Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows...

Monday, January 21, 2008

PV3D : Course in London, 2nd day

The second day was the most interesting of the two days as we here got to dive a bit deeper into the API's and even got to do some "freestyle" coding under the watchful eye from the competent Mr. Ralph Hauwert.

The sources and presentation files for the entire course can be downloaded from UnitZeroOne's website:
http://www.unitzeroone.com/papervision/workshops/workshoplondon.zip

An additional source is a spherical panorama of the course-hall which can be downloaded here:
http://www.unitzeroone.com/papervision/workshops/spherePano.zip

DFUG : Manager for Adobe User Group Copenhagen



Its a great honor for me to have been elected the regional manager for the Adobe User Group in Copenhagen in collaboration with Mikkel Havmand.
We hope to be able to make a difference on the Copenhagen RIA scene and I sincerely hope to be able to arrange for some cool events, both virtual and real-life, in the upcoming year.
I will from now on be posting about topics relating to this as well as RIA and Adobe Flex in general.

Check out the official statement (sorry, its only in Danish):
http://flashforum.dk/publikationer/nyheder/dfug-far-nyt-manager-team-i-kobenhavn

FITC : ActionScript 3.0 PostFestival Session

If you are attending this years FITC in Amsterdam, don't miss out on the opportunity for at day with Colin Mook. The day after the "Flash In The Can" festival, there is a "ActionScript - From The Ground Up" session.



You can sign up here, and its free.
The SignUp form is taylered for US citizens only, but with a little cheekiness you can get around it.

Sign up here:
http://www.adobeas3tour.com/

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Apple : Apple MacBook AIR

It looks amazing and I am now 99,9% sure that my next Laptop will be a Apple MacBook AIR... preferrably with the 64GB solidstate drive, but seeing the pricetag for this confguration might result in me not being so lucky.



Its the thinnest laptop I have seen since the Sony Vaio 505 which was only marketed in Japan and to my knowledge never made it to other markets (and if it did, at least never to Europe).



Check it out:
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Adobe Flex : Ted Patrick and his SEO experiment

The latest shout-out from Ted regarding his experiment with doing SEO on the Flex directory caught my interest. If it was Ted's apparent excitement I thought to be sensing when reading the first couple of lines (I should probably mention that SEO s something that normally leaves me cold) or it was the actual content that initially turned my focus to this last post about his experiments, I should not be able to say.

Anyways, read the post and judge by yourself :-)
Exciting stuff...
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/01/seo-and-flex-directory-build-003.php

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

FITC Amsterdam 2008 : Discount code

For the first time ever, Flash In The Can (FITC) will visit Europe.
This takes place as previously announced between the 24th and the 27th (incl. pre-festival workshops and a post-festival ditto featuring none other than the legendary Colin Moock).

If you still haven't gotten your ticket I would def. urge you to, its gonna be a lot of fun and it might even have some educational aspects too (just kidding, I know I will bring home a lot of goodies for the dev-shed).

Anyways, in case you haven't gotten your ticket yet I can offer you this discount entitling you to 25% off the sticker-price.

I know it works as I myself have used it... :-)

FITC Discountcode: "labs25" (without apostrophe's)

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Adobe Flex : Modular applications vulnerable to missing resources

When developing modular applications in Adobe Flex, its critical to ensure that all resources are available for the module and the application that loads it.
You will most likely not get any errormessage indicating the problem, the module will just never complete its creation flow and leave your application hanging somewhere in mid-air between the initialized and the creationComplete event.

The error handling in the ModuleManager and the ModuleLoader are to be honest, not particularly well written at this point (as of Flex 3 Beta 3, Milestone 4) and I expect that the entire mx.modules package is scheduled for an overhaul during the current and last development iteration prior to the emergence of the release candidates (if any) and the first release.

Anyways, back to the issue about missing resources causing the Module creation flow to halt... even the emittance of a style sheet reference used by the module will cause the creation to halt and fail in Flash's silent, but deadly manner (I never liked that paradigm and I am sad to find it all over the place, even here in one of the mission-critical parts of the framework).

I would very much prefer not to have to modify the source code for frameworks and/or 3rd-party products used by production systems, but if the mx.Modules don't receive a lot of "love" from the Flex team prior to release, I will have to in order to get the required stability and robustness.

I would like to mention at this point however, that we have decided to use Flex 3 for production level systems at a very early point, and in general this has been a hugely positive experience (please read previous posts about our Beta experiences) and I have not regretted this decision at any point.

Here you can read more about how to create modular applications with Adobe Flex if you have any interest in this...

Monday, January 14, 2008

Adobe Flex : Coghead 2.0 has been released today, now based on Flex

The new Coghead 2.0 was built using Adobe Flex. Like a lot of RIAs, Coghead is moving to Amazon Web Services to power the back end while adopting Flex on the front end.

Coghead is an interesting company because their application actually lets you create your own web application without programming. You drag and drop components on to the screen and then customize their behavior. As TechCrunch notes, the upgrade to 2.0 made the interface snappier and cleaner. Paul McNamara, the CEO, attributed this to the adoption of Flex.

Amazon Web Services and Flex make a really, really powerful combination and more companies are realizing that. More companies are also realizing that in some cases, when you have big, robust applications, Ajax doesn't always cut it. Not everyone is going to be building something as complex as Coghead, but as we see more of these immersive types of Software as a Service applications, you're going to see more Flex usage. Oh, and there's the AIR bit. These companies want to be able to expand easily to the desktop and AIR lets them take all the stuff they've already done and create a new experience for users.

Coghead claims Coghead is now 3X faster than before. And, in fact, some operations are now much more than 3X faster. The primary reason for this performance breakthrough have been achieved by re-implementing the UI using Adobe’s Flex software.

Check it out:
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Adobe Event : January 25th in Copenhagen

The Adobe experts are throwing a presentation of their Web technologies and AIR.

Folks like...

- longtime Macromedia/Adobe web-tech evangelist Greg Rewis
- omnipresent CSS and accessibility expert Stephanie Sullivan
- video-rockstar Jason Levine
- top-of-the-lnie AIR guru Mike Downey

...will come and present this for the general masses.

I don't expect this to be advanced in any way as its targetted towards the general public, but nevertheless it might be interesting for the more strategically inclined techies to attend as it will summarize the vision of the technologies down to one commutable serenade. A serenade I expect will be usable as part of a "sales pitch" both internally to management, other peer-departments as well as externally to customers considering a RIA solution.
I therefore also assume it could be beneficial for more non-technical personnel working with techies to attend, as I assume it will provide a not-too-technical overview of the technologies.

Check it out and signup here:
http://events.adobe.co.uk/events/cgi/event.cgi?country=dk&eventid=6279
NB. Its free and signup has just opened as of the time of posting this.

This day or seminar follows a day for VIP's only, where I suppose the plans for the future will unveiled... tell me, is there anybody out there who is not excited about the sharp turn Adobe has taken since the acquisition of Macromedia in regards to parter-relations :-)

Thursday, January 03, 2008

FITC Amsterdam 25th - 27th February

Don't forget to get your ticket while the early bird discount still is available (Last chance is the 9th of February). Its the 7th year of this exciting event and I am gonna try to do my best to be able to find the time and finance to attend.



Check it out:
http://www.fitc.ca/event_detail.cfm?festival_id=29

Adobe Flex : Visual Flex Unit

One of the major trailblazers on the Flex front is the company Allurent which features none other than Joe Berkovitz himself as VP of Engineering.
For you out there not yet familiar with Joe's (I hope he won't mind too much that I mention him by firstname) achievements, you should check his blog out right away and stay listening as its one of the major sources for good stuff out in respect to the Flex development environment out there as well as in respect to the entire Flash platform as well.

Anyways, Allurent have chosen to share another of their works, namely the Visual Flex Unit which "is an Allurent open source project to establish a framework for the testing of components' visual appearance. The goal is to enhance FlexUnit with additional features to support visual assertions. In a nutshell, a visual assertion asserts that a component's appearance is identical to a stored baseline image file. Tests can be run using a GUI interface or through an Ant build process."

It looks very promising and as a huge fan of automated test I will definitely try to give it a shot.

Check it out:
http://code.google.com/p/visualflexunit/

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