Peter Elst

Earlier today we went to sign the agreement and left a deposit on the new Project Cocoon Multimedia apartments/office space in Colas Nagar, Pondicherry.

We’ve now got ourselves a nice three story building that gives us enough space to have client meetings, organize training events and even have freelance developers over to work on projects as needed.

We’ll be moving in next month but we’re already open for business! If you have any projects going, we’ve got in house expertise for Flash Platform development (ActionScript, Flash, Flex, AIR), mobile application development for iPhone and other platforms as well as graphic and print design.

Additionally, starting from June we will start to provide offshore development services and can be your central point of contact for quality assurance on off site teams.

 
Feel free to get in touch!

 

In case you missed it — AIR 2 beta 2 is now available on labs.adobe.com and among a bunch of other things there are now some really cool additional printing features that give you a lot more control than what we used to have.

Be sure to check out the video interview Ryan Stewart did with Rick Rocheleau, one of the engineers on the core technologies group who made this possible.

I did a little experiment this morning, disabling plug-ins in my browser aka “the iPad experience”.

See where things start to break down? The Apple iPad web browsing experience, not quite what you expect. Yes, there are native apps for a number of these sites (social gaming on Facebook anyone?) I’m specifically talking about the web browsing which Steve yesterday called “the best web experience you’ve ever had”.

The message here seems to be, if you have an interesting site that we don’t support create an app for it.

Just hours after the product got announced, a lot has already been said and written about the Apple iPad and I don’t particularly feel I have a lot to add except for that “one more thing”.

I’ve been working almost exclusively on Mac for about five years now and its a decision I’ve never regretted. One thing I’ve always admired is how polished the user experience is and the attention for details makes Apple products a real joy to work with.

Today, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed “It’s the best web experience you’ve ever had.” — while I would love to believe him on that, this is what we saw.

No Flash Player support. Surprising? Not really. Disappointing? Yes.

Think of Flash what you will, thats a different discussion, and I’ve shared my views in an earlier post. Flash content is an integral and important part of the web experience, there’s a full decade of SWF material out on the Internet that is essentially out of bounds for your users.

On a mobile device with limited specs we could see some reasoning behind it, although just about every other mobile manufacturer didn’t find it a problem to partner in the Open Screen Project and roll out Flash Player 10.1 support on their devices.

With the iPad we’re talking about a different device, a processor that clearly is capable of high performance rendering and a user base with different expectations when they sit down in their sofa to browse the web, play games, watch video and cartoons,…

This is your chance to really go for the best web browsing experience possible. With an iPad specific SDK reportedly coming out, work with Adobe and allow them to roll out a Flash Player for your new device. It will allow your users to opt-in to what a lot of us believe is a better experience on this ground breaking device.

To those of you that agree that Flash support is essential for a device like the iPad, I urge you to speak up as many have already done.

 

When Internationalized Domain Names became available last year, I jumped on the bandwagon and registered a couple. One of these is שָׁלוֹם.com (Shalom as written in Hebrew).

I’ve not done anything with it since and thought it would be a good way to raise money for Haiti disaster relief. I’m holding a blind auction, if you are interested in acquiring the domain name please drop me an email with your bid and contact details.

The auction closes on Thursday, January 28th at 8pm CET. I will contact the highest bidder and transfer the domain name ownership on receipt of payment.

Feel free to spread the word!

 

There’s another new conference coming this year and thats always exciting, but Flash and the City promises to be different. Not only is this the first major Flash conference in NYC in quite a while, its going to be an amazing opportunity to network and meet interesting people.

Why so? Well rather than just sit inside and geek out listening to the various sessions, there’s something called the “City track” that gets you exploring the “Big Apple” with speakers and fellow attendees. I think this concept could be a real winner, some of the activities you can join in with are:

• South Street Sea Port tour
• Dim Sum Breakfast
• Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty
• Brooklyn Tour On A Double Decker Tour Bus

 
Even if you don’t want to miss any of the speakers and stay in to see all the sessions, there’s a 3 hour cruise complete with dinner (and open bar) on Saturday evening included in your ticket.

There’s also the Statue of Liberty awards on Sunday evening with a number of categories including “Most significant Open Source Project of the year”, “Most influential Flash person of the year” etc. Make sure you get your nominations in before March 31st.

May 13th, the day before the conference there are four different workshops you can attend — Mobile and Devices, Beginning ActionScript, Flex 4 and AIR 2.0. That last one is definitely one you’ll want to attend, AIR 2.0 is some truly mind-blowing technology and you’ll learn all about it and get some hands on experience.

I’m excited to be taking the lead for that AIR 2.0 workshop and getting some fantastic speakers on board to help cover all the new features. Don’t worry if you’re new to Adobe AIR, we’ll start out with a basic introduction first and get you going.

So what are you waiting for? Get your tickets now! The way this conference is shaping up, Flash and the City is going to be an iconic event.

 
www.flashandthecity.com

 

If you haven’t heard about Robert Penner’s AS3 Signals yet, you’re missing out. Until yesterday I had only briefly looked at the project but after John Lindquist’s video tutorial I’m completely sold on the idea and look forward to using it in my projects.

So what is AS3 Signals suppose to do for you?

Well for one it uses composition rather than inheritance so you don’t need to have your class extend flash.events.EventDispatcher. You can dispatch a “signal” and pass any number of arguments with it, no more endless subclassing of flash.events.Event for creating your custom events.

There’s also some nice features that you don’t get with the traditional event handling in ActionScript 3.0, things like addOnce which makes sure a listener only gets triggered the first time, removeAll which removes all listeners on a Signal and numListeners that returns the number of listeners on a Signal instance.

Apart from the generic Signal class, you also have DeluxeSignal which allows you to define the target (it also has some experimental bubbling support using .parent) and the NativeSignal which lets you map native events like MouseEvent.CLICK to a Signal.

This AS3 Signals project makes for an incredibly easy way of working with events inside of ActionScript. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

 
Watch the video tutorial

 

This morning I read an interesting blog post by John Dowdell highlighting some things that bothered me in the last week or so (and talked about on twitter).

We’ve been seeing some sensationalist headlines on tech blogs like “Open Source JavaScript to Replace Flash?” without seemingly any understanding of the (all be it incredibly cool) project in question.

Gordon is Javascript code that parses SWF files, loops through the frames and outputs SVG that can be played back in modern browsers without the need for the Flash Player plugin — that means it works on browsers like the one on the iPhone. A fantastic proof of concept and it works really well considering the amount of heavy lifting it needs to do.

The problem here is, this is not a Javascript based Flash runtime as it gets advertised. Its parsing an SWF file and outputting SVG graphics. If you look at the list of supported SWF tags you’ll notice these are all SWF version 1 and 2 — meaning very basic functionality. Search for some tutorials on Flash 1 or 2 if you can still find them and see what that limits you to.

Not to diminish this great project, at this time its practically only useful for very simple banners or animations without any sound or user interaction. It is also – understandably so – heavy on the CPU. Now you get the kicker with uninformed comments like this:

“While the open source Gordon is available to all, it still doesn’t solve one of Flash’s biggest problems. These SWF files still hog the CPU. One demo, a simple vector graphic of a tiger, throws my desktop browser up to around 100% CPU usage”

 
To be very clear: it is *not* running the SWF file — its parsing it, converting it using Javascript and outputting SVG. Running that same SWF file on a native Flash Player, even on a smartphone would be a fraction of that in terms of CPU usage.

Then you get people saying projects like this highlight how the Flash Player has become obsolete and its proprietary format is harming the “open web”. Somebody hasn’t been paying attention since 1998. The SWF format is open and freely available (as are many other formats and protocols used in the Flash Player), that is in fact what makes projects like Gordon possible without resorting to reverse engineering.

There is literally nothing stopping anyone from developing an open source Flash Player, Adobe’s implementation isn’t fully open source mostly due to some technologies it licenses and can’t release (video codecs and text rendering). Saying the Flash Player is a black box or its future is in jeopardy because of its proprietary format is just factually wrong.

I do hope to see more people take up the challenge and start developing code that plays back SWF content, we can only benefit from that.

 

A few months ago I had the pleasure to get involved tech reviewing a book by David Powers on CSS — one of the technologies I used to work with on a daily basis before switching almost exclusively to Flash Platform development.

I have to honestly say this is most probably the best book I’ve ever read on CSS, it covers just about the entire spectrum of possible topics and focuses on pragmatic solutions to common problems. David is a very skilled author and uses clear examples to guide you through the process of building out a page and solves issues that come up as you go along.

Definitely recommend buying this book to anyone wanting to start out with CSS!

 

Today one of Adobe’s community programs previously known as “Adobe Community Experts” got rebranded to “Adobe Community Professionals“. This was long needed to avoid naming conflicts with other people using the ACE acronym such as the “Adobe Certified Experts“.

I’m also glad to report I’ve been renewed for another term in this program. If you count the years at Macromedia this is now my 8th term, first as a Team Macromedia volunteer, then Adobe Community Expert and now Adobe Community Professional.

Still every year its an anxious wait to see if you’ve made the cut — thanks to Adobe and the community team in particular for their vote of confidence!