Help shape the future of Flex, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Builder

… and get a chance to win a nice gift in the process!

If you have 15 minutes to spare, then click here to fill a survey. You can literally shape the future versions of our tools and frameworks.

I know this doesn’t matter , but just in case you want to know, the prizes are:

One Apple 64 GB iPod Touch (valued at $399)
One Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5K 9 MP Digital Camera with 10x zoom (valued at $350)
One of two $250 gift cards from Amazon
One of five $100 gift cards from Amazon

LATER UPDATE: Unfortunately, the prizes are only for those living in North America.

December 18, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 2 Comments

AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 samples added to Tour de Flex

If you open the Tour de Flex application today you’ll get an update and among other things, you’ll see samples for AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 features.

Did you try AIR 2? If so, what do you think?

December 16, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, Flash Player | Leave a Comment

Why Flash: Interview with Mindomo.com

Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Zoltán Lörincz, the guy behind Mindomo.com. Mindomo.com is one of the coolest mind mapping apps out there and it happens to be a Flex application.

I met Zoltán in 2007 when we talked about Flex Builder 2 and what they want to see in Flex Builder 3. At that time Mindomo.com was already in the market, and we knew that we could get a lot of valuable feedback about Flex and Flex Builder from someone who created such a complex app. Since that time they added many new features were added and created a desktop version using AIR. Another interesting feature of their application is the toolbar itself. They implemented probably the only Microsoft Ribbon in Flex out there.

In this interview you can find a short story about the birth of Mindomo.com, and you can learn some of the key features of this application.

I apologize for the image/sound quality. I did this interview remotely and the sound was recorded from the phones.

Enjoy!

December 15, 2009 | Filed Under Video | Leave a Comment

First iPhone app built in the pre-release program is out

On December 11th, the “Boost your Brain” iPhone application became available on iTunes. This is the first application created in the pre-release program for Flash Professional CS5 that was accepted on iTunes. The creator of this game is Francis Bourre. You can find the application here.

December 14, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 6 Comments

FlexPMD Eclipse plug-in available

We just released FlexPMD 1.0, FlexCPD 1.0, FlexMetrics 1.0, and an Eclipse FlexPMD plug-in for Flash Builder (beta for now).

If you haven’t tried FlexPMD, then you should download the plug-in and test it.

FlexPMD is a tool that helps to improve code quality by auditing any AS3/Flex source directory and detecting common bad practices, such as:

* Unused code (functions, variables, constants, etc.)
* Inefficient code (misuse of dynamic filters, heavy constructors, etc.)
* Over-complex code (nested loops, too many conditionals, etc.)
* Over-long code (classes, methods, etc.)
* Incorrect use of the Flex component lifecycle (commitProperties, etc.)

FlexCPD detects copy & pasted code snippets (it reuses the JavaCPD engine).

You can see FlexPMD in action in these two screencasts.

December 10, 2009 | Filed Under Flash Builder | 3 Comments

Webinar: using PHP and Flash for developing Rich Internet Applications

On December 2nd, together with Roy Ganor from Zend, I will host an e-seminar about PHP and the Flash Platform. We will show you how you can create a Rich Internet Application using the Flex framework, Illustrator, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Builder 4. Then we will show you how to connect the Flex application to a PHP backend and how easy is to debug the PHP and Flex code using Zend Studio 7.1 and Flash Builder 4.

You can register for free here. The webinar will start at 6:00 PM Central European Time (9:00AM Pacific Standard Time) on December 2nd.

LATER UPDATE:

You can download the slides from here, and next week the recording will be available you can watch the recording over here (you need to have a Zend account).

December 1, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Flex, PHP | 8 Comments

Magnifying Glass AIR 2 application or how to communicate with a Java program from AIR

My favorite feature in Adobe AIR 2 is, by far, Native Processes: the ability to launch and control and communicate with a native process. It could be any executable on the machine where the AIR application is installed. I think this feature opens up a whole new range of AIR applications. When you add this feature to the ability to create socket servers, you have a powerful platform to build RIA applications for desktops.

Once I heard that this feature would make it in AIR 2 I was very excited. Why? Well, back in 2008 when we launched AIR 1.0, my fellow evangelist Serge Jespers created one of the coolest AIR applications for the AIR Tour. It was the smallest video player in the world. Basically it let you watch videos in the application icon from the Dock.

The application is extremely cool, but it has a small issue: it is too damn small to be able to see what’s going on. Being an engineer, I spent some time trying to find an engineering solution. Of course, I could have asked Serge to rewrite the application to make it bigger, but this wouldn’t have been an engineering solution. It would have been something that an accountant or manager would come up with. My solution is to build a second AIR application that can be used to magnify the video played inside the icon. This application would act like a digital magnifying glass.

With AIR 2 I’m finally able to implement the magnifying glass app pretty easily. Below you can see a screenshot of my application in action. It has two windows. The first window is the view port of the magnifying glass. You can see how many frames per second it processes, you can control the amount of zooming, and you can drag it around your screen. The second window displays the magnified image.

The internals

How did I do it? The application has two main parts. One part is the AIR application itself. It renders the UI, controls the view port and the zoom factor, and scales the image. The second part is a Java program that captures a screenshot of a portion of the screen. The Java program is controlled by the AIR application.

Using the NativeProcess and NativeProcessStartupInfo classes from AIR 2, you can launch an executable. In order to communicate with the executable you can use standard input and standard output. I wrote the Java program to output the bytes of the screenshot to standard output. It listens to standard input for commands, such as take a shot, set the viewport, or terminate the program. I compiled the Java program as an executable JAR file and placed in the AIR application root folder.

In order to capture the output of the Java program all you have to do is to register a listener on the NativeProcess instance for the standard output events. When you want to send commands you write bytes to the standardInput property of the same object. Here is a snippet of code, for the complete code have a look at the ScreenShotService class from the AIR application.

private var nativeProcess:NativeProcess;
private var npInfo:NativeProcessStartupInfo;
//setting the arguments for starting the Java program
var arg:Vector.<String> = new Vector.<String>;
arg.push("-jar");
arg.push(File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("screenshot.jar").nativePath);
arg.push("130");
arg.push("100");

npInfo = new NativeProcessStartupInfo();
//setting the path to the native process
npInfo.executable = new File("/Library/Java/Home/bin/java");
npInfo.arguments = arg;

nativeProcess = new NativeProcess();
nativeProcess.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.STANDARD_OUTPUT_DATA, onStandardOutputData);
//start the process
nativeProcess.start(npInfo);

/**
 * Read the data from the standard ouput.
 * Before reading a png, first you have to read the length of the image
 */
private function onStandardOutputData(e:ProgressEvent):void {
    //reading the available bytes from the standard output buffer of the process
    nativeProcess.standardOutput.readBytes(_processBuffer, _processBuffer.length, nativeProcess.standardOutput.bytesAvailable);
    ...
}

//sending take command to the Java process
nativeProcess.standardInput.writeMultiByte("take\n", "utf-8");

This is the relevant Java code (you can find the complete code inside the source folder of the application, ScreenShot.java):

/**
 * @param width of the screen capture
 * @param height of the screen capture
 * @param args
 */
public static void main(String[] args) {
     if (args.length == 2) {
         width = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
         height = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);
     }

    ScreenShot s = new ScreenShot();
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
    String text = "";
    String[] tokens;

    while (true) {
        try {
            text = in.readLine();
            if (text.equals("take")) {
                s.capturePortion(x, y, width, height);
            } else if (text.equals("terminate")) {
                return;
            } else if (text.length() > 0) {
                tokens = text.split("\\|");
                if (tokens.length < 4)
                    continue;
                x = Integer.parseInt(tokens[0]);
                y = Integer.parseInt(tokens[1]);
                width = Integer.parseInt(tokens[2]);
                height = Integer.parseInt(tokens[3]);
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.err.println("Exception while reading the input. " + e);
        }
    }
}

/**
 * Capture a portion of the screen
 */
public void capturePortion(int x, int y, int w, int h) {
    try {
        if (robot == null)
            robot = new Robot();
        BufferedImage img = robot.createScreenCapture(new Rectangle(x, y, w, h));
        ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ImageIO.write(img, imageType, output);

        DataOutputStream dataOutputStream = new DataOutputStream(System.out);
        //output the buffer size
        dataOutputStream.writeInt(output.size());
        //output the buffer
        dataOutputStream.write(output.toByteArray());
        dataOutputStream.flush();

        output.close();
    } catch (AWTException e) {
        System.err.println("Exception while capturing screen. " + e);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        System.err.println("Exception while writting the image bytes. " + e);
    }
}

I am by no means a designer. Still, I think I managed to get a decent look of the main application window using Adobe Illustrator and Flash Catalyst. I created the design in Illustrator, and then using Flash Catalyst I transformed the graphics into a Flex application. And finally using Flash Builder 4 I added the logic.

Source code and native installers

You can download the Flex project from here, Mac installer from here, and Windows executable from here. This program requires Java 5 or newer and the Adobe AIR 2 runtime.

Things to know when working with Native Processes in AIR

In order to enable this feature you need to add the extendedDesktop profile to the application descriptor file. Add this tag as a child of the application tag:

   1: <supportedProfiles>extendedDesktop</supportedProfiles>

When using this feature you can’t package your application as an AIR file for distribution. You have to use the native installer. The easiest way to do this is to export for release from Flash Builder (you get the AIR file you normally use to distribute your application). And then you use adt at the command line to create the native installer. If you want a Mac installer you do it on a Mac, if you want a Windows installer you have to do it on a Windows. The command looks like this:

   1: adt -package -target native myApp.exe myApp.air

More on how to create native installers for AIR applications here (make sure you use the adt from AIR 2 and not one from an older version).

If you see an error like in the picture below when you install an application using the generated native installer, you should create a file named .airappinstall.log in your home folder. This log file can tell you what was wrong. In my case the error was “failed while validating native package: Error: Missing digested package file: .DS_Store starting cleanup of temporary files” (I fixed the problem by deleting the .DS_Store file from the source folder).

Finally, you can check at runtime if the application has extended desktop capabilities by using this:

if (NativeProcess.isSupported)
    //extended desktop profile is available
else
    //extended desktop profile is not available

What’s next?

If you haven’t already, download the Adobe AIR 2 runtime and SDK and play with the new features. You can find a nice article about the new features from AIR 2 on Christian Cantrell’s blog.

I already have another idea: what about an AIR application that does screen sharing? Keep an eye out I might be able to pull it off!

PS. Many thanks to my friends Chicu and Raul from the Romanian AIR team for their help.

Later Update: My friend Benjamin Dobler created a nice screen recording application with AIR 2 (it captures the sound as well). Although for now the source code is not available, I still think it is worth having a look.

November 30, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, Tutorials, Video | 6 Comments

Flex Builder 3 Alpha for Linux is out

If you use Linux then I have good news for you: we just released (November 24th 2009) a new version of the Flex Builder 3 plug-in for Linux. You can grab the bits from here.

There are no new features added to this update. However this version was tested on the latest Linux distros and the hardcoded expiration time has been extended beyond December 1st (this is the timeout for the previous release).

Click here to see the release notes.

November 25, 2009 | Filed Under Flex Builder | 4 Comments

Acrobat.com reloaded

We just launched a new version of Acrobat.com our online solution for office applications. There is a text editor (Buzzword), a spreadsheet editor (Tables), a presentation tool (Presentation), and a web conference tool (Meetings with screen sharing, voice and video). And because this is hosted in the Cloud, you can uset it wherever you have a web browser and Flash Player, you can upload files to your account and share them with other users, you can work on the same document at the same time (text documents, spreadsheets), and you can create PDF files from the documents you create using this suite, or from documents from your computer.

Acrobat.com is offered as a free product and premium one. Some of the differences between them are related to how many people can connect to your meeting room or how many PDF files you can create. But believe me, even the free version offers a lot of functionality. I’ve been using this suite for the past year and I’m quite happy.

There is an AIR application that enables “dragging and dropping files and folders from your local computer directly into your Acrobat.com account, and browsing, previewing, sharing or publishing files easily from your computer”.

If you have a BlackBerry or an iPhone you can try the Acrobat.com mobile application. Using this app you can view or fax documents from your account, and you can upload document images from your phone and have them automatically stored as a PDF (OCR is performed).

And finally if you run on Windows, you can install the Acrobat.com Outlook add-in. When you want to send a document to others, you can have the document uploaded to your Acrobat.com account instead of loading your mail server with this task. Or you can invite people to your meeting room right from Outlook.

Try it and don’t forget to drop a comment!

November 22, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment

Memory profiler for AIR apps created with HTML/CSS/JS

If you create AIR applications using HTML/CSS/JavaScript then you should have a look at the memory profiler feature from Aptana Studio for AIR 2. Here is a screenshot of the memory profiler: