Ted Patrick has this post about Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0. http://onflash.org/ted/2010/02/improve-flash-101-and-air-20.php
These platforms are in beta and our support is needed to use them in the real world and report any problems we may find.
Today I got an email from my bank. I thought it to be one of the usual emails telling me about new services that they have, credit cards or security threats that I should be aware.
Today thou I got a surprise: agendaBT. An AIR application that is a very nice agenda application. You can take notes per days using different colors, highlight what you have written or just draw. And while this is not particularly exciting by itself, the design is impressive, I really like it. You can see for yourself:
agendaBT
Flash Platform tooling beta launch is now live. Adobe rolled out a lot of content on the labs and devnet. Get the latest Flash Builder 4 (ex. Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst to play with them.
I just found out from a Tweet post about this tool and I rushed to install it.
Polaris - Adobe AIR desktop reporing for Google Analytics
It is simple to use and free to manage one website profile. It has nice charts and visual transitions. I would love to have this tool for WordPress stats also 
Adobe Romania is organizing a developer day in Bucharest on 19th May. More information can be found on Adobe Romania site. It is about Flex, Flash, AIR, web technologies, RIA, ColdFusion and a lot more.
You will have the chance to meet with Ben Forta – Senior Evangelist, Digby Horner – SVP Emerging Markets and lots of Adobe Romania people.
I have written before about Spaz – the Twitter client I use.
Because it is written in AIR and because is open source and AIR 1.5 just got out with new interesting features, I thought, why not “bend” a little Spaz, just for fun.
I say just for fun because it was not something done after a careful consideration of the usefulness of adding this effect in Spaz.
I have used as a starting point the BlaskBookSafe application described in my previous post. The changes made in Spaz were as follows:
The added code in index.html was of course importing those two scripts added in the lib folder. We need them in order to create the effect and also to “tween” it, to transform the bend into an animation.
The code from spaz.prefs.js is a little more complicated and it creates the bend effect and starts the tween:
1: 'window-alpha': {
2: setUI: function(value) {
3: $('#window-alpha').val(parseInt(value));
4: },
5: onChange: function(value) {
6: //alert(percentage+"%");
7: percentage = parseInt(value);
8: if (isNaN(percentage)) {
9: percentage = 100;
10: }
11: if (percentage < 25) {
12: percentage = 25;
13: }
14: var val = parseInt(percentage) / 100;
15: if (isNaN(val)) {
16: val = 1;
17: } else if (val >= 1) {
18: val = 1;
19: } else if (val <= 0) {
20: val = 1;
21: }
22:
23: /* the bending code */
24: BlenderEffect.get('app:/bender/page.pbj', function(shader){
25: var tween = BlenderEffect.createShaderTransition(window.htmlLoader,
26: shader , 1200, Tween.effects.elasticEase);
27: tween.hideOnFinish = false;
28: tween.start(true);
29: });
30:
31: window.htmlLoader.alpha = val;
32: },
33: check: function() {
34: .....
35: }
The addition was inside the onChange method for the window-alpha setting.
The reason I choose this method was to have a visual indication for changing the alpha setting from preferences. With all this in place, when changing the alpha setting for Spaz a nice effect will warp a little bit the window. I will let you to discover this as an image will not do it.
In the mean time I will send an email to Funkatron, maybe they will be interested in incorporating this in a more useful way .
The last version of Adobe AIR is 1.5 and brings a lot new features especially through integrating Flash Player 10 and updating the included WebKit. More about this can be read on Adobe AIR team blog.
What I want to talk about is a new sample made specially to show the new capabilities of this release, BlackBookSafe. It is an HTML/JavaScript application using jQuery framework and leveraging the encrypted local database, 3d transformations and Pixel Bender effects. Indeed, with the new AIR you can “bend pixels” .
BlackBookSafe screen
BlackBookSafe bended screen
The effect was created using the Adobe Pixel Bender available in Flash Player. And yes, I said that BlackBookSafe was created using HTML and JavaScript. You want to find out how was it done? Mihai Corlan, an Adobe Platform Evangelist wrote an article detailing exactly how this application was created in BlackBookSafe: Anatomy of an AIR 1.5 application.
Recently, to support the testing effort for the Adobe InContext Editing, I have changed all my site to benefit from this new service from Adobe. I was pretty bored with the old design so my site has a new look also.
My site on ICE
Adobe InContext Editing is an online service, available at no charge during the free preview period. It is a RIA application combining both Flex and JavaScript to create a very useful and simple tool to be used by both content contributors and web designers.
Basically what you do is create an HTML page and add some ICE editable regions from Dreamweaver CS4. Then you go in your browser at the same page and hit Ctrl+E and voila.. you can edit that page (in the image above is my Java page after I have done just that). If you need a similar page (let’s say Ajax in my case) you just hit the “duplicate page” button and that is all (aside from additional editing of that page).
The Adobe Platform Evangelists team are trying to find who’s doing Flex & AIR in Central and Easter Europe. If you are a company/independent consultant that knows Flex and/or AIR please drop a note here (corlan.org) specifying:
- Your name
- Type (agency/independent consultant)
- WebSite
- Contact info
- Address/Location
- Any other comments
Some time ago I wrote a small article about web 3.0 as I saw it. It was about moving more and more work and information to web and maybe creating something like a webOS.
Indeed, more and more work and information has moved over the last 2-3 years onto the web. Words like Rich Internet Application and Software as a Service become vary popular and even more, a reality.
Ajax and Flex have enriched our web experience a lot in the recent years. Web sites that do not have a nice information flow to the customer are less and less visited. We as customers value this kind of things. I like to go to an web site and work my way through the information without being interrupted by a page refresh.
Also media on the web become a something very common. If some years ago watching a flash movie on the web was a rare event, now sites like youtube.com made this a common thing.
All of this was possible due to multiple factors but I think the main one was easier access to broadband internet connection for more and more people. The ability to move around massive amounts of date was crucial to the web development we are seeing right now. Would you try to watch a movie on youtube.com over a 3 Kb/s line? Even going on flickr.com will make you think twice, especially if you are paying by the MB.
So BTW, what are we paying by the MB right now and is slow compared to our unlimited broadband connection from home?
The next rethinking about the way we are writing web applications will be linked to the mobile business. iPhone, HTC, Eten, BlackBerry will be the new drivers in shaping up the new generation of web application. They have a small screen, slow and very expensive internet connection, however more and more people are using them to browse the web. The experience right now is far from enjoyable as most web applications are not designed for this. All of them are using different pan and zoom techniques to overcome the screen problem but this is just an workaround.
Soon, some business owner will look to his site analytics reports and figure out that more than a half of his visitors are using mobile devices. And this business owner will go to a contractor and ask him to optimize the web site to be best view on mobile devices. Web 3.0 was born.
