Peter Elst

Recently James Ward, Technical Evangelist at Adobe, did a video showing performance of Flex running on the Google Nexus One in Flash Player 10.1.

Consider that myth about Flash Player performance not being up to scratch for use on a certain mobile device well and truly busted!

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.

We’re about a month away from the next edition of “The ActionScript Conference” and I can’t wait! This conference has fast become one of my all time favorites and this year will no doubt be even better with two days of sessions scheduled in.

The speaker lineup looks excellent and includes people like: Ryan Stewart, Leif Wells, Andre Michelle, Marco Casario, Mohammed Khan and lots more local and international talent.

If you didn’t make it last year, its worth checking out Lee Brimelow’s video.



 
I’ll be doing a session called “Getting Creative with AIR” and showing how you can take advantage of the various APIs and get creative with them building some unexpected applications.

Hope to see you there! I’ll be in Singapore from September 12th until the 19th.

 
Get your ticket now: www.theactionscriptconference.com

 

I was happy to see this video by Dave McAllister, Open Standards Evangelist at Adobe, talking about Adobe’s take on open initiatives and how that involves community.
 
There are some common misconceptions about Adobe being very concerned with keeping their core technologies closed and proprietary while, more so than many other leading technology companies, the opposite is true. Even more so in the last few years.
 

 
(via Serge Jespers)
 

I came across this great video by Paul Robertson, Senior ActionScript Developer/Writer at Adobe, about local database optimization with Adobe AIR. There’s some really useful information in his presentation so definitely worth watching!
 

Sometimes I really wish I worked over in San Francisco — now and again Adobe does these great meet ups, like recently happened with FlashCamp. They’ve put the video of the presentations online including a keynote by CTO Kevin Lynch and the following topics:

• Introduction to Flash Catalyst

• What’s New in Flex 4
• Skinning Components and Apps in Flex 4
• New Productivity Features in Flash Builder 4
• New Data Features in Flash Builder 4
• Update on Adobe AIR
• Using Effects and Animation in Flex 4
• Advanced CSS in Flex 4

 
These are some really good in depth presentations that I can highly recommend you check out!
 

Ryan Stewart has an interesting video up on Adobe TV showing the ColdFusion proxy tags for use in Flex based apps. Shows the ability to call ColdFusion functionality directly from Flex without having to write the server side code yourself.

This feature will likely be available with the release of ColdFusion 9 aka Centaur.
 

While at Scotch on the Road in London earlier this week I recorded a couple of videos and quickly edited those together for those interested to get a glimpse of what the event was like.

Includes some clips of the pre event drinks at O’Neills, Adobe’s opening keynote sneaks, Terry Ryan’s “Extending Bolt” session and Kev McCabe and Andy Allan wrapping up the day. Enjoy!