Iorana RIA

This week Adobe announced that they will offer Flex Builder 2 to students and faculty at no cost. This great move will put fuel in the fire of the RIA battle. Microsoft has also in the past given away software to schools in hopes of gaining ground with their technology.  It’s the same as giving cigarettes to children; get them hooked early. Whether we like it or not, it puts us developers in a good position. They are battling for us. I think that Microsoft and Adobe know that whoever gets the most developers will win, or at least be at a great advantage. Silverlight seems to be attracting the .NET crowd, while Flex/Air is getting more people from the Java side and other technologies. The fact that Adobe made Flex Builder an Eclipse extension shows their intention and their target. It would seem like Adobe is now trying to get more new developers on board by giving away Flex to students. Your move Microsoft…

Oliver Merk who runs the Toronto Flex Usergroup has setup a discussion group at yahoo.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/torontoflex/

It is meant to ask questions, post opinions etc..so take a look and see you at the next meeting. (well …Flex Camp)

Might be a little late as it has been announced awhile ago, but The Toronto Flex User Group is hosting a Flex Camp November 15^th. Tor register and get more details visit the Toronto Flex User Group Website. Mike Potter from Adobe will be there with others for a full night of Flex demos and learning. It will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, see you there!

Last week I went to a Microsoft event called Expression around the Clock. As I walked in, I was surprised to receive a full copy of the Expression Studio.  This conference was aimed at designers, but I took a lot in from the speakers including Bill Buxton. Bill’s talk impressed me the most, openned my eyes to UI and was quite entertaining.  By the time all the speakers were done, I was reminded of the software I had in my hands. They never demoed it at the event, so once I got back to the office I decided to install it. It was a big install and got it all working; however I ran out of time and had to get back to another project.

From what I gather, Expression Web is like Dreamweaver. Expression Blend is like Flash. Expression Design is like Photoshop/Illustrator. Expression Media is well, I am not sure, but maybe like Adobe Bridge, but with a video encoder. Regardless, there are several features I want to try. For instance, Expression Web is supposed to let you work in design mode and create standard-based code automaticly.

The next chance I get, I will test it further and keep you posted.

More videos are surfacing from the Adobe Max Conference held last week in Chicago. Peter Elst made more videos available, most of them made me raise an eye brow. The Flash IDE enhancements themselves are exciting, to name a few:  Enhanced tweens, live video preview on the stage, character animations that are also controlable with AS and more.

One interesting video on this page is the second one about “Flash on C/C++”.

Take a look! These videos and others can be seen here.

Adobe code name: Thermo
Since the start of our developing days, whether creating a website or application there has always been a gap between designers and developers. The back and forth can go on for awhile before the designer’s desired outcome is reached. This week in Chicago Adobe was holding their MAX conference where they showed an early preview of a tool code named Thermo. This tool’s goal is to bridge the designer/developer gap for Rich Internet Applications built in Flex. There have been several other attempts in other technologies to bridge the gap; it will be interesting to see how well this tool will perform. Peter Elst recorded the full demo at Max, and here it is.

Flash natively has always been 2D. Various methods have been developed to simulate 3D or import it from other tools such as 3D Studio Max. Aswell, libraries have been writen to create 3D, such as papervision3D.

Lee Brimelow, who had a great and funny demo session at the Adobe Air Bus Tour, interviewed Justin Everett-Church about the new flash player 3D support. Looks like a good start to a long standing 3D dream. You can view the interview here.

When I started with flash it was at version 3. Very little scripting was involved with this animation tool. We were able to stop and start and animation, tell a target to do something and give a button actions. Basically, it wasn’t developer oriented and was used primarily for animations and “killer website Intro’s”. As the product evolved so did the demand for interaction such as forms, network connectivity and other features. Macromedia started evolving the language called ActionScript. By the time Flash reached version 6 we were using it to create full applications. ActionScript at the time was impressive and powerful but wasn’t really a full OOP language. As developers, we had to create applications following non-standard practices like for example using the timeline to create what we needed. Non-Flash developers wanting to explore the possibilities of flash were hard pressed to understand the timeline and how to append nibbles of code here and there on it. In contrast, designers were losing the battle against this language that was getting more and more complex. That is when Macromedia decided to separate the two and created Flex. Flex and Flash output the same; however these tools are used for different approaches. Flex is geared towards developers and Flash is geared towards designers. Although we could certainly create an application in Flash, a complex application is much easier to develop in Flex. On the other hand, Flex does not process any design tools other than simple layout tools for our application. The integration between the two products is well kept however; for example we can create flash objects and control them in flex. The two tools work well together to create rich internet applications.

To recap, the description of Flex as quoted from the Adobe Website would be: “A cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). Flex enables you to create expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems.”

The list of good example applications is too long to list here, but here are few: Adobe share, Buzzword, Picnik, Flauntr, Scrapblog, Mattamy IFP and much more at the Flex showcase.
At MAX this week Adobe released the new Flex 3 Beta 2. New features of Flex 3 include: Data Wizard support for .NET, Persistent framework caching, Refactoring support, Advanced Datagrid and more.

Flex is one of many tools you can use to build your Rich Internet Application. If you choose Flex, here is what you will need:

Flex Builder 2 or Eclipse plug-in (Demo)
Free Flex SDK 2.0.1

Where is the web going? That depends on who you ask. Adobe thinks the web is going on the desktop and they are going to achieve this with a product called Air.

What is Air? Air is short for Adobe Integrated Runtime. It is a cross-OS runtime that runs rich internet applications on the desktop. It allows current developers to leverage their existing knowledge and bind it to the desktop. Air applications are based on current web technologies like HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex. In other words, developers can extend their current or future web applications on the desktop. The application will work on any OS, (and soon mobiles) give access to the file system and native applications and even include a local database for storing offline data that will sync to servers when back online.

This week in Chicago Adobe was holding their MAX conference where they launched various new technologies. This included the Air Beta 2 runtime which can be downloaded here. The new BETA version brings us closer to an official release which is planned for early next year. Last week I spent the day at the Adobe Air Bus Tour hosted at the Guvernment in Toronto. Not to mention the array of great food, they demoed many cool Air applications. I was impressed at the diversity of applications and technologies used for these Air applications. HTML applications were as impressive as big AJAX or Flex ones. There were several speakers there including Salesforce.com to demo an Air application and tell developers about their Flex toolkit for Apex. Yahoo Developer Network was also there to demo some applications and talk about ASTRA. It is hard to ignore Air with so many companies getting involved and at a fast rate. Here are a few further examples of Air applications: EBay Desktop , Adobe Media Player, Agile Agenda, DigiMix and more at the Air showcase.

It isn’t the first time that bringing the web to the desktop is attempted. It is interesting to see where this will all lead us. In the meantime here is what you need to start deploying your Air applications:

Air Beta 2 runtime
Air SDK (Command Line Compiler, docs, samples etc…)
AIR Extension for Dreamweaver (Build AIR apps from Dreamweaver CS3)
AIR Update for Flash CS3 (Build AIR apps from Flash CS3)
Aptana (Integrated development environment for building Air applications)