I knew this was coming but it looks like the official Adobe AIR Team blog has gone live. Robert Christensen, the product manager, is going to be doing most of the blogging it looks like but I’m hoping he includes guest posts from some of the team.
This is going to be a great resource for anyone interested in AIR and will also be a good way to get your feedback heard. Now we just need to get someone to design a blog for the Flex Team so we can get them off the ugly default Adobe template.
TweetThere’s a good writeup for getting started with and using SVN to download the Flex 4 source code, so if you’re a beginner, that’s a great place to start. If you’re a heavy user of SVN, then the below is going to be useless. But if you’re semi-new to SVN and hoping to get started quickly with the Flex 4 source code, I hope this makes it as easy as possible by limiting the number of steps.
Currently I’ve got an SDKs folder on my computer where I store various SDKs for use. To check out the source code, open up the Terminal and use the following steps in whichever directory you want to store your Flex 4 SDK:
mkdir flex_4
cd flex_4
We’ve got the latest Flex 4 SDK inside of the trunk folder of the main Flex 4 open source repository, so that’s all we want to check out. Note the ‘.’ at the end of the command, that’s just going to make sure we put this in the folder we’re currently in:
svn co http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk .
That may take a little while. Once that’s done you’re ready to roll. Now if you want to keep that build up to date, you just need to go into that flex_4 directory and use one little command:
svn up
That trunk folder in Open Source is constantly being updated with the latest Flex 4 checkins, so it can change often. Once you’ve got your brand new Flex 4 SDK downloaded you can start using it in Flex Builder by adding multiple SDKs using these instructions.
I’m deep in planning for my MAX presentation, Intro to Thermo, in San Francisco in November (and something special that will be a surprise). I’m lucky enough to also be presenting the session in Milan for MAX Europe. There’s going to be a bunch of cool stuff in San Francisco, but I’m also really, really looking forward to Milan. One, having it a couple of weeks later means that people will have had a chance to play with the technology for a bit. External speakers (which are usually the best) will be able to show off some really cool examples. It also means that some of the products that aren’t ready yet will have a couple more weeks of work. There may be a few surprises for MAX Europe that people in North America won’t get to have seen.
But first and foremost MAX is about networking and MAX Europe is going to be a great place to network. A lot of Adobe’s plans revolve around Europe. Europe’s always been big for Adobe and we’re going to be putting even more resources towards it than we have been. Europe has the largest evangelist team by quite a bit and we’ve ben expanding it with a bunch of great new additions. Some of the team will be in North America but in Europe you get a chance to meet all of them. They’re going to be the best resource for getting information about what Adobe is doing and getting your feedback back to the product teams.
So if you’re on the fence about MAX Europe, it’s going to be a great conference and I’m looking forward to showing off Thermo in my session, so register and add it to your session list.
TweetThis is really cool. Brian Deitte has been doing some work on improving the speed and workflow for Flex 3. That’s something we’ve been working on in Flex 4 and since the projects are open source, Brian figured he could take some of the Flex 4 code and make the Flex 3 compiler faster. And it worked.
I think it’s a great example of what open sourcing the Flex Framework means. The goal was always to increase community participation by being as transparent as possible. It’s easy now to go look at how components are built, how the compilers work, and how we put the debugger together. Sometimes that results in things like what Brian’s doing – improving an entire companies workflow.
TweetKevin Lynch gave a keynote at AjaxWorld in which he talked a lot about how Adobe fits into the open web and what we’re doing around innovation. There are a bunch of really good slides so I got permission to put them up on Adobe Share for people to check out. There is a very good writeup by Ian Dickinson on Kevin’s keynote. The slides are below and available for download here.
TweetI asked Matt what the best way to keep up with the changes in Flex 4 was (because there are many, many changes). I was hoping for some secret Adobe-only document that held the grand master plan. No dice. Instead what he sent, the SVN commit log, is completely public and really valuable. It’s a bit dry, but you can see a list of all the changes to the SDK and get an idea of the direction of things. There’s a ton of valuable info there and some people seem to have known about it for a while but I hadn’t seen it before.
You can get email notifications whenever something new is added, but unfortunately there is no RSS feed.
TweetCoCoMo is one of the cooler projects going on at Adobe. It is a project that breaks out a bunch of the components in Connect (things like chat, video chat, whiteboards) and lets you bring those into your own application. I interviewed two of the product managers, Nigel Pegg and Fang Chang, as part of Tech Talk with Ryan Stewart. CoCoMo should be available soon and I’m really looking forward to seeing what people do.
If you’re interested in finding out more, Nigel and Fang are going to have a couple of MAX sessions. One is building an AIR app with CoCoMo, and the other is a standard, building real-time collaboration apps with CoCoMo.
TweetThere have been a couple of posts recently about Google’s ability to search Flash files. And it looks like we’re getting some good news. The latest is over on InsideRIA. Dominic Gelineau has been doing some experiments and noticed as recently as October 14th that things have started to change for the better. The other post was by Brian Ussery. He’s been also running a long series of experiments and while the results aren’t quite what I was hoping, things may have changed recently. Possibly most interesting from Brian’s research is that Flash files can now have their own page rank independent of the root URL (see case study #2).
So it doesn’t seem like we’re perfect yet, but we’re making progress after the announcement earlier this year. It seems like Google is starting tweak the algorithm and figure out how to get it working as people expect. That’s good news.
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It’s a little tough when you live inside the Adobe bubble to step back on release day and talk about all the “new” stuff (and some bug fixes) that you’ve been talking about for months. But Flash Player 10 is a big release, so I’ll do my best. As I’ve said a bunch over the past couple of months, I felt Flash Player 9 was a developer-centric release. We rewrote the virtual machine, introduced ActionScript 3, released Flex 2, and essentially laid the groundwork for rich Internet applications. We created the train tracks for more complex, interesting, and sophisticated applications in the browser. We’ve since extended those train tracks to the desktop with AIR and into the world of real time collaboration/communication with things like BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services.
Flash Player 10 on the other hand, is in some ways about getting back to the core of what made Flash great in the first place – really creative people. We’ve got Pixel Bender which companies like Picnik are already using to enhance the graphical capabilities of their photo editor. We’ve got new 3D APIs that will help make it easy for anyone to add a 3D-like effect to their applications. We’ve got new drawing APIs and primitives that enable some very interesting visualizations and will go hand in hand with a lot of open source projects out there that were previously pushing the Flash Player further than most. We’ve also got new low-level text APIs that for the first time make text as rich as other aspects of the Flash player. I was showing off some of those text APIs a couple of weeks ago in Asia and they went over very well. It’s going to help the Flash Player become truly global.
With the importance of video we also added a lot of video enhancements. “Movestar” was our big video release with support for H.264, but in Flash Player 10 we’re enabling dynamic streaming which means your users can get the best possible picture that their bandwidth will support. That means smoother video playback and a better video experience.
So now that Flash Player 10 is out we’re providing the platform on which to build some very cool stuff. A way to blow people away with your creativity and vision. That’s going to be a major theme next year, I think. Adobe is a design company at its core. We make great design tools and we answer to designers. That provides us a big advantage in the increasingly design-heavy world of the web. Creative Suite 4 and Flash Player 10 are a great example of what’s possible. Flex 4 and “Thermo” are going to build on that so that when it all comes together it’s going to be the best platform around for great looking, fast, and cutting-edge applications. And if our penetration story sticks, in 6 months we’ll have upgraded the web again so you can just take it for granted and deploy those apps without a second thought.
TweetAs I’m creating some samples for the PHP User Group tour this week I saw that there have been some updates to the Google Maps for Flash API. One of the biggies is that the 1.7 SWC can now be used as a flash CS3 component. They have a pretty good tutorial on getting started with it.
The new 1.7 SWC *also* includes support for using Google Maps as a custom Flex component. So instead of creating the map in ActionScript you can just use <maps:Map> inside of your Flex app. That should make it that much easier to use Google Maps inside of your Flex application.
I don’t know who Pamela Fox is, but she’s become my favorite Googler. She appears to be the one doing all of or most of the work around the Flash API. She even created a perfectly-Flashy sample of integrating Google maps into an animated environment. Puff the Magic Dragon for the win.
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