Monthly Archives: March 2009

Get your BugQuash on with the Flex SDK

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This weekend (on Saturday, March 28th) we’re going to be hosting a Flex Bug Quash event at Adobe Seattle. It’s shaping up to be a really fun event and it’s going to be both in person at the Seattle office as well as online via Connect. What’s the purpose? We’re going to be hacking with the Flex SDK and fixing some of the bugs that exist. If you’re a seasoned developer it will be a great way to help the community and have some fun with fellow developers. If you’re new to Flex, it’s a great way to get to know the framework and get in the guts of how things work.

So come join us in Seattle or online. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Huge props to Marty Mickelson from Adobe and Nate Beck for putting this on.

Differences Between Silverlight Out of Browser Experience and AIR

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A lot of stuff was announced today at MIX09 (and Scott Guthrie is always fun to watch) and one of the more interesting things was that Silverlight is supporting an Out of Browser Experience. At first I thought AIR would be the direct competitor but after sitting in on Mike Harsh’s session, I think AIR and the Silverlight OOB (Out of Browser) are two very different technologies for two very different scenarios.

Installation
Because you’re in the browser context, Silverlight OOB doesn’t make you install anything extra, you can just bring any piece of Silverlight content to the desktop. Silverlight OOB has both events you can call as well as a right-click context menu item that becomes available when you edit the application’s manifest file. When you do that, you get a dialog box with an icon you can customize and the option to add the application to the start menu and/or desktop. Uninstallation is done through the same right-click menu. Silverlight OOB applications don’t show up in the add/remove programs menu or Applications directory. In some ways it is similar to Gears’ Desktop API. With AIR applications, you of course have to download the AIR runtime and you get the standard AIR installation screen and the user has to click through a couple of times. We also want you to sign your applications because when a user installs an AIR application, they’re not in the browser security sandbox but a regular desktop security sandbox.

silverlight_install

System Access/Features
The major difference, and what really causes all of the other differences, is that Silverlight OOB runs in the web browser’s sandbox. That means you can’t do anything the web browser can’t do. That means no full file system access, custom chrome, notifications, native menus, etc. Silverlight OOB gives you a bit of isolated storage space where you can read and write from the hard drive, but not direct access like AIR. Everything aside from that isolated storage has to go through a save/open dialog. This is the clear separation between AIR and Silverlight OOB because the install process you go through with AIR gives you access to more desktop hooks. Silverlight OOB also doesn’t have any kind of SQL database and you’re restricted to non printable characters when you’re in full screen mode. Mike said in his session that the Silverlight OOB team was looking into SQL as an option down the road.

Updating
Tim Heuer has a pretty good post up about the differences in updating applications. The significant difference I saw is that with Silverlight OOB, your users are required to update. With AIR, the developer gets to choose whether or not to force users to download an update. The Silverlight team is looking at allowing developers a choice Tim says.

Summary
AIR and Silverlight OOB don’t really compete in the same space. AIR is about letting you take your web application skills to build desktop applications and Silverlight OOB is more about letting you take your Silverlight applications to the desktop. The different models will be different for everyone, but right now AIR gives you a lot more flexibility and more API hooks into the operating system. You can also combine HTML and Flash and it doesn’t sound like you have any HTML functionality in Silverlight OOB. I obviously work for Adobe, so I’m biased in favor of the AIR model, but I think Silverlight OOB has a lot of good scenarios; it just doesn’t really compete with AIR in my mind. And I think we’ll be watching to see how developers use it and if there’s a demand for that kind of experience with Flash.

3 Tickets Left for the Flash Gaming Summit – March 22nd in San Francisco

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flash_gaming_summitI’m going to be speaking at the Flash Gaming Summit 2009 which is a conference targeted specifically at those who are interested in Flash Gaming. I spent yesterday judging the finalists for The Mochis, the Flash Gaming awards, and it was so cool to see and remember what is the heart of the Flash community. People are doing some very, very cool stuff.

If you’re going to be in San Francisco on March 22nd and you’re interested in Flash gaming, I highly suggest you grab one of the final tickets. It’s just $99.00 and you get a great speaker lineup covering everything from marketing and analytics to programming. I’m going to be doing a session at 1:30 on the future of the Flash Platform. It should be a great time with some great Flashers.

Tech Talk with Ryan Stewart: Adam Cath and Flash Catalyst

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Another episode of Tech Talk with Ryan Stewart has been posted up on AdobeTV. This one covers Flash Catalyst and we sit down with Adam Cath on the Catalyst engineering team to talk about some of the behind the scenes work on Flash Catalyst. Adam is one of my favorite guys on the engineering team and the interview was a lot of fun. I also go through a bit of a demo at the end but if you’ve seen some of the other Flash Catalyst demos there isn’t much new. We did this right after MAX so I tried to use some MAX-themed assets.

When The Kids Go Online Instead of Watching TV

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Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser has a good interview up with Bill Rusitzky on some of the demographic shifts that are happening with regards to TV and online video. This obviously has some gigantic implications for RIAs and Flash developers. It’s become a part of culture that we control when and how we view: things like Tivo have made that happen. What’s more interesting however, is how that’s starting to adapt itself online. You get the on demand aspect, but as Bill notes, once people are watching on their computers, you can use other parts of the “computer experience”. You can start to add interactivity to video with Flash, let users choose their camera angles, and adapt the online viewing workflow to the inherent interactivity of the web.

Even now I think video is still seen as a “black box” medium. You see sites like YouTube and it’s mostly about consuming a video clip and moving on. There are a ton of examples on sites like The FWA that show how video can be just another piece of an overall experience which blends seamlessly into other interactive elements of an application or showcase. I want to see more developers start to treat video like another tool in their toolbox when it comes to creating the ultimate application. Hopefully that starts to happen more as people move away from the passive relationship of watching TV in the living room and start to demand that video be as active as the rest of their web applications.

ImBizzi Calendar Component for Flex

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One of the things I really want to see more of is a robust 3rd party component ecosystem for Flex. We’ve come a ways with things like ILog, but I want more. Hopefully some of the new Flex 4 features will make it easier for developers to create easily customizable, useful components. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a calendar component, then ImBizzi looks pretty powerful.

It’s an Outlook style calendar that lets you drag and drop to add calendar items switch between day, week, and month. It should have everything that you need if you’ve got to add a calendar to your application. There is good developer documentation and a style guide that lets you customize the look and feel of the calendar.

Adobe Events at SXSW

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Update: Added an accessibility panel and a book reading. I also forgot to mention that there is a SXSW group for people interested in Adobe AIR.

Coté mentioned this really good post by Chris Bernard listing some SXSW goodness and I realized that we needed a list of Adobe happenings at SXSW. It turns out they are numerous and varied. So if you’re coming to SXSW, please join us at one or all of these:

Saturday, March 14th

    Panel: Emerging Trends in Mobile Technology – 11:30am – 12:30pm

    iPhone 2.0, Android, Flash Lite 3.0, Streaming Video, Electronic Wallets, Mobile technology is growing rapidly and becoming an intrinsic part of consumer mentality. Hear the experts discuss the role of mobile in today’s lifestyle, discuss emerging technology, and predict national and international trends.

    Greg Rewis and Stephanie Sullivan Booksigning – 1:55pm – South by Bookstore
    Panel: Connecting Interrelated Design and Development Workflows – 3:30-4:30 Room 10/Austin Convention Center (we’ll be talking about Flash Catalyst/Flex and ColdFusion/Dreamweaver)

    Design and development are like siblings in the creative process constantly trying to express their individuality but a lot closer than they’re willing to admit. This session will explore the interrelated disciplines of design and development by looking at three specific project types: designer/developer collaboration for the Flash Platform; designer/developer collaboration for Ajax; and cross-media design and publication. You’ll see how designers and developers can achieve peace through more efficient integration and collaboration across media types and disciplines. This panel is sponsored by Adobe.

    Interactive Click (these are fun get togethers with some prizes and food/drinks) – 4:30pm-5:30pm – Adobe Day Stage Café/Exhibit Hall

    Agencies, designers, developers, and beyond! Gather at the Interactive Click to network with industry peers, enjoy lively libations and win cool prizes – including Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection. Each Click guarantees a minimum of 25 winners! So join in the fun, the odds are definitely in your favor.

Sunday, March 15th

    Panel: Accessible Flash and Flex Applications – 10:00am-11:00am Room Hilton A

    Developers are increasingly interested in delivering accessible applications that use Flash-based technologies but are uncertain as to what is possible and how to develop and test their applications. This panel will look at best practices and examples, and share information on what’s new in Flash accessibility.

    Education Click (these are fun get togethers with some prizes and food/drinks) – 12:30pm-1:30pm – Adobe Day Stage Café/Exhibit Hall

    Calling all educators, students, wannabe students, and on… Gather at the Education Click to network with industry peers, enjoy tasty treats, and win cool prizes – including Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection. Each Click guarantees a minimum of 25 winners! So join in the fun, the odds are definitely in your favor.

    Panel: Making the Most of Creative Suite 4 – 2:00-3:00 Room 10/Austin Convention Center

    Join Greg Rewis, author and industry-renowned Adobe evangelist, to learn how to get the most out of Creative Suite 4. Greg will show you hidden features in Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and more. During his performance, and it will be a performance I’m sure, he’ll also show you his favorite time-saving tips and tricks, and who knows what else you’ll walk away with – hint. hint. You certainly won’t want to miss this fun and informative session. This panel is sponsored by Adobe.

Monday, March 16th

    Video Click (these are fun get togethers with some prizes and food/drinks) – 4:30pm-5:30pm – Adobe Day Stage Café/Exhibit Hall

    Motion graphic artists, editors, sound artists, and those with a passion for film, video, or audio. Gather at the Video Click to network with industry peers, enjoy lively libations and win cool prizes – including Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection. Each Click guarantees a minimum of 25 winners! So join in the fun, the odds are definitely in your favor.

    Panel: What Does Awesome Sound Like – 2:00-3:00 – Room Hilton A

    Join our conversation about the impact voice integration has on user interaction. We’re talking about and demoing some amazing functionality, like making phone calls and posting voice messages from mobile devices to web apps. It’s all done with Flash and Ribbit, a simple yet breakthrough API for cross-device content creation, distribution and voice interaction. Get started at developer.ribbit.com and you can bring something to show.

Tuesday, March 17th

    Book Reading: Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone – 12:00pm – 12:30pm – Adobe Day Stage

    Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge — especially when mobile users need to access your sites. You’ll discover how to use standards-based web technologies to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile Web.

    So there is a ton of stuff! Hope to see you there!

Aviary Acquires Digimix

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This is pretty cool. Those of you in the Flex community probably remember Digimix, one of the early AIR applications and winner of the AIR Derby at MAX in 2007. Alan Queen has been busily working away and today announced that he’s been acquired by Aviary, the Flex-based online creative tool company.

I keep being impressed with what the Aviary guys do. They recently released a vector editor called Raven which looks very cool and I’m a huge fan of their Peacock pattern generator. They’ve hired some of the best minds in the Flash world and it’s paid off well. More coverage of the acquisition over on TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider.

Getting Started with Augmented Reality and the Flash Platform

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ryan_flarHopefully by now you’ve all seen this augmented reality example by GE with an explanation here of how it works. It’s using the FLARToolKit by the ever-awesome Saqoosha who I interviewed while I was over in Japan for MAX Japan. It’s really cool stuff.

I spent a chunk of the weekend playing with it and I was impressed with just how easy it is so wanted to make sure that anyone who saw the demo realized that it’s super simple to get started. The first thing you need to do is check out Saqoosha’s Start-up guide for FLARToolkit (in English) which shows you exactly what you need to do and includes sample files. He basically goes through exactly which parts you need to change and what gets altered. I’m in the process of trying to get Gumbonents to work with Papervision3d so I can pop up live, interactive Flex components with FLAR.

Another thing I found helpful was an ARToolKit maker which helps you make the shapes that are required for FLAR to create visualizations. With those two links you should be able to start creating your own augmented reality demos in no time.

I’ve also got a Flex project which is based on Saqoosha’s demo code that you can download if you want. I basically just took his AS3 classes and combined them into one project because I didn’t want to use the fla file. Update: There is also a WAY more impressive project that Saqoosha created and showed at MAX 2009. You can grab everything you need on his blog. Saqoosha is the man!