Times Reader AIR application from The New York Times

The New York Times just released the Times Reader AIR application. This application lets you “consume” The New York Times newspaper on your screen. You can install it from here.

It doesn’t sound exciting at all, does it? Just another custom reader for a newspaper. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong! My friend Tudor (user experience designer at Adobe) and I believe that this application is one of the best out there in terms of the immersive experience that it offers to its users when it comes to consuming text on a computer screen. The main thing that this application managed to do is to offer an excellent digital “paper” to read the news, but at the same time, retain some of the magic that an “analog” paper has. Of course being digital made it easy to add features that are not available in the paper edition (like having a picture gallery as a way to see the news).

At the core of this is a clean interface and liquid design (as you change the size of the application, the layout and the content adapt to that new size, thus the user gets the best possible experience). See the following pictures where I played with the first page at different sizes.

How did they do it? Very simple :D. They leveraged the new features available in Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5, in particular the new Text Engine and the library built on top of it, Text Layout Framework. I can’t wait to see what they can do for mobile devices, when we have Flash Player 10 for mobiles (FP 10 for mobile devices will be out soon)! The application is created using the open source Flex framework.

You can use the free version, or the full version (if you have any kind of subscription to the newspaper, or you pay a weekly fee).

Try it and let me know what do you think!

Later Update: You can read more about the features of this application on New York Times blog.

Later Later Update: You can view here a short interview with the UXDs that worked with The New York Times to build the app.

May 11, 2009 | Filed Under AIR | 6 Comments

ADC article about SaaS

Duane Nickull published and interesting article on Adobe Developer Connection: “Software as a Service: A pattern for modern computing”. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Software as a Service (SaaS) has become a popular term within software industry circles since its introduction in early 1999. While many in the press have predicted that SaaS may eventually replace the incumbent model for software delivery, more likely an approach will evolve that combines the best of both worlds. This paper examines the core pattern of SaaS in pragmatic terms. It also outlines some of the strategic advantages SaaS can provide over distributed and shrink-wrapped software. This paper is not intended to be a singular authoritative source for defining SaaS; indeed it would not make sense to try to create such a document.”

Duane was too kind to add my name; for sure the article would have been as good as it is without any help from me :)

May 7, 2009 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

Boot Camps: Introduction to Adobe AIR, and LiveCycle DS / BlazeDS

We’ve seen high demand for our two Boot Camps we’ll have as part of the Adobe Developer Day event on May 19th in Bucharest, Romania. Because the space we have limits the number of persons we can accept, we had to turn down a lot of people.

Because we hate to turn down people, I found a solution. We will do in the next months these Boot Camps in Bucharest (Adobe’s office), and for the people who can’t attend in person, we’ll do it online using Acrobat Connect. As a reminder these events are free.

What do you have to do? Just send me an email(s) with the one of the following session names a the subject to mihai dot corlan at adobe dot com:

These are the sessions we’ll do in our office, in Romanian

Boot Camp Introduction to AIR [RO]
Boot Camp BlazeDS/LCDS [RO]

These are the sessions we’ll do online in Romanian:

Online Boot Camp Introduction to AIR [RO]
Online Boot Camp BlazeDS/LCDS [RO]

These are the sessions we’ll do online in English:

Online Boot Camp Introduction to AIR [EN]
Online Boot Camp BlazeDS/LCDS [EN]

We are working to set up a system to sign up to these events online. For now, just send me the emails. We will notify you about the dates by email!

May 6, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, Conferences, Java | 2 Comments

Bug Quash, second edition!

The first Bug Quash was a success (we had nearly 200 participants, online and on site)! So, we thought we’d do it again (OK, this is not very creative; it’s like making sequels of a good movie :D). This one will take place in Indianapolis, May 17th.

If you want to participate, then click here for more info!

May 6, 2009 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

SAP and Adobe developer contest: Flex Your Muscles with Xcelsius SDK Contest and Win 15K!

You can win money, fame, and clients by entering in this contest. Basically, you have to create Flex components for Xcelsius, a Flex based data-vizualisation and dashboarding tool from SAP. The contest started last week. You can read more here.

May 4, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment

Swiss Flash User Group Conference on June 26-27

The Swiss FUG is organizing a conference on June 26-27 called “Flash at the Lake”. Among the speakers you can listen to are the following from Adobe: Serge Jespers, James Ward, Paul Burnett, Sven Doelle. If you want to check out more, click here.

May 4, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences | 2 Comments

Some interesting articles

Lately, I’ve been traveling a lot. Thus, I haven’t have time to work on my pet projects and blog. But I had time to read what others wrote :D. Here is a list of articles that I think are interesting (they are not in any particular order):

Bruce Eckel interview on Python, RIA, Flex, and Java
An interesting article about why beautiful interfaces work better (lately I’ve been told couple of times that Flash Platform is more eye candy than a platform for enterprise business): In defense of eye candy
Create your first Facebook application with Flex
Deploying your first Flex application on Facebook
Building a kiosk using Flex
Flex cookbook: Flash FLVPlayback control in Flex
A post about getting Flex certification: Adobe Flex/AIR Certification?
High definition in Flash: H.264 for the rest of us
James Ward wrote a library to build Pixel Shaders at runtime: Announcing pbjAS – An ActionScript 3.0 Pixel Bender Shader Library
Lee Brimelow has a video tutorial about Augmented Reality in Flash
Serge Jespers has a post about some of the greatest Augmented Reality examples out there
ADC article: Migrating to ActionScript 3.0
Adobe’s Real-Time Media Flow Protocol – an article about the latest feature from Flash Player 10, this is a protocol UDP based, that enables peer-to-peer communication
ADC article about creating Flex and AIR apps in the cloud using Amazon S3
Christophe Coenraets has an article about how to externalize the service configuration for BlazeDS or LiveCycle Data Services ES
Video interviews from FITC Amsterdam about moving from ActionScript 2 to 3:
Mark Ander’s FITC 2009 Toronto session about Flash Catalyst