Tag Archives: Flex

Flex Mobile European Tour 2011

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Next week I’m going to be hitting the road with my colleague Mihai Corlan to spread the news about what Adobe has been up to the past few months. The primary reason for the trip is to show off the work the product teams have done with Flex on devices. Mihai and I are going to be doing some hands-on sessions showing just how easy it is to build great looking applications for iOS and Android. Bring your laptop, a copy of Flash Builder, and a device and we’ll walk you through all the steps you need to go through to start building and deploying mobile applications.

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.

MAX Reflections

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I’m sitting down with some tea while my little girl is taking a nap feeling the big exhale from MAX. The energy of the past few days has been largely fantastic and I always find MAX to be rejuvenating both from a professional standpoint and a personal standpoint. Getting to connect with the community and my colleagues at Adobe has been great. In the contrast to the buzzing of MAX, the current deep quiet of my house leaves me reflecting a bit on the week.

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.

Flash Player 11, AIR 3, and Flex/Flash Builder 4.6

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Today is a pretty big day for Adobe developers. We’re officially announcing Flash Player 11, AIR 3, and Flex 4.6 and Flash Builder 4.6. The bits will be available in early October, but we’re announcing things today to help provide developers with information on what’s coming. I’ve been at Adobe for 4 years now and it’s been a very interesting 4 years as the landscape has evolved. It’s definitely been an up and down ride for Adobe developers, but the world has never been a better place for interactive developers, and these set of releases provide a ton of functionality aimed at helping Adobe developers create content in the most cutting edge places.

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.

Dismissing a Flex Mobile PopUp With the Back Button

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In an application I’m building for Android I use a lot of pop up windows (because that’s how Android does combo boxes) and I was having a tough time figuring out how to get them to close when the user pushes the back button. By default, the framework will call navigator.popView() whenever the back button gets pushed and the only way to override that is by doing it at the application level, which isn’t really ideal.

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.

Beer List for Flash Camp 2011

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Most of you know that I’m a pretty serious beer person. And since we have a fantastic beer store, City Beer, just up the street from the SF office, it makes it easy to get good beer for events like Flash Camp. I just finalized the list and we’ve got some great beers. At this point you should have no excuse; it doesn’t get better than mobile development and great beer.

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.

Slides and Code from 360Flex Denver

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360Flex Denver360|Flex Denver was an absolutely fantastic event. I was at the first 360 and have watched the event grow and mature over the years. It’s always been the best Flex conference out there, but there was something about those first few 360′s that had so much energy and got the community excited. This event felt like that. I’d rank it as one of the best 360′s I’ve ever been to. The attendees were enthusiastic and great to talk to, the keynotes were awesome and inspiring, and John and Nicole were at the top of their game as far as hosting went. It might have been all of the mobile stuff, it might have been the announcement on day 2 of Project Spoon, but this 360Flex was just all around great.

So of course, I made a bit of a misstep with my talk. At what was one of the greatest Flex conferences of the past 5 years, I go and give an HTML5/jQuery talk. But hopefully it was still fun. And to be honest, as I dove into HTML5 and jQuery for this talk, I learned that we have it very, very good as Flex developers. There are a lot of great things about HTML5 and especially jQuery, but if you’re building complex RIAs and applications, Flex has solved a ton of problems that the HTML5/JS world hasn’t yet. I definitely think they will, and the community around JS and jQuery is great, but as a Flex developer, you’ve got the best of both worlds and you’re going to be able to jump over to jQuery/HTML5 projects and bring some very valuable knowledge about building complex apps.

Thanks to everyone who attended the talk. My slides can be found here (and embedded below) and you can grab the demos from my GitHub repository here.

HTML5 and jQuery for Flex Developers
View more presentations from Ryan Stewart

The Implications of Every Flash Developer Being a Mobile Developer

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There’s an article in the Wall Street journal today about the demand and insufficient supply of mobile developers, which is becoming a huge problem for companies as mobile strategy becomes more and more critical. One of the main problems, as the WSJ draws out, is that these mobile platforms are relatively new so it’s tough to find developers with a lot of experience. Many companies are turning to good developers and retraining them as mobile developers to fill demand.

If a software engineer doesn’t have mobile experience, the company has sometimes been willing to spend several weeks training the engineer to work on mobile platforms, Mr. Rosenthal said.

Given the mismatch between supply and demand, many companies say they have no choice but to retrain software engineers in the art of mobile development. In the last year, Major League Baseball’s Internet company MLB.com nearly doubled the number of mobile engineers it has to 19, said MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman.

I thought this article was a perfect complement to the announcement this week of Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5, which are focused explicitly on helping Flex developers build applications for mobile devices like iOS, Android, and the PlayBook. There is obviously huge demand for mobile applications, and because of scarce supply and experience, existing developers are going to have to think about how they can gain mobile experience. Flex mobile does a fantastic job of making that learning curve smaller by letting Flex developers use what they already know and providing some key mobile features (like ViewNavigator for managing views, the ActionBar for managing global navigation, etc) so that they can quickly turn out Flex applications for these mobile devices.

If you’re a Flash or Flex developer, then with AIR for mobile devices and Flex 4.5, you’ve got the skills to go out and build applications for the biggest platforms. That’s a huge advantage to you as a developer and for any developer who doesn’t want to get locked into a specific platform. As the chart below shows, there are a lot of people looking for experts in iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, but there are a lot more people who are looking for Flash experts. With this release, you get the best of both worlds.

Adobe Refresh – Australia, Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore

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I’m really excited to be joining up with the crew for Adobe Refresh, which will cover some of the latest and greatest features for the Flash Platform as well as show off Adobe’s HTML story over a couple of weeks in March. We’re hitting a total of 6 cities in Australia, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore. I’ll be tagging along with Richard Galvan, Paul Burnett, and Michael Stoddart.

The sessions are going to cover Flash Pro, HTML5, Flex/Flash Builder, Digital Publishing, and a Q&A for answering any questions you might have about the Adobe stack. Plus we’ll be showing off some things that most people won’t have seen live yet, so if you come, you’ll get a first crack at seeing some very cool stuff coming up from Adobe.

Here’s the full list of cities:

I’m looking forward to being able to see all of the community members in those countries as well as getting to show off the latest and greatest with the Flash Platform. I’ll be talking about multiscreen development with Flex and Flash Builder and there is some VERY good stuff for developers on the horizon when it comes to building apps across devices. This will be a great event to see it all come together.

PlayBook Development: Flex Mobile Framework or the QNX Components?

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Flex or QNX

One of the first decisions you’ll have to make when you start building a PlayBook application is whether you want to use the Flex Framework for mobile devices or the QNX component set that ships as part of the AIR SDK for PlayBook. Even if you’re a Flex developer it’s not a straightforward decision so it’s important to be able to weigh the pros and cons of each side. I’ve been talking to a number of developers about Flex versus QNX and wanted to put down my thoughts to help developers decide. If you think I missed something, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it.

Performance

I don’t yet have a PlayBook to test the differences on, but in talking to people that do, performance generally seems like a wash. There’s something to be said for the fact that the QNX team is working really closely with the hardware to optimize their component set, but I also know the Flex team has made leaps and bounds in performance for Flex Mobile. When I get an actual device I’ll update this section.

Component Set

This is an area where I thought Flex would have a decided advantage. And if you count the entire component set, it does. But if you limit the comparison to mobile-optimized components, Flex ends up a little behind. For both platforms the core components are there, lists, buttons, etc. Flex has a TextArea component while QNX doesn’t, but QNX has a slider component while Flex’s hasn’t been mobile-optimized yet. Where QNX ends up winning though is in the number of components that are being built to support UI features of the PlayBook. QNX has support for a number of different dialog components including the LoginDialog component as well as built in support for lists with sections. If you’re sticking to the normal base components, Flex is a perfect fit, but the QNX components are a bit higher level and provide some specific UI elements that your users will see across the PlayBook that you can then add to your own application.

The Picker component from the PlayBook AIR SDK



The Picker component selected

Layout

Flex wins this hands down in my opinion. The layout system that the QNX components employ works just fine, and it’s elegantly simple. It uses a container system and I’ve been told it’s similar to Java. I did a screencast on how to use it and it generally accomplishes most of what you’ll need to do. But if you want to do anything above and beyond, the Flex layout system still rules. Having to use things like a Spacer container to align a component in the middle of the screen just seems hacky compared to being able to set properties on a Group. Plus, with Flex you can very easily create your own layouts, which means you can create far more customized looking applications with Flex than with the QNX components.

Skinning/Designer-Developer Workflow

Currently I see this one as a draw. The Spark components of Flex offer a lot of customization and on the desktop provide some great integration with tools like Flash Catalyst, Illustrator, and Photoshop. The only problem is that you don’t really get those integrations if you’re building mobile Flex applications because for most components you won’t want to use MXML-based skins, you’ll want to use AS3 skins. Because all of the designer-developer tooling uses MXML, you won’t be able to pull out all of the benefits of Spark on mobile devices. On the other hand, the QNX components don’t really have any designer developer workflow either. I found the skinning model for QNX to be similar in a lot of ways to the skinning model of Spark. Either way, when you skin these applications you’ll be doing a lot of ActionScript and relying a lot on images.

Mobile UI Paradigms

The TabNavigator UI Paradigm

The Flex mobile team has done a fantastic job of building the framework from the ground up with mobile user interface paradigms in mind. A base Flex Mobile application gives you an ActionBar, which can contain global content, an easy way to add and remove pages from within the application (complete with default transitions between screens), and components for tabbed navigation. With QNX you’re going to be creating most of those from scratch. On one hand it means that you can build up your own mobile UI paradigms if for some reason you don’t want to use what Flex has to offer. On the other hand, the paradigms that Flex Mobile uses are ubiquitous at this point and I’ve found myself trying to copy them in my PlayBook applications.

Flex Mobile's ActionBar Component

Native

This is one of those intangible things but I think it’s important to look at critically. Alex Payne noted some of the issues with AIR applications and how they compare to native applications (also read Ed Finkler’s post on the subject). One of the things I find most exciting about the PlayBook is that it’s the only platform where Flash is native. The QNX components that you use in the SDK are the exact same ones that are being used across the device. It’s very exciting to be able to build native UIs with my Flash/Flex skills. I’m obviously a big fan of Flex and AIR for a lot of things, but given the chance to build native apps, I’ll do it. And it couldn’t be easier for Flash developers to use the QNX components to create native PlayBook apps. That being said, the native APIs and device functionality are all exposed via ActionScript APIs so even if you’re building a Flex app you can still take advantage of the same native and device-specific functionality that developers who use QNX can. So it just comes down to how you want your application to feel compared to other applications on the device.

Another important consideration is being able to reuse your code to deploy to other devices. If you’re looking for a consistent brand across multiple devices and the ability to reuse big chunks of code, Flex is the only answer. You won’t be able to use the QNX components outside of the PlayBook environment so you’ll have to rewrite the application for iOS or for Android or for any of the other devices AIR supports.

Conclusion

I don’t really see a winner for either one of these because I think it comes down to developer skills and what kind of experience you’re going for. I’ve really enjoyed diving into the native QNX components because I like when applications have a native look and feel. If you’re primarily a Flex developer you’re probably going to miss some of the things that you’ll lose by moving to the QNX components. And someone may come up with a Flex skin that mirrors the look and feel of the QNX components so you can get the best of both worlds. Either way building applications for the PlayBook will be right up the alley of any Flash developer. It’s a device that has basically been built from the ground up to support Flash and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. I’m hoping to have a Pintley application out for the PlayBook at launch so if you’re a beer lover, check back here.

One good place to start hashing out the differences is to take a look at the developer documentation for each: Flex, QNX. That will give you a feel for some of what’s supported in each one. And again, I’ll be updating this post with comments so feel free to comment below or to drop me an email.

360Flex Denver

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360Flex Denver360Flex is officially coming to Denver this year! I’m stoked because Denver is the second or third best city in the country. It’s going to be April 10th – 13th. Right now there are some good deals on tickets (if you buy before January 7th) so get them while they’re hot. It’s going to be a fun year for Flex with all of the devices coming to market and with people having had a chance to play with Flex “Hero” and Flash Builder “Burrito” (plus Flash Catalyst “Panini”) so this could be the best 360Flex in a while.

While you’re registering, you might as well think about speaking. They’ve opened the call for papers as well. See you there!