The other part of these events is providing some firsthand demos of some of the things we showed off at MAX. I think MAX was a major turning point for Adobe and Mihai and I will be showing off the touch tooling, talking about the creative cloud, and showing all of the things Adobe is up to in the world of HTML5. Plus we’ll give you some sneak peaks of the next generation of the Flash Platform. So there’s a ton of info and you’ll have the chance to ask questions firsthand. 2012 is going to be a great ride for the Adobe community so we want to make sure you have all the info you need to be successful.

Here are the cities we’re hitting:

Update: For those of you in the UK, there is an event on Monday, the 7th. I couldn’t make it out in time for that, but Mihai will be there covering everything.

November 9th

November 10th

November 11th

November 14th

November 15th

November 17th

November 19th

Can’t wait to see you and talk about application development and Adobe’s 2012.

This will go down as a very transformational MAX. The announcement of the Creative Cloud and the fact that it will include all of Creative Suite Master Collection as well as the touch tools and services (including TypeKit) is one of the biggest things I’ve seen from Adobe in a long time. And it feels like we’re jumping in with both feet and getting back to the core of what Adobe does: empowering designers to create with great tools. I thought the news about the single edition of the Digital Publishing suite was a perfect example of that. It makes the blossoming world of digital publishing accessible to more people.

The PhoneGap announcement was, for me, the most significant announcement of the week. By acquiring Nitobi (fantastic guys) and contributing the PhoneGap project to the Apache Foundation, Adobe took a huge, huge step into the world of HTML5. It was a perfect way to start a day 2 keynote that focused on the things Adobe is doing to be a part of the HTML5 ecosystem.

Based on the Twitter stream there seemed to be a feeling that the lack of traditional Flash indicated that Adobe is giving up on it. I think that misses the big picture. With the Nitobi acquisition and the embracing of PhoneGap, Adobe is making a significant and meaningful bet on the web and cross-platform mobile applications. This can’t be overstated. For Flash developers we have AIR, which will let you build cross-platform mobile applications. For HTML developers we have PhoneGap, which will let you create cross-platform mobile applications. Both are web technologies that don’t require developers to be locked into a specific operating system or type of device. You see the same thing with our digital publishing suite; it doesn’t matter if you want to deploy on iOS, Android, or PlayBook, you can. And that’s possible largely because of the web formats that go into creating the DPS apps.

This isn’t about Flash versus HTML, this is about supporting creative and interactive content across the broadest platform in the world: the web. Whether it’s mobile apps or browser content; animations, interactive web applications, or 3D gaming experiences, Adobe genuinely believes that the web is the best way for our customers to deliver their creations. By making PhoneGap a cornerstone of our story, I think we’ve proven our commitment to that mission.

I’m glad I was at MAX to see all of this in person.

Edit: This is a great piece by Daryl Taft of eWeek that talks about Flash and HTML. And it’s great to see that the “and not or” message is getting picked up. But what I like about this particular message is that when you follow it upstream a bit more, it just means we love the web. And if that’s the case (and I feel like it is) then the technology becomes secondary to the goals of helping people create cross-os and cross-device content with web technologies.

Gaming

We’ve been doing a lot of work to help enable console-esque games on top of the Flash Platform. Flash Player 11 includes Stage3D, which is going to open up a whole new world for game developers. Zombie Tycoon and Tanki are initial examples of what can be done and I can’t wait to see what comes of it. I’m reminded very much of the early days of Flash where a bunch of creative people were given a technology that was pretty open-ended and poked and prodded to create a bunch of very cool things. I think we’ll see that kind of revolution with Stage3D because of the ubiquity of Flash and the creativity of our developer community. Also in the gaming bucket is a framework we’re working on called Starling, which leverages Stage3D to create a super-fast way of doing parts of 2D games. It’s a great merger between the underlying technology/performance benefits of Stage3D and the kinds of things people want to do in 2D games. I think it’s also going to see some traction beyond games as agencies start to use it to enhance 2D content.

Mobile Applications

Flex and AIR have really found a great place in mobile applications. The performance enhancements in 2.7 made building native-experiences with AIR possible and we’ve seen some great examples of that in action including Machinarium and Caltrain Times. I’ve been impressed with performance on my 100 Days of Exercise application on iOS. I’m incredibly, incredibly excited by what this means for Flash. There’s a definite need to create mobile apps that can be deployed to multiple application stores. The Flash Platform provides a way to create great looking, high-design applications with near-native performance that can run on multiple devices. That’s a big deal.

And this release of AIR 3 goes where we haven’t gone before on the Flash Platform with native extensions. Now if there are features that aren’t included in AIR, like access to a credit card reader, you can build those extensions in native code and then link them to your AIR applications and leverage those libraries. It’s a great mix of native for specific use cases and AIR/Flash for fantastic user interfaces. It’s a big, big, big deal to be able to extend the platform and it’s a huge step.

I also think we have one of the best mobile-tool chains out there. Flash Builder 4.6 is going to help with creating those native extensions while also enabling the use of captive runtime in AIR so your applications don’t need to rely on the external AIR runtime on Android. Combine that with the enhancements that are coming in Flex 4.6 and it adds up to a world class mobile development platform that lets you reach more devices that matter. Flex 4.6 is especially exciting because of the new components that have been added. Flex and AIR are far and away the best toolset for interactive developers or any mobile developer who needs to create content for multiple devices. The apps you can build with Flex and AIR are going to stand out from the boring, standard apps that have started to litter app stores. Creativity will win the day and creativity is at the core of Flex/AIR.

Beyond

So this is a huge release, and I’m excited. But I’m also excited about the future of Adobe and how we are responding and will continue to respond to the evolving marketplace. As Danny Winokur, VP and GM of the Flash Platform, said recently:

“We’re not so concerned about what the right technology is for that as long as we’ll be able to deliver those experiences. We’re working with Microsoft and other members of the HTML community including Google, Apple, and others to enable rich experiences on HTML5.”

This is not a technology war. Adobe is about enabling developers to build the best possible experiences with the technology they want. We want to build tools and services that cater to that ethos. That takes the form of cutting-edge gaming features like Stage3D and world-class mobile app features with Flex, AIR and Flash Builder. But HTML5 is exciting for a lot of reasons, and Adobe will help developers there as well. If you’re an interactive developer, the future is very, very bright for you.

So you better get a good pair of sunglasses.

100 Days of Exercise

Profile Creation Screen

The Date Selector

It’s been a fun project and I’m looking forward to adding a few things down the road. If you have any feedback, definitely drop me an email and let me know.

So here’s what I came up with.

Basically I intercept the removing event on the view, which is the last event that gets called before the view goes away. Using that event I check to see if any of my PopUps are on the screen using the isPopUp property and if they are, I use event.preventDefault() to stop the view from being removed and instead just remove the PopUp.

protected function view1_removingHandler(event:ViewNavigatorEvent):void
{
     if(exerciseList.isPopUp)
     {
          PopUpManager.removePopUp(exerciseList);
          event.preventDefault();
     }
 
     if(timeList.isPopUp)
     {
          PopUpManager.removePopUp(timeList);
          event.preventDefault();
     }
}

I’m not sure if this is really the best way to solve this issue, so if anyone has something that they’ve done I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Flex Mobile Button Skin

I’m working on a mobile app that requires a lot of skinning and since Flex 4 we’ve gotten a MUCH improved skinning model for Flex. Unfortunately, with Flex mobile, for performance reasons it’s a good idea to use ActionScript-only skins which means going back to the world of Flex 3 and diving into the component lifecycle a bit.

My colleague Terry Ryan has a good blog post that shows what he used to do skinning and I started off with that approach. But something didn’t seem quite right about skinning a button with a function associated with borders, so I tracked down the skinning master on the Flex team, Jason San Jose, and asked him the best way to do it. It turns out it’s really pretty simple to skin a button using Bitmap assets. If you look at the source code for ButtonSkin you’ll see that in the constructor, they associate FXG files (as classes) with specific button states.

upBorderSkin = spark.skins.mobile320.assets.Button_up;
downBorderSkin = spark.skins.mobile320.assets.Button_down;

In that constructor they also check for the DPI of the device and then load in the correct skin class according to that DPI. In general it’s going to be a good idea to check for different screen sizes and load in different assets accordingly, but for this example, I’ve just got one size that stretches reasonably well. The first step is to embed the assets and give them a variable name.

[Bindable]
[Embed(source="/assets/combobox_button_up.png")]
private var up:Class;
 
[Bindable]
[Embed(source="/assets/combobox_button_down.png")]
private var down:Class;

Then, in the constructor, simply set the upBorderSkin and downBorderSkin to those classes:

public function ComboBoxButtonSkin()
{
     super();
 
     upBorderSkin = up;
     downBorderSkin = down;
}

In this example I also wanted to create a graphic that would be overlaid on top of my skin. It’s a triangle graphic that will change depending on whether the app is on iOS or Android because of the different ways that those two platforms do ComboBoxes. On iOS you often have the app slide over to reveal the list (so the arrow would be pointing to the right) and on Android you often get a pop-up window with a list of choices (so the arrow would point down).

Adding Objects To Your Button Skin

To add something to your skin you need to go back and think about how Flex components work. You first want to make sure it’s added using the createChildren method. In this example I have already created the _triangle variable and instantiated it in the constructor.

override protected function createChildren():void
{
     super.createChildren();
     addChild(_triangle);
 
}

Then, once it’s added, you can start to modify it. In this example I wanted to make sure I could dynamically place the arrow depending on the height and width of my button. Luckily, the drawBackground method gives you an unscaledHeight and unscaledWidth, which you can use to calculate where the object should be placed. So all I had to do was tie into the drawing API, use those numbers, and voila, my skin now has the triangle.

override protected function drawBackground(unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number):void
{
     var halfUnscaledHeight:int = Math.round(unscaledHeight/2);
 
     _triangle.graphics.beginFill(0xcee410);
     _triangle.graphics.moveTo(unscaledWidth-20,halfUnscaledHeight-5);
     _triangle.graphics.lineTo(unscaledWidth-10,halfUnscaledHeight);
     _triangle.graphics.lineTo(unscaledWidth-20,halfUnscaledHeight+5);
     _triangle.graphics.lineTo(unscaledWidth-20,halfUnscaledHeight-5);
     _triangle.graphics.endFill();
}

One of the benefits of this approach as opposed to just including the triangle in the skin is that the triangle kind of looked odd when it was stretched and morphed to different screen sizes. This way it’s independent of the bitmap skin and I can change the size according to the size of the underlying button.

Here’s what the finished button looks like and here’s the full code for you to grab.

Mobile Button Up State

Mobile Button Down Skin

    package skins
    {
    import flash.display.Sprite;
 
    import spark.skins.mobile.ButtonSkin;
 
    public class ComboBoxButtonSkin extends ButtonSkin
    {
    [Bindable]
    [Embed(source="/assets/combobox_button_up.png")]
    private var up:Class;
 
    [Bindable]
    [Embed(source="/assets/combobox_button_down.png")]
    private var down:Class;
 
    protected var _triangle:Sprite;
 
    public function ComboBoxButtonSkin()
    {
    super();
 
    upBorderSkin = up;
    downBorderSkin = down;
 
    _triangle = new Sprite();
    }
 
    override protected function createChildren():void
    {
    super.createChildren();
    addChild(_triangle);
 
    }
 
    override protected function drawBackground(unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number):void
    {
    var halfUnscaledHeight:int = Math.round(unscaledHeight/2);
 
    _triangle.graphics.beginFill(0xcee410);
    _triangle.graphics.moveTo(unscaledWidth-20,halfUnscaledHeight-5);
    _triangle.graphics.lineTo(unscaledWidth-10,halfUnscaledHeight);
    _triangle.graphics.lineTo(unscaledWidth-20,halfUnscaledHeight+5);
    _triangle.graphics.lineTo(unscaledWidth-20,halfUnscaledHeight-5);
    _triangle.graphics.endFill();
    }
 
    }
    }

SourceMate

• Generating ASDoc Comments
• The TODO/FIXME enabled in the Task pane
• All of the refactoring support

And the localization features look really helpful for anyone building applications that need to make use of resource bundles for localized apps.

Major props to the SourceMate team.

• Pretty Things Jack D’Or
• Goose Island Sophie
• Russian River Blind Pig
• Russian River Damnation Golden Ale
• 21st Amendment Watermelon Wheat
• 21st Amendment IPA
• Scrimshaw Pilsner
• Victory Pilsner
• Shipyard IPA
• Big Sky Moose Drool
• Stone Oaked Arrogant Bastard
• Victory Golden Monkey Triple Ale
• Session Lager traditional
• Session Lager black
• New Belgium (makers of Fat Tire) Blue Paddle
• New Belgium Sunshine Wheat
• Bear Republic Racer 5

We’ve got some great sessions, the product teams are coming to help answer questions, and it will be a lot of fun to show off the Flex mobile story in person.

In the morning we’re going to have sessions covering all aspects of the mobile workflow. We’ve got a keynote from VP of Developer Tools, Ed Rowe, then Deepa Subramaniam, Flex Product Manager and Andrew Shorten, Group Product manager for Flex, are going to be doing an overview of the new mobile-specific features in Flex 4.5. We’ll also have 3 separate tracks to help you dive a little deeper:

• Flash Builder for PHP
• iOS and PlayBook development
• UX design for mobile devices

In the afternoon we’ll bring out the tables and let you guys get to work building mobile apps. The Flex and Flash Builder teams will be on hand to help answer questions and help provide feedback.

The beer is being provided by City Beer Store, and I’m still nailing down the list, but we should have some fantastic craft beer at the event as well as pizza provided by Amici’s to help fuel the end of the day coding before we start giving away prizes and showing off mobile applications.

The Contest

One of the unique things about this Flash Camp is that after the hands-on session we’ll be giving away some prizes for people who have built a mobile application that afternoon. We’ll have a bunch of categories including most interesting use of Flex, most useful application, and most-well designed application. And you can win software, devices, an Xbox Kinect, and more, so there’s a ton of potential loot for you to take away.

You can also feel free to form teams, so if you are a designer-type, bring along your developer friends to fill out the team and you can show off the application as a team at the end of the day.

It’s going to be a lot of fun and I can’t wait to see what you guys put together. So register and come learn about mobile development with Flash and Flex, drink some great beer, and win prizes.