AIR contest for developers or students living in Romania

We’ve just launched an AIR contest for anyone who lives in Romania. All you have to do is to create the coolest AIR application and submit the application before November 1st. We’ll announce the winners on November 14th.

You can win the big prize, a MacBook 13”, or licenses for Creative Suite 4 Web Premium. This should be fun, especially since I am a member of the jury! You can find more info here (it’s in Romanian, but if there are expats who want to take a shot, we can translate the page for you in English). There is a registration form that should be filled in, and the final app must be uploaded on share.adobe.com.

July 30, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment

Cairngorm Plug-in for Flex Builder 3

This is hardly a novelty (it was released on November 2008), but I am not sure how many people actually know about this plug-in. So, I thought I’d tell you about it. It is a plug-in for Flex Builder 3 (it is open source, and you can actually contribute to the code if you have the time and skills) that helps you to increase your productivity while working with Cairngorm. It offers two wizards for creating a Cairngorm Command or Cairngorm Controller.

Some people complain that when you work with an MVC pattern such as Cairngorm, you have to write a lot of extra/glue code. Well, using this plug-in you can streamline this a bit. You can find more about it (installation, documentation) here.

July 27, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 6 Comments

Videos on LCDS 3

The weekend is closing in (well, I am Europe based), and what better way to spend some quality (family) time than watching your favorite movie? Just in case you’re out of good movies, or the sequels are not up to the original I have for you 9 movies featuring LiveCycle Data Services 3: Fiber overview, Flex 4 demo application, Data Model Annotations, Fiber Filters, Styles, Message Throttling, etc.

You can see the videos here.

July 24, 2009 | Filed Under LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services | Leave a Comment

Adobe Wave is available on Labs

At last year’s MAX we announced a new project, code name Adobe Wave (more about what Wave is here). Now, Adobe Wave is available on Labs.

You can install it from here (the desktop client that displays the notifications is an AIR application), if you want to sign up for a free publisher account click here (as a publisher you can add your own feed of notifications, and users can choose to subscribe to it). And if you are curious about what is behind it all, you can check this page.

If you choose to install the application, you’ll notice that there are not so many publishers for now. I hope this will change soon, ‘cause I have some perfect candidates to make my life easier :) Among the existent publishers are Myspace, Variety, digg, Livestation, lastminute.com, VentureBeat.

July 23, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, Others | 2 Comments

Adobe Flash Platform Blog

Just in case your blog reading list is too short, here comes a new blog for you: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/. It was launched yesterday, and you can find an interesting post about the penetration statistics for Flash Player.

There is another post about the two new open source projects from Adobe, and Dave McAllister is talking about our Open@Adobe strategy.

July 21, 2009 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

It’s hot, open up a little bit!

We’ve just announced two new open source projects at Adobe: Open Source Media Framework and Text Layout Framework.

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), previously known as Strobe, is a an open framework for building media players for the Flash Platform. Out of the box, as a developer, you get rich features to quickly build robust players with lots of features. At the same time, there is an API that enables partners to build plug-ins for this framework, thus extending the features and adding more value. The source code and pluggable components are available under Mozilla Public License. We believe that this is an important step for creating an open industry standard for media player development.

Text Layout Framework (TLF) is the second project that is now open source. I think this is very exciting for a lot of developers. When I wrote a post explaining what Text Layout Framework is and how you can use it with Flex 3.2 (in Flex 4 it is part of the framework), many people asked me about our plans for opening up the library. Well, people it is ooooooooooooopen now!

For those who may not know why this is important, let me give you two hints. First, take a look at how the layout and text is managed in the Times Reader AIR application (don’t forget to try the print option for any article; I double dare you to get this printing quality out of a HTML page). This layout was made possible by the TLF library.

Second, TLF is library built on top of the Flash Text Engine (introduced by Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5) that makes text a first class citizen in the Flash Platform, bringing all the experience Adobe has in typography into the RIA realm.

July 21, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 5 Comments

FlexMonkey 1.0 is out

Gorilla Logic just announced the release of FlexMonkey 1.0. FlexMonkey is an open source Flex record/playback testing tool. If you want to find more, you can read Eric Owens article from Adobe Developer Connection. Another good resource is the project website.

Enjoy and free-bugs Flex apps for all!

July 14, 2009 | Filed Under Flex | Leave a Comment

Flex Builder 3 for unemployed Biss

A while ago, we had a program that gave away Flex Builder 3 licenses to unemployed developers for free. We just launched it again, thus if you are in this position, or you have a friend who is, use this link: https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/

Good luck!

July 13, 2009 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

New Articles on Adobe Developer Connection

There are new articles available on Adobe Developer Connection, and, as you might expect, some of them are related to the Beta launch products and framework:

Kevin Hoyt article: Lots of Flash, Flex, Zend, and PHP samples
Flex SDK engineer Ryan Frishberg article: Introducing skinning in Flex 4 beta

But there are some articles discussing Tour de Flex AIR application:

Christophe Coenraets article: Building the server side of the Tour de Flex real-time dashboard
Greg Wilson article: BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services samples galore in Tour de Flex

And there is a good article on Flash Media Server 3.5 and large-scale streaming.

Enjoy!

July 7, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment

Adobe User Group Tour

As you probably know, we launched the first public betas for Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst, and Flex SDK 4 in June 2009. And we had about 100 events across the world, events that were driven by the communities (Adobe User Groups). I had the pleasure to present at four events: Amsterdam, Netherlands; Bucharest, Romania; Zagreb, Croatia; and Pavia, Italy.

I think all the events went great, and personally I had great fun doing the presentations and talking with the people afterwards. But, from my point of view the Adobe User Group from Netherlands deserves a special mention. Somehow the Netherlands, of all the events I’ve attended so far, has something special that is hard to find in other places. And I am not talking only about the Adobe User Groups events, I found that this is true also for events organized by the PHP community for example.

The location was extraordinary, the audience was big (more than 200 people) and very eager to ask questions, and there was good food and cold beverages, including after hours beer. I can’t stop thinking how it would be to have a MAX event in Amsterdam :)

The organizers taped the event. So, in case there wasn’t a Tour event near you, you can see here the presentations Christoph Rooms and I gave on Flash Catalyst, Flex SDK 4, and Flash Builder 4.