Monthly Archives: August 2008

Building Collaboration Into Your Web Apps

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TechCrunch UK has a blog post up about Collaboration Web Apps that will help you beat the econonmy-related tightening purse strings of the corporate world. It’s a good post with a lot of good tools but it made me realize that we should be louder externally about how Adobe is helping with collaboration.

Of course we’ve got Connect Pro and even Connect Now, which gives you a free meeting room you can use and includes text chat, video chat, and screen sharing. But what’s better than that? Being able to add collaboration components to your own applications. That’s where CoCoMo is going to come in. You can check out more at the Collaborative Methods blog. We’re exposing almost all of the functionality from Connect Now into components that you can use inside of your own Flex applications. Even better, CoCoMo will provide all the hooks you need to add a real-time collaborative element to your application. There’s a recording available from a meeting with the CoCoMo team if you’re interested in more info.

Interview with Ben Stucki on OpenFlux

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At 360Flex I took a bit to interview Ben Stucki on OpenFlux, a project that he describes as a little bit of Flex 4 for Flex 3. You can see the interview below thanks to the new Brightcove player that the Evangelism team is using. You’ll be able to subscribe to the channel in AMP or watch it directly in Brightcove.

More on OpenFlux can be found here:

Mark Anders Thermo Demo from 360|Flex

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Ted just posted a video of the day 1 keynote at 360|Flex in which Mark Anders shows off Thermo as well as FXG and Flash Player 10. It’s a great overview of the future of Flex and Flash and also a nice sneak peak of Thermo. I’m really excited to watch all of you guys play with Thermo. It’s been a fun and hard problem to solve. We’re also trying to be very open and transparent. We want to get your hands on it as early as possible, so we’re planning to make the bits available as soon as possible. The build probably won’t have the full bells and whistles, and the actual product release is still a ways off, but I think you’ll enjoy jumping in and kicking the tires while helping us drive features for the product as we march on to a 1.0 release.

Adobe AIR as “PDF of Web 2.0″

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I love watching people discover AIR for the first time and give some thought to what it really means. We’ve gotten a lot of traction with AIR. The Marketplace continues to grow, developers continue to be excited about it, and both end users and developers alike are tweeting about how cool AIR is. There are a few bugs that we still need to work out of course, and we need to have more of a dialogue with users about how to performance tune their applications so they don’t balloon with memory as they’re used. But aside from that, the platform is in a really good place. That’s why it’s fun to think about the future.

Having one runtime that enables you to not worry about the operating system you’re on is a really powerful thing. Want to switch to Linux but don’t want to give up your apps? If they’re built on AIR you won’t have to. Think about the mobile implications. The success and popularity of the App Store for the iPhone has been huge. Imagine that but across every major phone and device operating system out there. With AIR we have gone a long way towards bridging the gap between the web and the desktop. We’ve given web developers a way to quickly and easily create desktop applications. That’s resulted in a lot of creativity and some very neat applications. And it’s coming at a time when a web-desktop bridge is exactly what the web needs to move forward. So as a developer, if you’re building an AIR app, you’re on the cutting edge of something very big.

Live GPS Data with Merapi and Adobe AIR

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One of the coolest demos from 360|Flex was watching Jordan Snyder hook up Merapi and Adobe AIR and use an AIR application to control a remote controlled car. It did a great job of showing off the cool stuff you can do if you let AIR connect to devices and native code. Unfortunately we don’t have that functionality in the runtime. But the Merapi Project creates a bridge between AIR and Java so you can do some very cool stuff.

Andrew Powell just blogged about another cool Merapi example that lets him connect directly to a GPS device and grab the data then plot it on a map. I’d love to be able to do that natively with AIR, so he got my imagination running wild. Very cool stuff, Andrew.

What Do You Think About The Current Adobe AIR Certificate Situation?

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I was watching Craig Cmehil’s Friday morning report and he said a lot of really good things about AIR. Craig is a big fan and it’s always great to have someone like him doing some community evangelism for us, so thanks Craig. But he has a frustration. He doesn’t like how we do AIR certificates.

I didn’t know much about certificates before looking at how they work in AIR. As you probably know, if you want to sign your AIR applications, you need to get a Thawte certificate to do so. But there’s a problem (sort of). Thawte doesn’t allow you to get an individual certificate. They only let you get one if you have a company. I’m not entirely sure why that is, but I assume that it has something to do with liability. The pain of getting a certificate caused Craig to question whether or not it was even valuable to get a certificate. He said that he used 3-4 AIR applications and that most of them weren’t signed.

Signing is a really important part of the AIR process because it creates a contract between the user and the developer. But because AIR makes it so easy to build desktop applications, I can understand the frustration of not being able to get an individual certificate. So for those of you out there building AIR applications as individuals, I want to see if that’s preventing you from signing your apps. If we had a way to get individual certificates, would you sign those apps?

360Flex – Now With More Awesome

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I’ve been in a weird mood lately (notice how my blogs have gotten a bit quieter) so part of me was dreading 360|Flex. It’s always great to see everyone but I wasn’t sure I’d been tapped into the community enough lately. I was partly right and partly wrong. It turns out the Flex community has exploded. It’s always great to see the old guard; guys like Ben, Doug, Dan, Josh, Chuck, Juan, Renaun, and everyone else who was there at the first 360|Flex, but there were a ton of people I didn’t know. I think that’s a really good sign.

One, it means that 360|Flex continues to expand its reach. It’s hitting parts of the Flex world that I didn’t even know existed and not just the AXNA bubble. 360|Flex has basically become a hub of of the Flex world. The presentations were great, the social activities were fun and informal, and there was an air of collaboration around the entire conference. With all of the sessions being online you may feel like you’re not missing out on much by not going. Content-wise, that’s half correct. But 360|Flex has become the place where you can work with other Flex developers to help drive the platform, help drive open source projects, or be inspired by a random guy sitting next to you.

I also want to give a shoutout to the Flex team. Deepa, Matt, Chet, and the other Flex team members who were there. They were always around and accessible which I think helps put the icing on the cake of the conference. Getting to talk to product managers and engineers is always worthwhile and I was proud to be an Adobean after watching how many conversations they had with the community.

Hats off to Tom and John. They put on a great conference and they’ve really enhanced the world of Flex. I’ll be posting the slides and code from my session this week. It was definitely not one of my better presentations but hopefully the code will be helpful to folks.

Get All of the 360Flex Sessions on AMP

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Ted just blogged about the fact that you can grab all of the sessions from 360|Flex and watch them inside of AMP. I haven’t had a chance to blog much about 360|Flex but it’s been a really, really great conference again. I think the speakers this year are better than other years so this is a good one to be recording. If you’re interested in seeing the content, all you have to do is click the badge below and go through the install process.

Update: For those having issues with the badge, this step-by-step should work. Sorry about that.

Video Interview: Simeon Bateman on Ruby and Flex

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While at OSCON a couple of weeks ago I interviewed Simeon Bateman about Ruby and Flex. Simeon is a long time Flex developer and has given a few presentations on how to integrate Ruby and Flex. We cover Ruby from a Flex development standpoint and talk about how Flex and Rails can communicate. One of the major projects out there is RubyAMF which lets you talk to a Ruby application using fast, speedy, AMF. We also dive into some of the benefits of Rails when doing Flex development and how using Flex can make any Rails application better by offloading some of the work to the front end.

I apologize for the video quality. We were filming it an informal style and Simeon’s dog wanted to be on camera.

Good Ruby/Flex Resources

Be In the MAX Keynote

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Ted is giving anyone out there a chance to be in the MAX Keynote. We’re creating a video to play at the keynotes in North America, Europe, and Japan and all you need to do is record a 30 second video that answers the question: “Why MAX?”. If you’ve seen Philip Kerman’s “Why” vids you know exactly what we’re looking for – something funny, creative, and interesting.

Once you’ve made the video, just upload it to YouTube and tag it with “30onMax“. Then the MAX team will go through and select the best ones and include them in the keynote video.