Adobe Outlook
April 2, 2007
Anyone who is interested in Flex and Apollo should watch a presentation to financial analysts given by Kevin Lynch. It will be well worth the time. Thanks to Ryan Stewart for the link.
Ryan Stewart – Rich Internet Application Mountaineer » Adobe’s Rich Internet Application Head Start is Huge
“The numbers are great. Flash Player is on 98% of computers in the world, and by 2010 it will be on a billion devices. Flash Player 8 penetration is at 95% and the update mechanism ensures that when Adobe rolls out a new version of the Flash Player, people quickly and easily grab it. With Apollo, they’ve now embedded the platform into the desktop making the “Flash stack” run from devices, to video game systems, to web browsers, to the desktop. And all of these access points use the same tools and technologies so developers can become proficient and then access the entire spectrum.”
360 Flex Coolest Demos
March 15, 2007
video.onflex.org » Ely Greenfield Shows his FlexBook Component
“At 360Flex last week, Ely Greenfield gave a talk on creating Flex components. I video taped the entire session, except for the last 3 minutes (my tape ran out). Unfortunately, that is when Ely showed the coolest stuff. He was cool enough to talk with me after the session and demonstrated his new FlexBook component.”
360Flex – Flex Bulder Secrets
March 13, 2007
david zuckerman » My 360Flex presentation: Flex Builder Secrets
“I’m publishing my presentation (GPI samples)here for those of you who missed it, and there’s also a chance that a video of my presentation from the third day will be published online as well. If that goes up, I’ll throw a link to it here.
In addition to the presentation, I’m also publishing the source to the Class Browser plugin that I used as my demo. I’ve attached a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license to the code, so feel free to hack it and include the source if you distribute it. For those who just want the plugin, just drop the JAR into Flex Builder 2.0.1.”
360Flex – Flex Builder Secrets
March 7, 2007
Presented by David Zuckerman – Adobe.
Flex Builder Tricks
Apple-Shift-P moves from a bracket to its match.
Apple-Shift-T finds all instances of Types.
Apple-Click on an indentifier allows jumping to any identifier.
CTRL-O opens a pop-up outline
Apple-? or CTRL-F1 opens dynamic help which is context sensitive
Flexbuilder keeps a local history to see what changes have been made.
Any Apple key can be substituted for Control on Windows.
Flex 360 Keynote II Live – Ted Patrick
March 7, 2007
Ted Patrick, Adobe Flex Evangelist is doing the Keynote today.
He immediately introduced Tom Hobbs from Adobe eXperience Design.
We were shown a demo of the Tour of California. It is a bicycle race that displayed full screen video but used Flex to overlay GPS data, Flickr pictures; all done live.
This was done by three people in six weeks. A designer, who did the designe elements. A developer, with a C++ background, this was his first Flex project. Very knowledgeable about cycling. A system architect, had flex experience as well as experience with sports broadcasting. They all had roles but complementary skills. Based on iteration. Balancing interface and infrastructure. The architecture was much more complicated than expected.
Myths
- More Features More Value
- Chrome is Cool – Instead Content is King
- Animation is Gratuitous – Instead Flow orients and guides. Animation needs to be predictive and focuses attention.
- Apps are the sum of their parts – Instead Design is a Whole. One person or team should desing. Feature changes effect the whole.
- One Size will Fit All – Instead Personality and Community Rule. Users want different things. Identity and brand matter.
Embrace Iteration.
Ted then took the stage. His presentation is called Next Flex.
Adobe wants to make it easier to learn Flex and use it for web and enterprise applications. They are investing in the platform to build a healthy ecosystem.
Flex 2 integrates with Flash CS3, Fireworks CS3, Illustrator CS3 and Photoshop CS3. He showed that Flex Components are available in Fireworks. The designer can build it in Fireworks, export in MXML and import a functional Flex app.
Borneo is the next version of Flex Data Services. Focused on scalability and performance. Completely rewritten web services.
Moxie is the next version of Flex SDK and Builder. Added language intelligence, an integrated profiler, enhancements to the design view, data integration and enhanced datagrids and lists.
He showed a demo that Flex builder can change the name of an object from any instance of it. It also has the ability to search for any object and get a map of all its references.
The profiler will allow you to look inside the Flash player and see the memory utilization of all variables and objects.
The Flex ecosystem is more than Adobe. Check out Flexlib, a component library hosted on Google Code. There are some useful components that can be added to Flex projects. Yahoo has built up a large group of API’s. They have now added Flex components to extend Flex and give access to search, maps, weather, etc.
The next version of 360 Flex is maybe in August in Boston.
Really cool Flex RSS reader
March 6, 2007
Yesterday at the Keynote, we were shown a visual based RSS reader built on Flex. I missed the authors name but last night Doug McCune posted about his experience of having his work shown like that.
My RSS Reader featured in 360Flex keynote! Here’s the newest version with smoke
“This morning was the kickoff of the 360Flex conference. I got an email last night from Mark Anders from Adobe who was giving the keynote letting me know that he was going to show the RSS Flex app I made during the keynote. SWEET! I was excited to see it up on the big screen this morning.”
Building Apollo Apps Conference Session
March 5, 2007
Mike Chambers from Adobe is the senior product manager for the Apollo team.
Apollo is just the codename for a desktop runtime to leverage web development skills to build and deploy desktop RIA’s. It will be able to work with:
- Flash/Flex/Actionscript
- HTML/Javascript/CSS/AJAX
- Combination of these
- PDF can also be leveraged
Apollo will be closer to a browser application then a desktop application.
He showed a demo of an MP3 player called Ascension. It is a mashup of local music files plus information from the web. It uses the iTunes library to show music and then accesses extra information from Amazon. It can cache the Amazon data so it will be available when the user is offline. It can also look at the album and artist and then load Flickr images that are related. It can also load webpages of lyrics and display them natively from the originating web site. Apollo can load the HTML directly.
HTML Engine
- Uses Webkit Open Source Engine
- Used in Safari
- Webkit was used since it was an Open Project
- Can run on mobile devices
- Small size
Flash can interact with HTML as a bitmap. He showed loading an HTML page and then using Flash to rotate and blur it. And the links still work.
Apollo Functionality/API
- Offline
- Run in the background
- Network: HTTP, XML-RPC, REST, Sockets
- File I/O
- Custom Chrome
Desktop Integration
- Installation
- Shortcuts
- Drag and Drop
- Clipboard
- Cross Application communication (Desktop, Apollo and Browser)
- Notifications
- There are no cross domain security issues
Scripting
- Actionscript and Javascript will be supported.
- Complete access to Flash and HTML DDOM and API
Mike showed how simple it is to get HTML to render. You just create an HTML control and then it will render the code you send it. The app only needed six lines to save an HTML file to the desktop.
He is the co-author of the Apollo pocket guide from O’Reilly. It will be released with the alpha release.
ByteArray 101
March 5, 2007
Presented by Ben Stucki.
How to manage binary data with Flash.
It was an interesting view of how to work through files to pull out the information you are looking for. He built an example app of pulling the album art out of an mp3 file and displaying it inside an Apollo application.
He also showed a real cool webcam where the stream is sent through ethernet and then he uses the Byte handling inside Apollo to stream it and add a reflection. It was very cool.
CRUD for FDS
March 5, 2007
By Kevin Hoyt from Adobe.
Create Read Update and Delete.
This was an interesting presentation that really showed off how Flex Data Services allows you to synchornize data between users.
Here is the information from Adobe’s site.
Adobe – Adobe Flex 2: Flex Data Services
“Powerful solution for creating data-intensive rich applicationsAdobe® Flex™ Data Services enables developers to build applications that are rich not only in terms of user interface, but also in terms of how data flows between tiers — and in terms of the innovative services these applications can offer.”
Live blogging 360Flex Keynote
March 5, 2007
Marc Anders from Adobe is doing the Keynote.
What Makes Flex magical?
MXML
Renaun Erickson » 360Flex Keynote
“Mark demo’d a MXML component that allows for inline SVG code. He continued by showing the power of Binding and real time SVG manipulation for a out of the box MXML component.”
Databinding
Components
Marc showed a cool Fish Eye Component. Tree map compnent as well. Then an MXNA reader. Really cool reflection effects on the Fish Eye compnent. And combined with the tree map component to read blogs.
States
We saw a demo of susing states to display the results of a flickr search using states with Databinding to attach to Flickr web services.
Flash
Gets Flex out on the web in a format that everyone can use. Some cool apps built in Flex.
Picnik – edit photos the easy way, online in your browser
“Online photo editing made fun
With Picnik you can quickly edit all your online photos from one place. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos. “
Virtual Ubiquity
Online word processor.
Actionscript 3
New FAST virtual machine. Class support. Strong typed. Regular Expressions. Exception handling.
The virtual machine can render the at 12X the old version.
Adobe has donated the Virtual Machine to Mozilla Foundation.
Flash Player 10 has been built from this foundation by Adobe AND Mozilla engineers.
An Exciting Future
Mike Downey showed a demo of Apollo.
Apollo is a cross-operating system run-time to build and deploy web apps to the desktop.
- Local file access
- Offline events
- Drag and drop between the desktop apps
- Clipboard access
- Background processing
- System alerts
- Multiple windows
- Custom Chrome
Showed a demo of Buzzword. Web based word processor but the files can be stored online and accessed through a login inside the word processor. Neat UI all running with the Apollo run-time.
Grant Skinner has built gtimer in Apollo. It is a time tracking application with task management. Incorporates a timer so that the time is automatically tracked. Then has a week view like iCal to see how time was used. Graphical calendar items can be dragged and manipulated in the graphical context. Because it is in Apollo, can be browser based or desktop. Also can be converted to run on Mobile using Flash Lite.
Next demo was an App that loaded Google Maps into Apollo and added an overlay of a personal address book. Called Maptacular.
Scout is a web developer utility that loads a webpage and then makes the source available in a tree view of HTML, DOM, etc.
Flex 3
Back to Marc.
Changes to Designer and Developer workflow. Ties into Creative Suite tools.
Working with data improvements as well as richer display.
Apollo Applications. Enhancements to the framework to take advantage of Apollo.
Timeline
1st half of 2007. Apollo and Flex versions in labs release. CS3 released.
2nd Half. Apollo 1.0, Flex 3.0, Philo 1.0 (video) and Flash Media Server.
