Peter Elst

Kevin Lynch walked us through ‘a day in the life’ with several very interesting AIR applications. I think it shows the huge potential of AIR as a platform when you see just how many fantastic applications have been made while the product is still very much in beta.

People seem very excited in the idea of leveraging their existing skills and porting traditional web 2.0 to web-enabled desktop solutions and Adobe makes this a compelling story.

Kevin Lynch and Shantanu Narayen kicked off the first day keynote at MAX Barcelona on Monday talking about the new Adobe Developer Connection site, the history of multimedia experiences and Adobe’s five rules for creating the next generation of engaging experiences.

…or what is all the fuss about? If there’s one controversial topic in the community its speaker arrangements with regards to covering their expenses for conferences. In the last few years several people have been pretty vocal in expressing their opinion on the issue.

Just to put this into context, I’m not pointing the finger at any particular event or organizer nor am I suggesting that its in any way unethical for a conference to make a profit. I want to put some information out there for those of you that might be wondering how things are handled by various conferences.

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Last Tuesday Serge Jespers presented a new project code named Pacifica during the second day keynote at MAX Barcelona. Pacifica is a service that allows VoIP, messaging and presence information to be integrated within your Flash, Flex and AIR projects.

It even has support for connecting to the PSTN on the roadmap, essentially enabling you to place calls directly from your web and/or desktop application.

Unfortunately Adobe’s CEO, Bruce Chizen, couldn’t make it to MAX Barcelona but I just got round to uploading his talk during the second day keynote in Chicago.

More reviews and videos of the European MAX conference are coming soon!

When you’ve got Installer.app installed on your iPod Touch you’ll notice that it allows you to install Apache and a number of scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby).

That’s all well and good but getting it to run in on that local Apache install is another thing. Just managed to get it to work with PHP 5.2.3 so just follow along if you’re in the same situation:

1. Edit /etc/profile and update the line setting PATH to read as follows:

PATH="/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/opt/iphone/bin"

2. Edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and add the following to the end of the file:

ScriptAlias /php /opt/iphone/bin
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
Action application/x-httpd-php "/php/php-cgi"

2. Restart Apache by SSH’ing to the iPod Touch and running the following command:

apachectl restart

Now put your PHP files into the webroot (/Library/WebServer/Documents/) and access them by pointing Safari to http://127.0.0.1/<path_to_your_file>.php

I’m yet to try it with Perl and Ruby but that should just be a matter of adding another ScriptAlias to httpd.conf of your local Apache install. Enjoy!

I’m a very happy camper — spent about an hour this afternoon hacking my new iPod Touch and thanks to the guys at touchdev.net I now have third party applications enabled with the 1.1.1 firmware!

All in all it wasn’t that difficult to do if you strictly follow the step by step instructions. If you’re scared of opening up Terminal this jailbreak process is going to be a bit daunting though. To enable third party applications on your iPod Touch just follow this guide: http://www.touchdev.net/wiki/Jailbreak_Guide

Here are a few minor hiccups I ran into:

- Had problems getting libreadline to work when not copied into the root folder of your HD (/opt/local/lib/libreadline.5.2.dylib)
- Cyberduck really is the best FTP software to SFTP into the device, tried Transmit and had some issues renaming folders

I currently have the following apps installed:

- Mail (iPhone)
- Weather (iPhone)
- Stocks (iPhone)
- Notes (iPhone)
- Maps (iPhone)
- Calendar (adding events enabled)
- Taptap Revolution
- Stumbler
- Sudoku
- MobileCast
- MobileRSS
- VNsea

As was to be expected some of the apps listed in Installer.app don’t work well on the iPod Touch (yet) but overall its been a very positive experience. When someone gets round to porting Flash Player for use on the iPod this will be my all time favorite multimedia device.

I heard via Marco Casario that a Flash Lite 1.1 guide for the Adobe MAX Barcelona conference has been released by Paul Lamonby and just gave it a test run on my Nokia N95.

Its done really well — you can easily browse through the different days and sessions are sorted by time. If you click on a particular session you get a map showing you what room it is in.

This is going to be so much handier than a little pocket guide like we got at MAX Chicago. If you’ve got a Flash Lite enabled phone and are attending MAX Barcelona, be sure to download this!

I made it out to Brussels today for the afternoon sessions of Adobe’s Beyond Boundaries event — pretty cool stuff! Sakri Rosenstrom started out with the second part of his ActionScript 3.0 session and went into a wide range of topics as well as a basic checklist of migrating over from AS1 and AS2.

He used some hilarious metaphors when it came to OOP, might have to ‘borrow’ some of those for future presentations. Incidentally just remembered that I used his ’second cousin’ E4X joke at Flashforward which got quite a few laughs, so props to him for that!

It might sound strange but I’ve found introductory sessions are some of the most difficult ones to do, you need to cover an incredible amount of information and your audience typically comes from widely diverging backgrounds as opposed to discussing a specific API or design pattern where you can really focus on the topic at hand and get it across. I think he absolutely nailed it — could probably easily have used another hour or so to get more in depth, but who can realistically expect to learn AS3 in such a short amount of time.

Danny Dura first did a session on Flex Builder 3 showing some of the new goodies we can now play with in the beta — advanced contraints, CSS design view, skinning, CRUD wizard, WSDL generator, profiling etc. Not a lot of new information there but I was amazed at what a workflow improvement this represented, I’ve played with many of the features individually but got a better picture of how combining all this can make you a lot more productive.

The final session Danny did was an overview of AIR, this was one of the first public presentations I saw that used beta 2 of the runtime. If you haven’t tried the new beta yet, be sure to download and play around with it — it has lots of new features and it convinced me that I really need to start moving into RIA development for the desktop in the near future.

All in all, great event and seemed to be a very positive response from the attendees and buzz around Flex 3 and AIR. Let’s hope for some more of these type of events coming soon!

Next Sunday I’ll be flying over to Barcelona together with Koen to make it out for Adobe MAX Barcelona, the first MAX conference to come to Europe.

I’m really looking forward to meeting up with local friends and colleagues from the community, ironically enough I don’t get to see them quite as often as those based in North America. Its promising to see how the landscape is changing these last few years though — we’re getting more and more quality conferences over here.

My session is entitled “Best Practices for Developing with ActionScript 3.0″, you can catch it at the following times:

Monday, October 15th – 10:00am
Wednesday, October 17th – 10:15am

For those interested, I won’t limit my presentation to just discussing AS3 — I’ll be talking about methodologies, dealing with clients, feature creep and maintaining your sanity as a freelance developer.

Other sessions I’m hoping to catch are:

- “Play with pixels : Bitmap manipulation with Flash CS3″ by Koen de Weggheleire
- “Take the Web to the Next Dimension” by Carlos Ulloa
- “Using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) APIs” by Andrew Shorten