Peter Elst

Watch this space for live coverage of the Adobe Keynote with Kevin Lynch here at Flashforward2007 Boston kicking off in just under an hour.

08:36:47 GMT-0400 – The room is starting to fill up, O’Reilly is pulling out all the stops — a free copy of Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0 on every seat. Read the rest of this entry »

With just a couple of hours to go before I leave for Boston and a sold out Flashforward, here’s a first beta release of AIR LiveBlogger for you guys to play with.

Install notes

1. Make sure you have the AIR runtime installed
2. Download the AIR LiveBlogger .air file
3. Install and run

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For the last few nights I’ve been working on an AIR app that allows you to do live blogging. Its almost ready for a public alpha so thought I’d blog a little preview.

First step is to fill in your blog connection details (XML-RPC gateway, username and password).

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One thing I hear a lot from people moving into object-oriented code with ActionScript 3.0 is how it is much more structured and readable than doing things on the timeline in the Flash IDE.

That doesn’t mean that there are no situations where your code needs to deal with the timeline. I’m personally still a fan of setting up view states and transitions as keyframes on the timeline, hooking it all up and controlling it from the Document class.

Working with keyframes for application states its always advisable to use frame labels. Luckily for us ActionScript 3.0 now gives us additional features to work with the timeline and get frame label information.

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I got an interesting question the other day from someone wondering how you can insert variable values when defining an XML structure in ActionScript 3.0. Its actually an interesting feature I haven’t seen a lot of discussion around.

As most of you will probably know, ActionScript 3.0 now treats XML as a native data type meaning its no longer parsed as a String. That does bring with it that the old methods of inserting variable values (e.g. “<value>”+myValue+”</value>”) no longer apply.

So how was this addressed?

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The talented guys (and gal) over at Nectarine have started a weekly comic strip which looks absolutely kick-ass, can’t wait for the next one!

Ted Patrick appears to have stumbled across a bit of a sore spot in what Microsoft calls its “Windows Live Streaming Service” — it turns out to be nothing more than progressive download over HTTP.

It even “streams” FLV and SWF files as long as you give it a .WMV extension ;)

If this is confirmed that is just a ludicrous marketing mistake, how could they possibly expect this to go unnoticed and who had the brilliant idea of marketing this at IBC as a breakthrough “streaming” solution?

Read more: http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/09/flex-and-flv-in-microsoft-streaming.php

[update] SWF/FLV playback example has now been removed by Microsoft

With Flashforward2007 Boston just over a week away I thought I’d post what sessions I’m planning to attend. The speaker lineup is just fantastic, can’t wait for the conference to kick off!

My own session will be “OOP for the Noob”, an introduction to object-oriented programming in ActionScript 3.0.

I’ve got a great slot assigned, first day just after lunch, can’t believe my luck. That translates to some serious party time for the remaining days rather than staying locked up in the hotel room making those last minute tweaks to my presentation.

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There’s been a lot of debate around web vs desktop as a platform for deploying applications for some years now. With the popularity of web 2.0 initiatives (and social networking sites in particular) some thought the whole momentum was shifting and the very idea of desktop applications was antiquated.

Of course that is not the case, there is still the issue of occasionally connected devices, the lack of offline functionality that comes with it and on the other hand the situation where current generation web applications are crippled because of browser and security restrictions.

What is the web 2.0 way to solve this? They release ‘desktop’ utilities to work around the issues such as drag ‘n drop upload, publish ‘desktop’ widgets to allow interacting with their particular site outside of a browser environment. Do you see the problem here?

Its not a question of choosing between either. Technology like Adobe’s AIR (or Google Gears to some extent) are taking on the task of bridging the gap between these two platforms and bring them together. It is the same web application that gets enabled on the desktop, breaking out of the restrictions of a browser shell to integrate seamlessly with the OS file system, a local database (SQLite) and transparently work with system events, notifications, icons, installation across PC, Mac and coming soon Linux.

If you have a HTML, AJAX-enabled web application or a full-fledged Flex application why not package that up as an AIR application and bring it to the desktop. In many cases where not talking about creating a new application, rather just a question of checking whether you’re currently in a desktop environment and take advantage of the additional functionality provided by the AIR runtime.

I see AIR as an ‘enabling’ technology rather than something new for people to learn — HTML, Flash and Flex developers can leverage their existing skills and now deploy to the desktop.

In many ways the important news here is the concept of the web converging with the desktop, not what may or may not be included in an AIR 1.0 release, or even whether it is a solution coming from Adobe, Google or Microsoft.

We can only hope the various solutions play nice and can coexist peacefully. One thing I’m sure of is that this move is radically redefining the deployment and revision model for applications and redefining our idea of web 2.0 applications as we know it.

So, what’s happening with our local user group? More than you might have expected! We’ve been very busy behind the scenes preparing for some upcoming sessions and making sure that we have a kick ass community for our members.

First of all of course, if you missed the news — Koen de Weggheleire (of newmovieclip.com and Multi-Mania fame) has taken over the role of user group manager and he’s doing a wonderful job. Serge and myself are still involved and we have a number of other members that are actively lending a hand.

Then, the name change. We started back in July 2004 as the Macromedia User Group Belgium (MMUG), rebranded to Multimedia User Group Belgium after the acquisition by Adobe was complete December 2005 and now we’ve gone all the way and named our group the Adobe User Group Belgium, with a domain name to match: www.adobeusergroup.be.

The site not only has a forum for all your technical and conversational needs, we also have a growing list of Flash, Flex and AIR tutorials (to which you can contribute) and other benefits for registered user group members. Be sure to check it out!

Now for some of the events we have in store!

We’ll start out on September 15th with an ‘inspirational Saturday’ at the offices of These Days in Antwerp with creative showcases by These Days, BUT and Lost Boys. This is followed by a BBQ, a user group first and we hope we can make this a regular yearly event.

Drinks are sponsored by These Days but we do ask for a contribution for the barbeque, more information on the site. An excellent opportunity for networking and among other things we’ll be raffling a full ticket to MAX Europe in Barcelona (including flight and hotel stay!) — what more of an excuse do you need?

The user group posse (read Koen, Serge and myself) will all be presenting at MAX Europe in Barcelona as well, so if you are there too drop us a message on the user group forum and we’ll organize a little get together.

In October we’ll have Ben Forta over in Belgium again for some ColdFusion goodness followed by our regular Mike Chambers the next month.

www.adobeusergroup.be