Peter Elst

This coming Friday (October 21st) OSFlash.org will host its first Open Source Flash conference via Breeze. The speaker lineup looks great and I expect we’ll be seeing quite a few sneak peeks

17:55 Introduction by Nicolas Cannasse
18:00 Keynote : The OSFlash Revolution by Aral Balkan
18:30 Session : RED5 Prototype Unveiled by John Grden
19:00 Session : The ASWing GUI Framework by Firdosh Tangri
19:30 Session : The ActionStep GUI Framework by Richard Kilmer
20:00 Break 15 minutes
20:15 Session : High-Scale Enterprise OSFlash Projects by Carlos Rovira
20:45 Session : Flash Rich Desktop Applications by Edwin Van Rijkom
21:15 Session : Using the Flash JavaScript Integration Kit by Igor Costa
21:45 Session : MTASC past , present and future by Nicolas Cannasse
22:15 Conclusion

All the times above are in GMT, if you’re planning to attend you can leave your name on the wiki (optional). The URL for the Breeze room will be posted a few hours in advance. Hope to see you then!

I had an interesting comment on one of my blog posts asking about creating your own custom effects in MXML. I knew it was possible but wasn’t really up to speed on the best way to do it. Well, after a bit of research here is an example — its a very basic rotation effect that rotates an object by a given number of degrees over time.

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What a way to start the week! The aggregators are flooded with all the exciting news, but I’ll just add a quick overview here:

Macromedia Labs goes live — a place where developers can get hold of alpha builds of software and see what technologies the engineering team is playing around with. It also has a wiki, an RSS feed and the latest docs on things like ActionScript 3.

Flex Framework 2, Flex Builder 2, Flex Charting components 2, Flash Player 8.5 public alpha versions are available for download.

Flash Player 8.5 is incredibly fast, Claus Wahlers ported the DENG CSS 3 parser to ActionScript 3 and 20kb CSS file parses 12,5 times faster than in Flash Player 8 (without using any additional optimization).

That kind of makes up for not being able to go to MAX — at least I’ll have some more time to experiment with the new goodies

I had an interesting discussion a few days back about Flex compared to the Flash IDE, to many people it appears as though Flash applications built with MXML are by definition very static and lacking real creativity.

Don’t quite agree with that, it might just be that the typical use case for Flex is Flash applications which are generally not very ‘flashy’ but focus more on functionality. That certainly doesn’t mean it has to be that way. XML is not the most convenient format in which to build visual effects (certainly not for right-brainers) but, as Abdul Qabiz also mentions, Flex and the Flash IDE can complement each other very well.

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A few days back Mike Chambers posted an interesting code sample (made by Christian Cantrell) for Flex 2 to the FlashCoders mailinglist that shows a cool way to skin components in MXML.

Notice that it uses CSS and the Embed directive for using images as skins (which compiles the external image into the SWF). This feature alone will save hours when customizing the look and feel of applications compared to the way you do it in AS 2.0 or the Flash IDE, as many Flash developers will know from experience.

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Paul Robertson takes a detailed look at the ECMAScript 4 proposal which should give us some idea of what to expect for ActionScript 3 syntax in Flash Player 8.5.

A great read for people that can’t wait for the alpha release of Flash Player 8.5 next week!

Mike Downey announced the code-name for the next release of Flash. With all those announcements you’ve got to wonder if they’ve got anything else up their sleeve to announce at the MAX conference

Google defines the term Blaze as:

a strong flame that burns brightly; “the blaze spread rapidly” or
hell: a cause of difficulty and suffering; “war is hell”; “go to blazes”

I’m pretty confident the Flash 9 IDE will be more akin to the first definition! The public alpha (yes, you read that correctly “public”) should be available some time next spring

It looks as though we’ll soon be saying goodbye to the name Macromedia, after the company spent some 13 years helping to shape the web. Its surprising to me how much you can get attached to a brand, not just the name but everything it symbolizes. The marketing slogan “Experience matters” has become a way of life for countless designers and developers using their tools on a daily basis, including myself.

Talk about going out with a bang, the decision to give developers a public alpha of Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5 is an example of unprecedented openness and willingness to engage the community in the development process even for Macromedia. I’m not sure if Adobe will take a similar attitude, I sure hope so, but unfortunately don’t really see it happening any day soon.

Macromedia to me exemplifies how an effort to innovate and improve can drive a community and get the best out of everyone. Over the years I’ve been able to meet with some incredibly inspirational people both from Macromedia and outside and no doubt there will be more opportunities to do so in the future.

Conference and community events are a great way to meet the people behind the products so I strongly encourage everyone to head out to any of the upcoming conferences (MAX, Spark Europe etc.) to celebrate Macromedia’s achievements over the last decade and look forward to more amazing things to come!

If you want to get started with Flex there is no better way than sitting yourself down and start experimenting with this book next to you on the desk. Although there’s not much choice of books on Flex, this one I’ve found is exceptionally well-written and will guide you through all aspects of RIA development with Flex.

Something to take into consideration is that “Developing Rich Clients for Macromedia Flex” is not a book for absolute beginners - you ideally need to have some background knowledge on ActionScript 2.0 and OOP methodologies before you get started.

The guys from iteration::two (soon to be Macromedia Consulting EMEA) did an excellent job on this book, hope they’ll do an update for the next release of Flex.

Macromedia today announced its future plans for the Flash platform, which includes Flex 2 and Flash Player 8.5. Most noteworthy is no doubt their plans with the Zorn project which will now be named Flex Builder 2 and replace Flex Builder as we know it today. You can apparently use Flex Builder 2 to compile MXML and regular ActionScript to an SWF without the need to deploy it to a Flex server and it will be priced as a tool (< $1000 USD).

The Flex server will continue to exist and offer additional features to large enterprises. This is a really great move, decoupling MXML from the server is what many developers including myself were waiting for! Flash Player 8.5 will have a new virtual machine, ActionScript 3.0 with support for runtime error reporting, enhanced debugging, even better performance and further ECMAScript compliance.

Macromedia will be releasing a public alpha version of Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5 on October 17th in time for the MAX 2005 conference.

http://www.macromedia.com/go/flex2intro

[update] almost forgot to mention that Flash Player 8.5 will have support for E4X, Regular Expressions and Binary Sockets