Adobe MAX Awards 2010

The Adobe MAX Awards 2010 competition is open (the deadline for project submission is August 13th – hope you are not superstitious :D). This year’s categories are:

Advertising and Branding
Digital Publishing
Enterprise/Government RIAs
Entertainment
Multiscreen
Social Computing

Good luck!

June 15, 2010 | Filed Under Conferences | Leave a Comment

Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010

This August (25th – 26th) if you live in India and you work in the IT field then you really should consider attending Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010 in Bangalore, India.

This is a two day event, and more than 2000 people are expected with tens of sessions and international speakers. You can read more here and you can register here (you can save 60% if you register before June 25th). If you want to propose a session then hurry up because the window is closing on June 21st.

June 14, 2010 | Filed Under Conferences | 1 Comment

Going Multi-Screen with the Flash Platform Webinar

It seems this summer that webinars are highly fashionable. The App in a Week European webinar hasn’t finished yet, and we’ve announced another one: Going Multi-Screen with the Flash Platform. The webinars will take place between June 22nd – 24th and you can register here.

I guess after attending these webinars you should be ready to create multi-screen applications when Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR will be available for the Android platform (now they are still in beta).

This is the complete schedule:

Tuesday, June 22, 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time – Best practices in optimizing web content for Flash Player 10.1
Tuesday, June 22, 1PM – 2PM Pacific Time – The quickest way to build cross-platform apps with AIR 2
Wednesday, June 23, 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time – Rich Internet App development with Flash Builder 4 for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2
Thursday, June 24 9AM – 10AM Pacific Time – Multi-screen web content development with Flash Pro CS5

Enjoy!

June 9, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment

Flex and PHP webinar goodies

As I promised at the end of my webinar here I come with the projects I used:

The starting project created using Flash Catalyst
The finished project (Flex and PHP project)
PSD file

You can use the Import > Flash Builder > Flex project wizard to import these two projects into Flash Builder. However, to make the second project work, you need to copy the PHP files from inside the project (you’ll find a folder named eva_services with a bunch of files) to the root of your PHP server. Next you have to create the database (there is an SQL dump inside the same folder) and change the connection credentials from eva_credentials/db.php to match your local settings). Actually you can read more about this in my article on Debugging Flex and PHP projects.

I know that I squeezed quite a lot in my webinar and I had to move quickly between the topics. But you don’t have to worry because you’ll find articles and screencasts below that go into great detail on all the topics I covered:

Setting up XDebug and debugging Flex and PHP projects here
Working with Doctrine, Zend Framework, and Flex here
Working with Flash Builder’s DCD features on PHP projects here
You’ll find many Flex and PHP articles and videos on the Flex and PHP section of Adobe Developer Connection site,
If you want to read more about remoting and AMF using Zend Framework or AMFPHP here are two articles I wrote awhile ago: Zend Framework and AMFPHP
Data Paging using DCD features here

Finally, the recordings for the webinars:

Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design (Serge Jespers’s session)
Connecting a Flex app to PHP services (my session)
Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 (Michael Chaize’s session)
Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project (Mike Jones’s session)
Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 (Tom Krcha’s session)
Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services (Tom Krcha’s session)
Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2 (Piotr Walczyscyn’s session)
Code once and run on multiple mobile devices (Mark Doherty’s session)
Rapidly build, deploy, and maintain Internet apps with ColdFusion (Terry Ryan’s session)

Again, I want to thank all of you who took the time to attend my session. Until the next time, Ciao!

June 7, 2010 | Filed Under Presentations | 4 Comments

Test your AIR apps on an Android phone

I realized that for us (Europeans) it is a little bit harder to get our hands on a Nexus One or Droid phone. So, if you have created an AIR app for Android and you don’t have a device to test it on we can meet at one of the next events I’m doing and I will let you do the testing. Maybe we can shoot a video too :)

For now, my schedule looks like this:

June 2nd I’ll be in Cluj-Napoca Romania attending a Flex Camp
June 3rd – 5th Timisoara Romania, attending and speaking at Drupal Camp
June 10th-12th Norway attending gotoAndSki()

If you live in Bucharest, just send me an email and we will figure out a date depending on when I’m not travelling.

Looking forward to seeing what you build :)

May 31, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Android | 3 Comments

Open Source Media Framework 1.0 is out

The first release of OSMF, 1.0 is out. This is great news for both developers and publishers. Using the components from OSMF you can build quickly high quality and fully featured video players. And if you think about this, it totally make sense. I mean if you are a publisher your main expertise is to create/distribute/monetize the content and not to create advanced video players. And if you are a developer then you get an excellent start using components that were already tested and supports the latest advancements from the Flash Platform (Flash Player 10.1, Flash Access 2.0, HTTP Dynamic Streaming).

OSMF gives you the blocks you need to build a modern and powerful video player. What if you just want an out of the box player? Well, you have to take a look at Strobe Media Playback then. This is a compiled SWF that gives you a video player created using the OSMF.

I just want to add one more thing: OSMF was developed by many parties, not only by Adobe. Others submitted plug-ins and code. I know my friends from Kaltura are one of them, but other big names like ESPN, Akamai, Brightcove.

You can find more here.

May 30, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 3 Comments

Webinar: App in a Week

The entire European platform evangelism team worked hard to create great content for a webinar called App in a Week (June 7th-10th). What is it all about? In short: We will show you how you can create applications using various
techniques with the help of the Flash Platform. Basically you will see different tools at work (Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder, Photoshop), different approaches (Flex, ActionScript, desktop, mobile or web apps) and different back-end technologies (PHP or Java).

Long answer: it’s really too long, so better sign up and join us. I’m sure you’ll find new things. Here is the complete schedule:

June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones
June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn
June 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

As you can see we set up the event to work well for Europeans :) You can register here!

May 26, 2010 | Filed Under Presentations | 3 Comments

Flash Player and Google TV

If you watch the news or what’s happening at Google I/O 2010 chances are that Google TV is not a novelty anymore. However you may not know that Google TV uses Flash Player 10.1 (Google’s browser, Chrome, integrates Flash Player). This is something I know for sure I want. Being able to watch YouTube videos on my TV with my whole family, instead of huddling around a small computer screen, is really nice.

On the other hand, I can’t believe how fast the time flies and how fast the technology evolves and morphs these days. One year ago I was in Berlin talking with journalists for the first time about Digital Home, where the TV sets can handle both the web and regular TV shows.

Here you can see a video with Google TV running Flash content:

May 21, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | 5 Comments

Get AIR for Android and play with it

Today, at Google I/O 2010 we have announced a public beta of the Adobe AIR for Android. This means you can sign in for getting the bits and if you have a Google Nexus One phone you can install the runtime and then test the existent AIR apps for Android or create new ones.

So this makes the perfect moment for sharing my AIR app for Android that will come handy every time you have a dinner with others and want to split the bill. So grab the APK file from here, make sure you have the Android SDK on your machine and the phone is connected to the computer through the USB cable, and then run this command in console :

adb install -r aTabSplitter.apk

If you don’t like command line, then you can use Serge Jespers AIR app for packaging AIR apps as native installers including APK files for Android. Check his blog post here.

You can get the AIR for Android bits from here (and find more about developing for Android with Adobe AIR).

If you play with my app and you have feedback, please drop a comment!

May 20, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Android, Mobile | 7 Comments

Building Android apps with Adobe AIR

Last week I created my first ever mobile application. It is an AIR app for Android. The app is called aTabSplitter because ahh, it just helps you to split a restaurant bill between many people. Here are some screenshots with the two screens of the app:

Developing this small application was quite entertaining. But it teach me a few lessons too:

You know the old saying “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. This is true for mobile apps too. You never know if some framework or workflow will do the job until you actually try. In my case, the common sense was telling me that Flex 4 framework being a desktop framework is to heavy for the mobile world. After trying it, I think actually it works quite good for me. Your mileage can vary.
Developing for mobile is not easy at all. I spent almost my entire professional life building web applications for desktops. Doing mobile apps after this is like trying to create jewels miniatures with the skills of a mine worker. You need a different mind set; you need to acquire new skills.
It is highly educational watching people using your app. Because of the touch-input nature of the mobile apps and the personal experience each user carries forward from previous devices/apps, you will certainly notice some interesting behaviors. With my app, a friend tried to remove a person (on the first screen) by throwing him outside of the screen. Needless to say that I didn’t think of this workflow, but it gave me an idea on how to improve the app.

Finally, this week I had the time to clean up the UI and code a little bit, and put together a video (the making-of type of video). Here is the video (you can watch the video in higher resolution here):

If you want to have a look at the code (although I warn you it is not production ready) you can download this project file. If you want to run this on a computer without a touch screen you need to make couple of changes (work with MouseEvents instead of TouchEvents, change root node in main.mxml from Application to WindowedApplication).

I can’t wait to have AIR for Android out and see what people will build!

May 19, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Android, Mobile, Tutorials | 5 Comments

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