Happy New Year!

2010 is almost finished and yet, when I look back I can’t believe how packed this year was for those earning a living using the Flash Platform. I mean just look at the extension of the Flash Platform on mobile devices, the changes and improvements we’ve made to Flex and Flash Builder, the new capabilities added to the platform. It’s amazing that I can use today Flex “Hero” to build desktop applications and mobile applications (for Android, BlackBerry Playbook; iOS support is coming in 2011).

What continues to amaze me is the community around the Flash Platform. I truly feel privileged because I travel around and get a chance to meet and talk to you. This is one of the best parts of my job for sure. So, I want to thank you for the events you’ve organized this year and I’m looking forward to seeing you again next year.

And finally, I want to thank all my readers. It is so much easier writing tutorials and blog posts when you know people will read them :).

To all of you, I wish you A Happy New Year! And don’t forget, 2011 is looking even better than 2010 – well I do work for Adobe so I have some inside information :).

December 31, 2010 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

gotoAndSki() – 2011 Edition

One of the best conferences I attended and spoke at in 2010 was gotoAndSki() Norway. I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of. I mean it was quite small and the location was rather remote. So, why do I think it was so good? First of all, the guys behind this event are amazing. I met them at the first Flex Camp in Oslo back in 2009 and I enjoyed their company during the event and afterward, while doing some late night A/B testing of different types of beer :D (Does FlashMagazine.com and Jens Christian ring a bell?)

Second, conferences have always been about people and connecting people. Of course a good track of sessions and speakers makes the backbone of any good conference, but without the social network there would always be something missing.

And this is exactly where Jens and his buddies excelled this year. They had a great idea to organize a three day conference and put the sessions in the evening/night and the social activities during the day. This way all the attendees had a chance to really talk and know each other better while skiing, trekking, eating Norwegian food, and yes, drinking beer.

People think that going out and drinking lot of beer after the last session it is the best way to make acquaintances. I’m not saying it is a bad method. I’m just saying it isn’t necessarily the best method for a bunch of developers. I mean just imagine–you’ve always been a geek and loved to code during
high-school/university and you haven’t partied that much. Naturally, you decided to become a software engineer and here comes your first conference. Surprise, surprise if you want to bond with the attendees you have to be a beer master :D. Is this cognitive dissonance or what? Apologizes for my rant :D

Jens idea was to have the conference organized each year in a different country. So, I’m proud to announce on my blog that the 2011 edition – organized by Fernando Colaco – will take place in Switzerland, January 27-29. There are only 100 tickets, so if you want to experiment something different in a beautiful country hurry up and register here.

I just checked the sessions and I have to say I can’t wait to attend them – you can learn about making games, working with Arduino, developing for TV, Flash accessibility and much more.

In the end I want to take my hat off to Jens and Fernando for putting together an event like no other, at least here in Europe. And I’m curious where it will go next year!

PS. Fernando sent me a message telling me that actually they decided to have a summer edition and a winter edition in the same countries each year. What can I tell? They broke my heart; I had a vision about organizing one edition in the Carpathian mountains maybe with the help of my fellow evangelist, Ryan Stewart.

December 21, 2010 | Filed Under Conferences | 3 Comments

Bucharest Flash Camp 2010 – Recordings & Slides

I’ve finally finished uploading the recordings from the last week’s Bucharest Flash Camp 2010. I want to thank you, guys, for joining and staying with us late in the evening. I think it was one of the best camps we’ve had in our office and one of the reasons was you – because you asked a lot of questions and we had a lot of interaction.

The event was in Romanian. Read more

December 16, 2010 | Filed Under Conferences | 1 Comment

Developing for mobile devices with the Flash Platform

The dust has settled over this year Adobe MAX conference (my colleague, Serge Jespers, has been thinking about the next year’s conference for the past two months but this is another story :D). So, by now, you should have heard most of the news around the Flash Platform and mobile devices. However, if you haven’t yet tried to build your first “Hello World” application, read on because it is really simple for us, Flash developers.

In this post I want to help you understand what tools and workflows you can use and what devices you can target. Please keep in mind that this post is about what is available today. We are working hard to make mobile development easier so expect to see more news from us in the future.

December 12, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, Mobile | 9 Comments

Flash Camp Bucharest 2010 – Live Streaming

Today, we’ll host the last Flash Camp of this year in the Adobe Bucharest office. And because every time we organize an event in our office, many of you ask for live streaming or recording, we decided to do just that :D

So, today December 7th starting at 5PM (Romanian time) you’ll be able to watch the live streaming here: http://corlan.org/flashcamp/

One more thing, we are optimistic that everything will go right with this live streaming/recording. However, the setup is quite complex. My friend Dragos Dascalita (who will have a session on this subject – how to set up live streaming) took care of all the tiny bits (2 professional video cameras, audio/video mixer, server infrastructure, and so on). And because there are so many parts involved there is no guarantee everything will run accordingly to the plan.

Oh, almost forgot, the event is in Romanian so I apologize to those who want to participate but don’t speak Romanian.

December 7, 2010 | Filed Under Conferences | 9 Comments

Working with Native Custom Cursors in Flash

Another cool feature available for the first time in the Flash Player 10.2 beta release is the introduction of support for native custom mouse cursors. This was a feature request that gathered lots of votes from our Flash community.

December 2, 2010 | Filed Under Tutorials | 8 Comments

Working with Stage Video

Stage Video is out (at least for us developers) in the form of the Flash Player 10.2 beta released last night on Adobe Labs. So what is Stage Video and why should you use it? Before answering this question let’s see where you can actually improve video playback performance. There are two places where you can use hardware acceleration (that is, use GPU instead of the CPU):

For decoding the video. This is especially important when playing high quality video like H.264 1080p
For compositing (rendering) the video to the screen

For the first scenario, Flash Player already supports hardware decoding of H.264 videos. Before now, Flash Player used to read this data back from the GPU to the CPU and use the CPU to render the video. Here comes the Stage Video feature: it enables the GPU to render the video directly on the display without the overhead incurred previously by reading back from the GPU and rendering with the CPU. So, if you want to get the best performance you want to use H.264 encoding for the video and Stage Video for displaying the video. By using these two features together you can achieve video playback on the new 11″ MacBook Air with less than 10% CPU usage, for example.

December 1, 2010 | Filed Under Tutorials | 6 Comments

Flash Player 10.2 beta with Stage Video available on labs

If you saw bits of this year’s MAX conference, chances are you’ve heard of Stage Video. This is a new Flash API that uses the GPU for rendering the video on the screen. Thus, using this feature you get hardware acceleration for both decoding H264 videos and displaying them on the screen.

You can play with this new feature starting today (I wrote an article explaining this new API). The Flash Player 10.2 beta is available on Adobe Labs for desktop. In order to benefit from Stage Video you have to rewrite your existing applications to use this new API. On the other hand the previous video APIs are still there if you don’t want to use Stage Video. And this is good because sometimes you want to apply effects (e.g. rotate, skew, Pixel Bender effects) and with Stage Video you can’t. This is because the video renderer using Stage Video is out of the Flash Player display list – it is not a DisplayObject. At the same time even if the system supports Stage Video there is no guarantee that your application can use it – this is because only a limited number of videos can be played at the same time on system.

Other goodies you’ll love in this beta are:

In Internet Explorer 9 Flash Player 10.2 supports hardware accelerated rendering support
Native custom mouse cursors – offloading this tasks from Flash Player to the OS
Support for full screen mode with multiple monitors – you can have Flash Player full-screen on a secondary monitor and work on another monitor

Go install this version, play with it, build apps against it and let us know what you think. So next year when we launch the release version everything will work just great!

December 1, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 5 Comments