There are some interesting things happening for the next release of Flex. If you were at one of the MAX conferences last year you might have already seen Ely Greenfield talk about the Flex roadmap, now there’s a video about Flex “Gumbo” up on Adobe TV.
Excited to see how things are shaping up!
I’m excited to be partnering up with Comtaste for their “Meet the Guru” training sessions starting this October in London.
October 13-15th, I’ll be doing a three day course on “Programming ActionScript 3 for Flex 3“, covering everything you’ll need to get started with ActionScript 3.0 development for your Flex-based Rich Internet Applications.
Later that month Marco Casario is doing a “Flex 3 and Flex Builder 3” course and Koen de Weggheleire will be teaching “Developing desktop applications with AIR, Ajax and Flex“.
Needless to say these are going to be great events and a fantastic opportunity to get up to speed with the latest Adobe technology has to offer!
The courses take place at the Lafone House, The Leathermarket - Weston Street in London. Its a bring your own laptop event, course material that attendees get will include the books “Flex Solutions: Essential Techniques for Flex 2 and 3 Developers” and “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0“.
If you use the discount code “Peter” you’ll get a 5% discount when registering for the training. Hope to see you there!
More information and registration here
I was amazed at the amount of positive feedback I got yesterday when Leo Laporte published the little twitlive.tv AIR application on his blog.
Decided to address some of the excellent suggestions that were coming in and spent another hour or so working on it before releasing this 1.5 build.
Here’s what has changed:
- The application has been renamed to “TWiT Live Desktop”
- Application icon is now vector and looks much better
- IRC channel is now supported
- Refresh button added to force reload the live stream
- Compact video mode plays the video in a smaller “always on top” window
In a next release I’ll be looking at the following features:
- Add support back in for minimizing, maximizing and resizing the application
- Icon to toggle the “always on top” setting on the main window
- Preferences panel to tell the app to launch in regular or compact mode at startup, save your timezone setting so the Google Calendar displays the schedule for your timezone etc.
- Notes feature to allow you to quickly write down a URL or something interesting you heard and save it out to a file.
Some of the other feature requests that came in have to do with how Stickam handles their embedded video and chat. I’d love to talk to them to see if there’s a way to make it work. If there is anyone from Stickam reading or you know anyone there feel free to send me an email.
For those wondering version 1.5 is about 40 lines of code at this point. I will be open sourcing the application at some point in time, probably in a release or two, and putting it up on Google Code.
Download and install here:
Last Sunday afternoon I was listening to The Tech Guy on twitlive.tv and when I accidentally closed its tab one too many times decided to quickly make an AIR app for it to have it available as a desktop application.
It literally took me 11 lines of code and a good 15 minutes to build. Decided to send it to Leo and was happy to hear how excited he was about the app and did a plug for it on the net@night and MacBreak Weekly podcasts.
You can use the application to watch the live video stream and see the schedule for upcoming shows. Looks like it was released just in time to see him do the 24 hour iPhone 3G launch marathon.
For those of you not familiar with Adobe AIR:
- AIR is a free cross OS runtime (Windows, Mac and Linux)
- There’s no new language to learn, it uses web technologies like HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex
- You get a lot of additional API’s like drag ‘n drop, filesystem access, network detection, clipboard access, local database support and much more that you can directly call from your code
This particular application was built in Flex with a TabNavigator component and two HTML components that are specific to AIR (the runtime has the open source WebKit embedded, the same HTML rendering engine as Safari uses).
For embedding the AIR install badge on his blog, Leo is the AIR Badge plugin for WordPress, a project I started a couple of months back.
I hope you’ll like this little application, there’s obviously a lot more you can do with this so am happy to hear any feature requests you might have. Leave a comment or drop me an email.
Nice one, found out a week or so ago that this blog has been aggregated on the Rich Internet Applications category on alltop.com, Guy Kawasaki’s latest project.
Its quite an accomplishment and am rather proud to be sharing the stage with several of the big shots in the community, better keep the quality of my blog posts up. Incidentally you need to have a new blog post up at least every 28 days or you’re automatically kicked out so better not start slacking off.
I’m very happy to see Ryan Stewart from Adobe taking my concerns on board with regards to Flash content SEO and launching the “Flex SEO Contest“. Its not been particularly fun being the whiney guy continuously talking about issues with SWF indexing.
At the very least we’ll get people to actively start experimenting with SEO for Flex applications, see what works and learn some best practices. Make sure to get involved!
More about the contest here: http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1478
After Tuesday’s announcement about SWF now getting fully indexed I thought I’d do a little experiment and put up a few test SWF files.
Its difficult to accurately deduct what exactly is happening but thought I’d write down what I’ve tried and what the results are thus far.
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Was interested to read that in the latest Flash Player 10 beta refresh a number of issues have been fixed that were real showstoppers for Linux users. Most notably webcam support has always been problematic, which meant that that devices like the Nokia N800, the Eee PC and many others could not take full advantage of a number of web apps.
The Linux Flash Player beta now also support wmode, meaning your embedding SWF is not automatically the top-most element and you can have things like navigation elements rendered above.
I think what might be even more significant is that for the first time ever the Linux Flash Player seems to be on the same release cycle as those for PC and Mac.
This is really great news as it means new features in the Flash Player will now be completely cross platform from the get go rather than the Linux release lagging behind for a year or more.
Happy to see Adobe paying more attention to Linux and hope the Flex Builder 3 alpha for Linux is also getting closer to a release.
Go get the latest Flash Player 10 beta here
I’m very excited about the RIAJobs.org project now sponsoring on one of my all time favorite podcasts!
RIA Weekly is a (somewhat weekly) podcast with Michael Coté from Redmonk and Ryan Stewart, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, and the occasional guest.
If you’re at all into Rich Internet Applications that is definitely a podcast you’ll want to subscribe to. Previous episodes already featured news and discussion on Flex, Sprout Builder, Curl, JavaFX, Gears, etc.
Make sure to listen to episode #17 for a special offer that you might want to take advantage of!
Over the months I have tried numerous Twitter clients and few have survived my wrath. Twitter has for me largely taken over from email and IM for staying in touch with colleagues, family and friends. Working with the constraint of 140 characters also tends to make sure people get to the point which you don’t always get with email.
I’ll just walk through some of the clients I’ve used so far:
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