprehensive) view straight from an Adobe source and to hear too, where they see it sit within the CS3 family. The main pitch was that Flex brings together designers and developers alike, essentially, that the new Flex Builder IDE with it’s still-evolving ‘Design View’ accommodates the designer far more like the Flash IDE, or even Dreamweaver, than the developer-only Flex SDK.

What I was more interested in was seeing what’s in development right now. Throughout, Forsaith used the Flex 3 beta, Moxie. He also demonstrated it’s seamless integration with Illustrator and Fireworks – generating CSS output from vector-based assets created in Illustrator and now exporting MXML from Fireworks after using Flex-native components from inherently shared libraries.

It was also good to see Flex using live MySQL queries – I’ve only used/seen XML data to bind up until this point.

The second half opened with a good look at ColdFusion 8. I’d never really used ColdFusion to any extent before, so it seems like a completely different program (but then he said it pretty much is now).

Then came Adobe AIR (previously Apollo). Having only seen a brief look at a couple of apps in the showcase, it was good to see them in full swing. He demonstrated a fair amount, including Finetune – streaming music and playlists from your desktop – and Fresh – an RSS aggregator and manager. We also got a look at eBay’s San Dimas, which seems perfect for AIR. It’s exactly the type of thing that works with the online/offline balance and a great sell for eBay without basically having to create a parallel service or having a complete overhaul.

Salesbuilder and MapsCache showed the drag-and-drop desktop integration, creating images and charts on-the-fly that you can drag direct to your desktop as png or jpg files.

Pixel Perfect is brilliant, a great little app for designers and ScreenPlay was fun but i guess pretty pointless (only really a demo for alpha values), similarly the iPhone app.

Forsaith then quickly ran through some AIR building, in both Flex Builder and Dreamweaver and ended with a demonstration of AIR SQL Admin, which non-coincidentally runs the same as Google Gears – Google’s implementation of offline-synchronised SQL.

Overall a good session, only really lacking a hands-on workshop.

Keep goin’ straight until night and then boy, you’re on your own.