Join Adobe for a day of news, views and product deep dives fresh from MAX in LA. If you couldn’t make it to Los Angeles then this is your chance to be the first in Europe to see all the latest product demos around Flash, Flex, AIR, Stage 3D and more. Meet the evangelists, ask your question and get ready to have some fun.
Paris 27 October 2011
Don’t miss Back From Max Paris on October 27th 2011. Come and discover the latest news from Adobe MAX around multiplatform development for iOS, Android, PlayBook and others. Listen to our Evangelism team talks on Flash, Flex, HTML5, AIR, Multiplattform Apps, -Gaming and -Video!
Berlin 28 October 2011 Adobe Tech Summit 2011 Berlin will give you more than 16 hours of free power seminars and workshops on HTML5, Flash, Flex, AIR, Multiplattform Apps, -Gaming and -Video! You’ll come away from this day inspired and informed with all the news fresh from Adobe MAX.
London 02 November 2011
Join us for a half day at London’s Barbican Centre where you’ll get all the news from Adobe MAX in our keynote followed by two technical tracks. One track will have a more enterprise focus with sessions onFlex, AIR and mobile. Whilst the second will focus on gaming and flash technologies.
The agenda for each event can be viewed on their respective pages. Just click on the links above to find out more and register.
Day 1 – Creativity unleashed Date: Monday, October 3, 2011 Time: 9:30 am – 11:30 am (5:30 pm – 7:30 pm London time) Duration: 120 minutes Description: Join Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch and guests to learn how Adobe is transforming the creative process across mobile devices, personal computers, and the cloud.
Day 2 – Creating the very best user experiences Date: Tuesday, October 4, 2011 Time: 10 am – 11:30 am (6:00 pm – 7:30 pm London time) Duration: 90 minutes Description: Join us as we explore the best solutions for delivering highly expressive and usable experiences, both in the browser and as apps. We’ll look at a variety of technologies and products, highlighting current opportunities, and peering into the not-so-distant future.
For any Flash or Flex developer looking to create applications for mobile (in particular Android ones) then this is a great book to have on your desk! Weighing in at 372 pages, there is a lot of content in there just waiting for you to try out and play with.
First things first, this is a Cookbook. It’s not a reference title listing every single API and documenting every single class available. Though to be honest, it seems to cover most of the new AIR for Android features. The idea behind a Cookbook is to provide you with a selection of ‘recipes’ or common tasks, and then explain how to go about solving them in a clear and concise way. This book does this brilliantly. It is the sort of book you can dib into when you have a specific thing to get done in your app and you’re not sure where to start. Having said that, I basically read it from cover to cover, and still found it very informative and enjoyable.
The book is broken up into the following 11 chapters …
Chapter 1: Getting Ready to Work with Android: Development Environment and Project Setup (10 recipes)
Chapter 2: Interaction Experience: Multitouch, Gestures, and Other Input (13 recipes)
Chapter 3: Movement through Space: Accelerometer and Geolocation Sensors (9 recipes)
Chapter 4: Visual and Audio Input: Camera and Microphone Access (6 recipes)
Chapter 5: Rich Media Presentation: Working with Images, Video, and Audio (7 recipes)
Chapter 7: Native Interaction: StageWebView and URI Handlers (10 recipes)
Chapter 8: Abundant Access: File System and Local Database (7 recipes)
Chapter 9: Manifest Assurance: Security and Android Permissions (6 recipes)
Chapter 10: Avoiding Problems: Debugging and Resource Considerations (6 recipes)
Chapter 11: Final Considerations: Application Compilation and Distribution (10 recipes)
All these chapter are equally important and cover a wide range of features, but which ones you’ll actually need to use will depend on your project and what you are trying to achieve. Although the title of this book specifies Android, most of the code in this book will work equally well on iOS devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook. That’s the joy of developing using ActionScript and AIR!
I was particularly pleased to see that nearly all the code examples were IDE agnostic and didn’t tie you in to the Flex framework. They concentrated on using pure ActionScript in whatever IDE you feel comfortable working in. In fact, Joseph even went to the trouble of explaining any IDE specific stuff using example in Flash Pro CS5.5, Flash Builder 4.5 and FDT 4.1.
Once you have had a flick through at some of the examples it quickly becomes clear that Adobe have done a really good job at providing a consistent and logical API for achieving all these new mobile specific things. And this book does a great job of demystifying it all.
My one criticism would be that there is quite a lot of repetitive code (about 14 lines) in each example, where Joseph sets up an output textfield (and accompanying textformat) for demonstration purposes. But I guess I noticed it more because I was reading the book straight through (not how it was intended to be read). At least this way, each ‘recipe’ or example is self contained and provides everything you need to get you up and running easily.
I did notice a few errors here and there (code and layout), but nothing too serious that would cause you issues.
I’d thoroughly recommend this title to anyone who is interested in creating mobile apps for either Android, iOS or PlayBook using AIR and ActionScript.
You may have noticed recently that Google have been advertising their Chrome browser on TV. The advert I saw showed a chap called Edward Lewis (fictional I presume) sending emails to his newly born daughter, Hollie. All very cute and sentimental, ahhhh. If you didn’t see it you can watch it on YouTube here.
But you have to feel sorry for poor Mr Lewis (who is doing his best to provide his little girl with a valuable commentary of her early years), because at every turn Google are out to mess with his mind!
First of all he creates a new gMail account for Hollie with the username ‘dear.hollie’, only to find she already has 32 emails waiting for her in her inbox!
Secondly, he has been busy recording special moments of Hollie on his trust camcorder and diligently uploading them to YouTube for her to watch when she is older. We see him logged in to YouTube as ‘Edwardlewis599′ and he has already uploaded 11 clips.
Thirdly, at 42 seconds in, we see Mr Lewis trying to find where he needs to take his princess for her ‘First Day At School’. Obviously, not wanting to turn up at the wrong place he does a search using the Chrome browser address bar for ‘Park Road Primary School’.
And the school that Mr Lewis finds has obviously been taken in to special measures and then closed by OFSTED! Poor Hollie.
But to be honest, it’s lucky he ever found the school on her first day anyway. As Google Maps tells him that the school is located at 10 Park Road, NW4 84W.
Anyone that lives in the NW4 postcode area of London will be able to tell you that they live in Hendon, near the end of the M1 motorway, not Ealing, which is where Google Maps is trying to take him.
In fact, Google Maps doesn’t take poor Edward to Park Road at all. It takes him to Weymouth Ave in Ealing, a whole 9.2 miles (21 minutes) away. Me thinks Hollie is going to be late!
A quick drag of the little yellow man on to the map reveals what the school looks like …
Very impressive!!!
Whereas, on Street Map what we see is …
Not quite as impressive.
Maybe Hollie is actually meant to go to Little Ealing Primary School instead, there has just been an administrative error somewhere along the line …
Ok, let’s suspend disbelief for a little while longer and assume Mr Lewis knows where he has to take his daughter.
Next we see a lovely photo of lovely Hollie with all her school bags ready to go. At the top we can see that he has geotagged the photo with the latitude and longitude …
Hosted by Seb Lee-Delisle and Iain Lobb, two names I’m sure you will recognise from the UK Flash scene.
They will be discussing the ins-and-outs of programming for visual and creative applications. The first episode only went out on 30th January 2011, so it is still early days. Give them your support by subscribing in iTunes now.
Here are direct links to the three episodes so far …
Thank you for your participation in the Adobe Wave beta program on Adobe Labs. Adobe Labs provides us with an environment to release exciting, innovative technology to our community and gather feedback. Sometimes these technologies turn into shipping products and other times they provide valuable learning that is applied across our portfolio of products. We have decided not to continue development of Adobe Wave. As it is an online service, it will cease to function once the Adobe Wave servers are shut down, which will happen on April 15, 2011. We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to use this time to find an alternative solution for your needs. Thank you again for your use of Adobe Labs and we look forward to your participation in future beta programs.
Best,
Adobe Wave Team”
Adobe Wave was a desktop alert and notification application/system, that allowed users to send messages out to subscribers (hmmm, sounds a bit like Twitter doesn’t it?). I signed up to the program in August 2009 and then never used it. I think discontinuing this product is a good thing, it couldn’t compete with Twitter and Adobe are better off focusing their energies elsewhere.
O’Reilly are running a competition to ‘Win Your Wish List‘. Post your list on your blog and be in with a chance of winning the whole lot. You have until Tuesday 22nd February.
Last Wednesday (12th Jan 2011) Google released an API for accessing their goo.gl URL shortening service, which is great for web developers. However, for us Flash developers things aren’t quite so simple as it is for everyone else. This is due to the security restrictions imposed when accessing the goo.gl domain. There is a crossdomain policy file at the root of their server (http://goo.gl/crossdomain.xml) but it is very restrictive and of no use to us, causing security errors inside your Flash movie once it has been deployed online.
So I have written an ActionScript class and PHP script which makes the whole process easier for everybody. Here is a demo of it in action …
Hooray! I finally got around to updating WordPress on my blog. I had been running version 2.5 for ages and just couldn’t find the time to update it, even though I knew I should. This afternoon I successfully upgraded to version 3.0.4
I just love it when things work! Respect to the developers at WordPress for making the upgrade process so simple.
Here is a little tool that I have made which can be used to encode and decode strings into URL escape sequences (eg. convert special characters so they are safe to transmit in a query string). I recently also had the need to encode and decode HTML named entity references (eg. ” becomes ”) and after a long hunt around the web I couldn’t find one in AS3. So I have also written a static class called HTMLEntities which has the public methods ‘encode’ and ‘decode’. Hopefully you will find it useful. All the source code is available below.
NOTE: If you use the HTMLEntities class, you may want to remove the entry for the apostrophe (‘) which encodes it as ' because it is not supported by Internet Explorer. Apostrophes are better off being encoded as '
Here are some useful lists of the HTML Named Entities …
With all the interest in mobile development there come the issue of dynamically resizing UI elements based on the pixel density of the screen. For example, if a button is set to be 100 pixels wide, it will appear at different physical widths depending on the device being used. This is because your desktop monitor may have a pixel density (DPI or PPI) of 86dpi but you mobile phone may have a pixel density of 326dpi (as is the case with the retina display on the iPhone 4). This may meant that you nicely designed UI is unusable, with items being too small to click on with your finger!
Over the last couple of days I’ve been messing around with QR Codes and the Google Chart API. Basically I wanted to create a QR code in Flash using Google Charts to do the hard work. However, once I had it sending the data and loading the PNG back in locally, I soon discovered that Google Charts doesn’t have a crossdomain policy file (http://code.google.com/crossdomain.xml). This basically meant I couldn’t access the ‘content’ of the Loader object and I couldn’t access the BitmapData of the loaded PNG.
I then remembered reading about using a server-side script to act as a proxy, which would circumvent the security restrictions within Flash. After a lot of digging around on the web I came across a great article on Activetuts+ which had sample PHP code I could use. Success! It was now working online without any security sandbox violations.
Now I had access to the BitmapData of the loaded PNG I could make use of corelib to allow the user to save the resulting image as a PNG or JPEG to their computer. After that I added the ability to print the QR Code on to an A4 sheet directly from Flash. And finally I thought I’d have a go at using AlivePDF to create a PDF file on-the-fly which the user can save to their computer using FileReference (Flash Player 10 and above). I found this blog post by Alex Britez useful when generating the PDF using AlivePDF.
So here is the final SWF and a ZIP file containing all the (FlashDevelop) source is below.
If you have a mobile version of a website you may want to point users in the direction of an app that is available in the Android Marketplace. If so, you can do it like this …
I was recently working a project which used both TLFTextFields and FlashVars, and I came across a rather nasty bug. Basically, if you have at least one TLFTextField in your project access to FlashVars will stop working. So I posted the bug on the Adobe Forums – Text Layout Framework section and thankfully Alan Stearns got back to me very quickly with the answer.
The problem is down to the Text Layout Framework Runtime Shared Library preloading.
Over the last 12 months I’ve been using Snipplr to save code snippets online. It’s a great service for storing, sharing and accessing those bits of code that come in handy. You can also search for other peoples code and mark them as ‘favourites’ and follow people etc.
My only criticism would be regarding the search results and the use of ‘tags’. You are able to ‘tag’ your snippets with keywords, but these don’t seem to be taken into account when doing a search. So this limits the results a bit.
Earlier in the year Snipplr was acquired by Envato (Owners of activeden, tuts+ and many more), which may mean some improvements are on the way.
After recently seeing Chris Johnson’s Rotating SpiralChrome Experiment using JavaScript and SVG (and very good it is too), I decided to create something similar in Flash. Now, let me first start off by saying that Chris’s spiral is a lot cleverer than mine because his is created programmatically, whereas mine is just a vector created in Adobe Illustrator and controlled using AS3 in Flash.
Note, I did not create this to be some kind of benchmark testing tool between Flash and SVG rendering speeds. Please don’t post loads of comments telling me that one is better/faster than the other etc.
I’ve added some stats output just to see how it performs on different machines and for my own use. I’ve also added some controls, such as framerate, rotation speed, shade, quality, direction, colours and full screen mode. There are also some keyboard controls …
SPACE = Hide/show control bar and stats
S = Hide/show shade
Q = Toggle quality
D = Toggle direction
September 27th, 2011 by 
Adrian Parr 
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