Monthly Archives: January 2008

Yahoo Releases ASTRA: Set of Flash and Flex Components

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Yahoo Releases ASTRA Flash and Flex ComponentsYahoo is doing really great things for the Flash community. Today they released ASTRA (ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications), a set of Flex and Flash components that are meant to compliment the components that shipped with Flash CS3 and the components of the Flex Framework.

The Flash components include some great things like a Tree Component, an AutoComplete component, an Alert manager, Charting and a lot more. The Flex components are a bit more niche but still just as useful with the addition of an IPv4 Address Input, Color Slider Picker and a Time Stepper.

[tags]Yahoo, Flex, Flash[/tags]

Jesse Warden Has Me Nostalgic For The Old Days

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I’ll admit it, reading Jesse Warden’s post gave me a bit of nostalgia in thinking about the old days of Flex and the community. I can remember when Matt Chotin was all over Flexcoders. You could email at any time of day or night and he’d respond and help you out. Ely Greenfield actually had time to build components. The iteration:two guys were just starting with Cairngorm and had written the bible that every Flex developer knew by heart. Guys like Jesse were hacking around with Flex and Flash trying to mix the experiences together. We were all kind of screwing around on this new technology and having a blast doing it. I think we all still are but it’s got a different feel today.

The community is a lot bigger. Flexcoders is gigantic (check out the message history). Matt and Ely are both driving the direction of the Flex Framework (and still not sleeping). iteration:two was acquired and now Cairngorm is up on labs. There are a ton of great Flex books out and guys like Jesse’s rates are through the roof because Flex is in demand. Big time. A bunch of the companies at DEMO this week rolled out Flex applications. We have everything from Blist (web-based database) to Sprout (a web-based Flash IDE) to Seesmic (video Twitter). It’s humbling to think back to Flex 1.5 and Flash Player 7. We’ve come a very long way.

But there’s still a lot to do. Flex 4 is going to be awesome and we’re working on tools like Thermo to help Flex developers get even more creative. The footprint of Flex has expanded as well. It works much more closely with Ajax and you can use it to build desktop applications with AIR. So Jesse is going to MIX which kind of bums me out because he’s always fun to hang out with (though I’ll be at MIX so maybe I can hang with him there). At least he’s speaking at 360|Flex, another example of the great growth of the community.

It’s not the same as it was but it’s still a lot of fun. I’ll look back fondly on how the Flex community grew up. If the next 3 years are anything like the last 3 it’s going to be a really crazy ride. RIAs have such a tremendous amount of momentum that the end is nowhere in sight. It’s good to keep up on the whole space but keep in mind that the DNA that helped foster Flex in the old days is still alive and well. It’s just bigger now…..and charging more an hour :)

[tags]Jesse Warden, Flex[/tags]

Firebrand.com – The Best Time Wasting RIA Ever

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Firebrand LogoTed blogged about Firebrand.com but I didn’t get a chance to check it out until tonight and now I wish I would have waited. It’s actually the most ridiculous premise ever: watch commercials over and over again. But they cherry pick the best commercials so it’s one of the more entertaining RIAS that I’ve seen. The idea is brilliant because they’ve got a great user interface that keeps the branding of the commercial you’re watching prominent. Think a Coke commercial is great? Click the Coke logo and you can start watching all of the best Coke ads. It’s all of the best commercials put in a format that lets you enjoy them as art. You can even use the “post this” feature to link to your favorites.

FirebrandFirebrand.com is going to be hosting all of the commercials from this years Super Bowl so you’ll be able to check out all the good ones in one place. It actually annoyed me that I couldn’t go to a place and find funny commercials that I liked. The very nature of commercials means I should be able to easily find them. Now I can. Firebrand.com is like a bunch of 30 second tic tacs of pure awesome.

I mean seriously, the Magic Fridge whenever you want? Brilliant. And it’s all Flex.

[tags]Firebrand, Flex, Flash[/tags]

Doing Ajax Development in AIR now a Helluva Lot Easier

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I’m not going to lie, I need to be able to debug my applications. It’s one of the reason that Ajax was such a pain for me. Firebug is great but nothing comes close to the debugger in Flex. I make enough stupid mistakes that having a debugger just makes life easier for me and being able to inspect variables as they come back is huge when dealing with getting data from another server. In AIR it was even tougher because you can’t use Firebug. Now we have a solution, the Introspector, a Firebug like application that you can run with your Ajax AIR app and figure out where your problems are.

Kevin Hoyt has some great info about it but I want to provide a personal anecdote. How excited was I about the Introspector? Not only did I play with it, I broke out Dreamweaver, downloaded Spry and started building some AIR Ajax applications. I’ll admit to feeling a little cheesy about using Dreamweaver and Spry but it was actually really easy. Spry makes it pretty damn simple to grab data and bring it back. The Spry components are also pretty powerful and relatively easy to use, especially because they’re so tightly coupled with Dreamweaver. Having the Introspector makes doing Ajax AIR development a lot of fun (mostly).

I’m not switching anytime soon and there are still times when I want to bang my head against the wall trying to get my Ajax application working but the Introspector makes the entire process much more fun. If you’re a Flex dev I encourage you to at least check out the Introspector/AIR/Dreamweaver/Spry combo.

[tags]Adobe AIR, Ajax, Dreamweaver, Spry[/tags]

Adding Flex Components to Native Windows in AIR – Don’t Make the Mistake I Did

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I was playing around with the NativeWindow API the past couple of days and I ran into a roadblock. With Native Windows you create them and then you’re supposed to be able to add stuff to the display list using the addChild() method. But when I tried to add any kind of Flex Component, it wouldn’t work (reading the docs more closely confirmed that). Thanks to Sasha Magee from the engineering team I know why, and it’s pretty obvious.

The NativeWindow class doesn’t support all of the “Flex stuff” out of the box. It doesn’t know how to handle popping up a combo box, how to layout components or any of the “Flex smarts” as Sasha calls it. So when you try to add a component to the NativeWindow you’ve just created, it won’t work.

What I had to do was change the base class of my custom component from mx:Canvas to mx:Window. Now in order to create a window I just create a new instance of that component (in this case WaypointEditor), set the height and width, then call the open() method:

[code]
var wptEditor : WaypointEditor = new WaypointEditor();
wptEditor.height = 500;
wptEditor.width = 500;
wptEditor.open();
[code]

One other thing I noticed is that when doing Native Windows you can't call the acvitate() method that the documents use. You have to call open() in order to pop it up. Once you've created the window with the base class of mx:Window you can add any other Flex components to the display list. So if you don't want to have to change your custom component to mx:Window you can just create a custom component with mx:Window and nothing else, then create that and add your other custom component to the window using addChild().

[tags]Flex, AIR, NativeWindow[/tags]

Zero to Startup in 50 Hours

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SkillbitThis has been an interesting weekend. After my awesome user group tour I hosted a hundred developers, marketing maestros, PR people and legal minds here at Adobe’s Fremont office to create a startup. After the first night I thought it was going to be a disaster but we have some really smart and resilient people here in Seattle and they ended up creating an application that is not only good, it has a solid business model. I couldn’t get them to build an AIR application but when they do the APIs I think I’m going to create one.

The application, called Skillbit, is going to help connect companies with what skills their employees have. Being a “part” of this was a really cool experience. I mostly kept to myself and caught up on work so I can’t take any credit, but we were here 5 to midnight on Friday, 8 to midnight on Saturday and will be 8 to 9:00 PM tonight to create this thing. A hundred perfect strangers divided up into teams based on skills and plowed through to get this thing out. It’s quite a process. If you ever get a chance to do a Startup Weekend I highly suggest you check it out. I may go down to the Portland Startup Weekend to see if I can get some Flash/Flex/AIR influence in.

[tags]Adobe, Skillbit, Startup Weekend, Seattle[/tags]

Check Your Twitter Stats with Flash Charts

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Check Your Twitter Stats with Flash ChartsI just heard about a site called TweetStats which gives you a pretty detailed breakdown of your Twitter habits. The combination of interesting features and the fact that they’re using Flash charts was well worth a post. You can see my stats here. I sent 322 Tweets in March of last year but I’ve since leveled out a bit to a more reasonable 100-150. What’s also interesting is that it breaks down who you’re sending the most tweets to and what Twitter client you use. It would be really slick to aggregate that information and see how often people are using Twitter AI clients.

[tags]Flash, TweetStats, Twitter[/tags]

DEMO Is Going to Be Another Great Party for Flex and AIR

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DEMO Is Going to Be Another Great Party for Flex and AIRWe’ve had a lot of great companies using Flash and Flex present at DEMO and DEMOfall in the past including EyeJot and matchmine. We even presented AIR at last year’s DEMO and showed off the eBay application. I’ve been getting emails this year about companies who are building applications with Flex and/or AIR and showing them off at DEMO. As far as I can tell this will be the biggest number of Adobe-platform related companies ever in a single DEMO.

The festivities start this week on Monday and it’s always a mass of blog coverage and mainstream media so there will be plenty of news about all of these companies in the next few days. One thing that I’ve been really impressed with is the diversity in the types of companies. It’s clear that Flex and AIR have a wide appeal and I hope that trend continues.

[tags]DEMO08, Matchmine, Adobe AIR, EyeJot, Flex[/tags]

Designers Needed at Seattle Startup Weekend

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Seattle Startup Weekend starts tomorrow in Seattle and we’re sponsoring it at the Adobe office in Fremont. According to the O’Reilly blog they’re looking for designers. Luckily we have a lot of our designers in the Adobe community so those of you in Seattle who might be interested should ping Hans at shoestringventures dot com.

[tags]Seattle Startup Weekend, Adobe[/tags]

AIR on Nasdaq

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NasdaqComputerworld has a pretty good article up about the Nasdaq AIR application that they’ll be rolling out when we release AIR. Having played with versions of it, I can tell you that it’s pretty cool and I’m looking forward to the ability to demo it.

Also, one of the big questions that I’ve been asked on the pre-release tour is when the AIR release is scheduled. We haven’t announced it yet, but *cough* it’s very close.

[tags]Nasdaq, Adobe AIR[/tags]