Bucharest Flash Camp 2011

This Friday we will host a Flash Camp in our Bucharest office. The event starts at 5:00 PM and will end at 8:00 PM. If you have questions about what was announced at MAX, if you want to find out what’s coming next, or if you want to learn how you can start mobile development with our tools, runtimes, and frameworks then make plans to be there. There are still a few seats left so you can go here and register.

This event is a premiere because for the first time I will have the pleasure of co-presenting  (a Romanian event) with one of my American teammates: Ryan Stewart. So that is another reason to be there :)

And finally, we will have a hands-on session on getting startet with mobile development with Flex, AIR, and Flash Builder. So if you never tried Flex mobile and you want to learn the basics then you have a third reason to be there.

See you Friday!

Registration link.

November 9, 2011 | Filed Under Conferences | Leave a Comment 

Flex Mobile European Tour 2011

With almost all the bits and pieces falling nicely in place I can finally blog about the European tour we’ve been working on. Before talking about content, dates, and locations let me say loud and clear “Thank you!” to the people in our community who worked hard to make these events possible and to Magda Neagu and John Koch, my colleagues who gave us all the support we needed.

Why am I saying us instead of I? Because I have the pleasure of doing this tour together with my friend and fellow evangelist Ryan Stewart.

Here is the list:

  1. November 3rd – Vienna / Austria
  2. November 4rd – Rome / Italy
  3. November 7th – London / UK
  4. November 9th – Kiev / Ukraine
  5. November 10th – Berlin / Germany
  6. November 11th – Bucharest / Romania
  7. November 14th – Zurich / Swiss
  8. November 15th – Dublin / Ireland
  9. November 17th – Barcelona / Spain
    1. We will do a session at Barcelona DevCon
    2. We will have a meeting with the local Flex and Flash user group. I will update this post once I have the location and date
  10. November 19th – Zagreb / Croatia

If you want to attend one of these events make sure you register today because the number of seats is limited.

In terms of content, we will do a hands-on on mobile development with Flex, Adobe AIR, and Flash Builder. We will also have sessions about mobile development and some of the cool things we announced at MAX. And this will provide you with the perfect opportunity to throw questions at us. Actually let me re-phrase this: it will be the perfect opportunity to ask Mr. Ryan Stewart anything you want to know :).

Last but definitely not the least, if you have a cool project and you want to show it to us, please don’t be shy. Come to us after the event or during one of the breaks and we will listen to you. We always love seeing the great stuff you build and listening to your feedback. If you are reading my blog you know that from time to time I blog about cool apps and projects.

PS. If you plan to attend one of our hands-on sessions then you should have Flash Builder installed on your laptop. Also, if you have an Android phone you will be able to run all the examples on your device too (you will need a USB cable to connect the device to your laptop). Otherwise you can use the Flash Builder desktop simulator.

October 27, 2011 | Filed Under Conferences | 6 Comments 

CSS Regions running in Chrome 15

The latest release of the Chrome browser (15 was launched last night) makes Chrome the first browser that offers support for the CSS Regions feature. This is really amazing as the story has been developing for a little bit more than a year: from the initial idea, to the first proof of concept, then working with the standards bodies and WebKit, and finally to Chrome 15.

If you have the latest Chrome on your machine (should work on both Windows and Mac OS) you should be able to test this page. Just play with the size of your browser window and you should see how the text fills the three different columns.

PS. Just talked to the Adobe engineers that work on this and they told me that there might be a small glitch with how the text flows sometimes. But this has been already been fixed in the main line. So probably the next update of the Chrome will pick up this change.

Later Update: Peter Elst dropped me a message telling me that the CSS Regions examples we host on Adobe Labs don’t work in Chrome 15. This is true and normal at the same time. The examples we have there represent one of the first drafts of CSS Regions. Since then the syntax has changed. This is why I included a page for test in my post.

Later Update 2: Someone told me that Internet Explorer 10 already supports CSS Regions. This is true, but IE 10 is a pre-release version while Chrome 15 is a “production” ready release.

October 27, 2011 | Filed Under HTML | 3 Comments 

Flash Player 11.2 Beta and Adobe AIR 3.2 Beta available on Adobe Labs

We just released Flash Player 11.2 Beta and Adobe AIR 3.2 Beta on Adobe Labs. The main features for this release are:

Multi-threaded video decoding (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) — The video decoding pipeline is now fully multi-threaded. This feature should improve the overall performance on all platforms. Note that this feature is a significant architecture change required for other future improvements.

Flash Player background updates (Windows) — New versions of the runtimes can now be delivered more effectively to the end user with this enhanced updating mechanism (Background update is only available in the release versions of Flash Player).

From the release notes some additional info on the multi-threaded video decoding feature:

Multi-threaded pipeline was written grounds up to support lower end devices and full hardware stacks where all the decoding and rendering isoffloaded to hardware. The benefits of the modernization of the pipeline would be visible from mobile devices, tvs, netbooks to high end desktops.In Flash Player 11.2, the new video pipeline is available for desktop platforms (including netbooks ) and brings enhancements with respect to:

  • Eliminating jitter seen occasionally in some encoding and typically in live streams and real time interactive scenarios.
  • Gains in frame rate by reducing dropped frames as much as 50% on certain platforms with high bit rate content.
  • Seek frame accuracy.
  • High resolution/bit rate content decoding would still keep the player UI responsive and any background ActionScript processing going,which earlier could have experienced brief halts because all the decoding and player UI/ActionScript resided on the main thread. For HTTP streaming, ActionScript is the control point of fetching the stream data and delivering to the video stack. On seek, earlier thestreaming would halt, while the frames up to the point of seek would be getting decoded. With multithreaded video decoding, not onlywould the seek be more responsive, but it would also start playback faster after seek.
  • 50+ fixes as part of the modernization of the video pipeline architecture

Is this cool or what?

October 26, 2011 | Filed Under Others | 8 Comments 

Speaking at ZendCon 2011

This week I’ll be at the ZendCon PHP Conference in Santa Clara. I will have a session on Flex and PHP mobile development for iOS, Android, and PlayBook on Thursday starting at 9:15 AM.

If you plan to attend this conference make sure you drop by to say hello. We will have a booth in the exposition area next to Zend’s booth.

I’m really excited to be part of this conference. First, it is my first PHP conference in the States – so far I’ve been speaking only at European conferences. And second, it has been a while since my last PHP conference. I think I will have a great time catching up with what the PHP community is doing these days. I already picked up some sessions that I’m sure will blow my mind :)

Now straight to the airport! A long trip awaits me!

October 17, 2011 | Filed Under Conferences | Leave a Comment 

About Adobe MAX 2011: Flash and HTML

MAX 2011 was the sixth MAX for me and I have to admit it was by far the most interesting to attend. Judging by the discussions I was involved in or I overheard while being at MAX, I think that this is a feeling many share.

Fellow evangelists Ryan Stewart, Mark Doherty, Greg Wilson, and Michael Chaize already wrote about MAX so I won’t reiterate all of the news and announcements. However, I want to highlight some of the things I consider quite important.

Adobe Touch Apps

I’ve been arguing for a while that (1) tablets are not just bigger smartphones and (2) tablets could be used for more than just consuming digital content. So you can imagine how happy I was when I first heard about Adobe Touch Apps.

Adobe Touch Apps is a suite of applications that works on tablets and enables you to create and share content:

  1. Adobe Photoshop Touch – the name says all, doesn’t it? But make sure you check the video because you’ll be surprised by how powerful this app is.
  2. Adobe Ideas – a digital sketchbook for artists.
  3. Adobe Collage – create moodboards with ease. You can search for images, bring them into the app, and modify.
  4. Adobe Proto – this product has a good amount of magic. Using simple gestures you can create wireframes or interactive prototypes. In a matter of seconds you can add a header, a content area, a menu, pictures, and text
  5. Adobe Kuler – Kuler has been around for some time (2007 to be precise). It is the little app that helps you find colors that work together. There is a large community who adds new swatches. Once you find a theme you can easily customize the colors.
  6. Adobe Debut – helps you to share design/digital content created with Creative Suite anywhere right on your tablet.

You can find here a number of videos that show these apps in action.

As I said at the beginning of this section I’m glad to see apps for tablets that help people to create content on the go. However there is another thing that this suite is trying to address: device fragmentation. But first, let me present you the high-level vision. We announced a new initiative called Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe Touch Apps is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud along with other services (such as Adobe Digital Publishing, Business Catalyst, and Typekit) and products (such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Edge).

And one of the many benefits of these offerings is the seamless cross device synchronization. In other words you can take a picture with your phone or tablet and then open up your desktop or laptop and you will find the picture there. The bits are moving magically from one device to another (well you do need a Internet connection for this :D).

Stay tuned and early November you will find Adobe Creative Cloud prices.

HTML and Adobe

We talked a lot about HTML at Adobe this year. I bet you couldn’t believe the acquisition announcements of Nitobi/PhoneGap and Typekit :) However this is only one part of what we are doing at Adobe for the HTML world. These add to work around jQuery Mobile (last year we announced that we will contribute to jQuery Mobile), tooling for HTML5 (the Edge project and Wallaby are just two examples of new initiatives that complete Dreamweaver CS5.5 support for HTML5/CSS3).

So as you can see the work Adobe is doing around HTML5 is pretty significant and has reached the point where people from outside Adobe or Adobe’s community recognize this.

One aspect that is fast growing is the work Adobe does in moving web standards forward. Let me step back and tell you a short story. Back in 2007, Adobe AIR (called Apollo back then) saw the lights for the first time. And from the beginning we wanted to build a new runtime that would appeal to all web developers. What technology did developers use for building amazing websites and applications? JavaScript and ActionScript. Thus Adobe AIR brought support for both technologies. And the JavaScript/HTML/CSS support was made possible by including the WebKit engine in the AIR runtime.

Of course, we had to extend the WebKit engine in order to have the same APIs/capabilities as we had in ActionScript. For example to have access to the hard disk, to write/read encrypted data, SQLite support, camera and microphone access, and so forth (does this sound familiar? :D).

By doing this, our engineers became experts in WebKit. Fast forward to 2010 and we announced the CSS Regions proposal. Our engineers provided an implementation for this feature for WebKit. And this year we have two Adobe engineers who obtained the WebKit committer status. This is something great and I am proud to say I’m a friend of these two guys. I hope to see them getting the WebKit reviewer status :).

As the work with CSS Regions was moving on nicely, Adobe engineers didn’t stop here. At MAX 2011 we showed a new CSS feature that we are working on called CSS Shaders. Working with Apple and Opera we already submitted this proposal to W3C. Go here and watch the videos.

I have to admit that first time Alex showed me this (he’s one of the two Adobe WebKit committers) in action I was sure it was just some Flash application. When he told me that it is, actually, a modified WebKit and some CSS and JavaScript I was speechless.

So yeah, I think it is safe to say that Adobe “gets” HTML and we have lots of proof for this. And I know more things will come in the near future so stay tuned.

Flash Platform

Despite what others might think, my personal belief is that the Flash platform had an amazing year in 2011. With AIR 3, I think we have one of the best solutions for building mobile apps across devices and operating systems. The Native Extension feature makes it possible to extend the runtime and have access to all the other APIs available on the device right from your ActionScript code. The upcoming version of Flex, 4.6, will extend the support for mobile components and improve the performance.

With Stage Video and Stage 3D (Stage 3D is available only on desktops for now) you can build amazing applications that can handle video, sound, and complex 3D content. So playing Unreal Tournament in a browser through Flash Player became a reality.

What about new stuff? Well, take a look at these two sessions about the future of Flash Player from MAX: Flash Platform roadmap and What’s new in the Flex SDK. Workers (concurrency), a new Flex compiler, better tooling support (Flash Builder), and an amazing telemetry tool for profiling the release SWFs (Monocle) are things we are working on.

HTML and Flash

Last week I had an interesting discussion with two community leaders in the airport (hey guys, I hope your trip back home was fine :) ). And they were asking me about the future of Flash and what Adobe will do (they are first and foremost Flash guys). The main reason for all these questions was how the keynotes were perceived.

Since then, I thought more on this and watched again the keynotes. My personal belief is that all the effort Adobe puts in both HTML and Flash will actually serve developers and designers independently of what their first choice is. Joseph Labrecque has a good post on MAX 2011 and what some felt right there when everything was still hot.

Let me explain why. First, Adobe will be able to provide the best tools and frameworks for both technologies. If you are a developer or a business owner who uses Adobe technologies you’ll find easier to pitch your solutions. Clients would not see you as someone who only cares and knows only HTML or Flash. You’ll be able to propose the best technology for each project/client need. Definitely, this makes our life as Adobe evangelists much easier. Instead of being pushed into a defensive stance or fighting to be credible now we can just focus on the two sides of the stories.

Second, if you take a look at the history of Flash and how Flash relates to HTML it has already been about Flash doing stuff that wasn’t possible just with HTML. And the relation between these two was “AND” and not “OR”. “OR” implies that there can be only one choice. “And” means that they will co-exist. Some people after watching the keynotes they left with an “OR” in their hearts.

Third, if you are a guy who’s been building interactive content with the Flash platform then you are incredibly well positioned. Because you already know how to design and choreograph great content and apps. Without these skills all the JavaScript and HTML5 knowledge in the world can’t do much.

In reality for the foreseeable future the Flash platform will still be able to do things that are either impossible or more expensive with HTML. Certainly amazing 3D capabilities seems to be the main Flash usage. But let’s not forget about all the other goodies (improved Flex framework and Flash Builder, concurrency, and a faster compiler). These are things that will help developers who build interactive applications for desktop or mobile to be more efficient while building better apps than today.

Conclusions

I think 2012 will be an even more interesting year. Personally, I can’t wait. I’m so looking forward to see what people will build using AIR 3 and Native Extensions. I can’t wait for Stage 3D on mobile.

Second, yes you will be seeing us talking more and more about HTML and the things we are doing here at Adobe. Fellow evangelist Ryan Stewart already started working with PhoneGap. I’m doing the same. Actually, I hope to port one of my mobile apps to PhoneGap this month to better understand this platform.

At the same time, we are still working on the Flash side as hard as ever. Right now, I’m working with Ryan on the content for a European tour about Flex mobile development. We will hit about 9 different locations all over Europe. Once we have set up everything we will post all the details (by the way a big thank you to all the people from the community who are making this tour possible). So stay tuned and try to attend if you happen to be around of one of the locations.

Finally, I want to add that with each year I enjoy Adobe MAX more and more. It has to do with the feeling of family/community. There are thousands of people over there and from all over the world. And still you bump into someone who built something you knew or who read something your wrote or used/extended your code. This year I met people from South America, North America, and Europe. Actually there were lots of Europeans. To all of you, thank you for your time, and the friendly and insightful discussions. Looking forward to meeting you next year :)

October 14, 2011 | Filed Under Others | 2 Comments 

Devices at MAX 2011

Later this week Adobe MAX 2011 will be officially opened. Last week I blogged about some of the sessions and labs that will be focusing on mobile development. This week I wanted to highlight some sessions that are built around specific devices.

Adobe AIR and TVs (Samsung and LG)

Televisions are getting smarter and smarter. This means that you (individual developer or company/agency) have a great opportunity to build the killer apps people will want to buy or use on their latest generation TVs. If you want to find out more about what you can do and how, bookmark these sessions:

Sony Android Tablets

Sony announced this summer two Android based tablets that will be shipped later on this year. This was a surprise for many as this marks the first time that Sony has built a tablet that uses Android. At MAX you can attend these two sessions:

BlackBerry PlayBook

To date, the PlayBook is one of my favorite tablets that money can buy. And one of the things that make this tablet special is that you have multiple ways to create your application, from HTML to ActionScript/Flex. Here are some related sessions:

NOOK Color

NOOk Color from Barnes & Noble is one of the hot devices on the market – the content, distribution, Android OS, and demographics all make this device special. Well, if you live here in Europe not so much :D. At MAX you can learn more about this ecosystem:

Motorola

If you ever developed a mobile application you know that building the app is just one of a long list of the check points you have to complete. And arguably it is the easiest to check too (thanks to Adobe AIR, Flex, and Flash Builder I’d say). One question I heard at many mobile events is related to application discoverability. At MAX you can learn about making your app more visible in Android Market and on Motorola smartphones and tablets:

September 27, 2011 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Native Extensions examples available now

Among of the biggest news of the Adobe AIR 3 release  is the Native Extensions feature. If you want to get started with this, or maybe just try it, you should check out the Native Extensions page on Adobe Developer Connection.

There are five examples so far:

  1. Gyroscope (iOS/Android)
  2. NetworkInfo (iOS) – retrieves information about the network interfaces on an iOS device
  3. Vibration (iOS/Android) – make the device vibrate
  4. iBattery (iOS) – gets the battery status (unknown, unplugged, charging, or full) of an iOS device
  5. .NET Image Encoder (Windows) – encodes a bitmap into BMP, JPEG, or PNG format using Microsoft .NET Framework 4

The first three extensions were created by Adobe engineers, the last two by community. As I said before I’m looking forward to seeing many more extensions created and having a central place to go for all of them.

September 22, 2011 | Filed Under AIR, Mobile | 1 Comment 

Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 to be released in early October

Today Adobe announced that the next version of our runtimes, Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, will be released in early October. This is great news for all developers who rely on the Flash Platform for building desktop and mobile applications.

Just a reminder about some of the coolest new features coming with these releases:

Gaming

If you’ve ever played games like Machinarium or Tanki Online you know that Flash Player is one of the best options out there for developers and companies who want to build online games. To help you getting the most out of the Flash Platform we created a gaming center: Adobe Gaming Solutions.

We are also announcing the Starling framework: a lightweight framework for 2D graphics and animation that combines the simplicity of Flash with the power of the Stage 3D API. It is an open source ActionScript library. Watch this particle effect with Starling and Flash Player 11:

Adobe will also soon make a 3D framework technology preview called Proscenium. This will allow developers using Flash Builder to rapidly prototype apps focused on simple content interaction and display, whether for simple games, visualization, or high-quality rendering of small object collections.

Mobile Apps Support

The Native Extensions feature is aimed at mobile developers. I believe that this feature was the “missing link” that stopped some people who otherwise would have chosen the Flash Platform.

Indeed being able to write native code to expose native hardware and OS features and APIs means that you can basically extend the AIR runtime from now on. So, instead of asking Adobe for support for notifications or the contact list API you can create or buy/reuse a native extension that does this.

I know many people are already working on a number of native extensions many of them taking care of some of the most popular developer requests. I hope we will have some kind of a market so people who want to build native extensions and those who want to consume them will be able to meet.

Finally, the Stage 3D API will come to mobile devices too. So this means it will be possible run even more incredible content on these devices.

What about Flex and Flash Builder

With the new version of the runtimes almost out it is only natural to ask this question: what about Flex and Flash Builder? Well, don’t worry because Flex 4.6 and Flash Builder 4.6 are coming this year too (and if you are a Flash Builder 4.5 customer you’ll get this version for free).

Flex 4.6 extends the mobile support introduced by Flex 4.5 by adding new components and better performance. Here are some of them:

SplitViewNavigator

CallOutButton

SpinnerList

DateSpinner

Toggle Switch

The other big news is the improved support for text input across devices. Flex will be using the native text input control on every platform. What does this mean for developers? It means you can customize the keyboard (having access to all supported keyboards; e.g. numeric keyboard or email keboard) and you have access to features like spell checking or cut/copy/paste.

In terms of performance, simply repackaging with Flash Builder and Flex 4.6 can boost your application performance up to 50%.

These releases will provide support for the latest operating systems like iOS 5 and the upcoming Android OS.

Also Flash Builder 4.6 will have support for monitoring network traffic and unit testing for mobile projects.

Download

You can download the release candidates from Adobe Labs.

If you do the math, you’ll see that it has been almost three months from the previous updates of the runtimes, Flex, and Flash Builder. This is not much time, and yet the teams were able to add lots of new features. So I think they deserve a big round of applause! Well done guys!

September 21, 2011 | Filed Under Others | 4 Comments 

Adobe MAX 2011

Adobe MAX 2011 is just around the corner. Every year I feel the same: how fast the last year has passed! I guess I have a better feeling of how the time is passing by counting the MAXs :D

Anyway let’s get back to the event itself. There are many reasons for wanting to attend Adobe MAX (learning new products and technologies, staying in touch with the latest and greatest, and networking just to name few) but if you plan to start mobile development or to learn new tricks then here is a list I put together.

Beginner

Intermediate / Advanced

I want to call out these sessions:

My team has been working lately on a number of mobile applications so we have lots of experience earned first-hand. I encourage you to attend Renaun’s, Ryan’s, and Paul’s sessions.

See you there and don’t forget you’ll be able to watch the keynotes online if you don’t plan to attend the event in person. Let’s rock the house once again!

September 19, 2011 | Filed Under Conferences | 1 Comment 

← Previous Page — Next Page →

Switch to our mobile site