Now everyone can be at Adobe MAX

Virtually, that is :P

Adobe Max 2009 is couple of days away. Fortunately, I happened to be here in the bay area, and my boss was kind enough to let me go attend MAX, despite the tight schedule. I've been at the MAX Asia conferences before - 2005 in Bangalore, India, and 2006 in Singapore, but lets face it - the one in US is undoubtedly the mother of all MAXes. And I'm very very excited about being there this year.

So if you are reading this and thinking, ' wish I could go' but those pesky deadlines at work didn't let you go - worry not; Not everything is lost. Last year, the MAX team posted the sessions on adobe tv, within a few weeks of the event. This time around, Adobe is also streaming the keynote talks, live! All sessions will be available online latest by October 11, 2009. So yea, go ahead and register yourself for viewing the live videos, here.

You can also keepup with tweets using the adobe max companion. Its a thin twitter client, which filters tweets about adobe max and lets you post tweets as well. You can also check out details about the sessions, and the session location etc. Sweet!


If you are going to be at LA, see you there! You can reach me on twitter at @arulprasad

Developing crossplatform AIR applications

Though Adobe AIR is a runtime for creating cross platform applications, it is very much possible to create an AIR application, that runs fine on - say, Windows and screws up on Mac OS X and Linux. Its up to the developer of individual applications to make sure that his/her application remains truly crossplatform.

Charles Ward from Adobe documentation team has put up an article on devnet highlighting areas that developers need to be careful about when they develop AIR applications. Go take a look.(http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/developing_crossplatform.html)

Apple store browser - Be the first to know ;)

I know a lot of you out there are constantly refreshing ur browser windows pointing at apple.com, in an attempt to see when the new set of pages go up with the new products.

At the time of writing this post, the store displays a note saying that the store is being updated. So go on apple fans, start hitting the page, and be the first to see the new page!

So I just put up this mini apple store browser, which keeps doing the refresh page, for you. And thought I'd as well pass it out to others who want to do the same :P

If you already have the AIR runtime installed, just download the appleStoreBrowser.air file and install.
If you don't have AIR runtime installed, get it here

Go, go!

Singapore Flex UserGroup - February meet

With Flex 3.0 ( and AIR1.0 and BlazeDS source, and flex source and, and...) being released this morning, this month's FUG meetup is time to celebrate! We have a couple of sessions this time around. The agenda as per Shunjie's UG invite mail is as below:

What:
7.00pm - 8.05pm : Session 1 - Test Driven Development by Thye Yeow Bok
BREAK
8.25pm - 9.30pm : Session 2 - Flex 3 / AIR 1.0 Live! by Hu Shunjie

When and Where:

27th February 2008, Wednesday, between 7.00pm to 9.30pm

at

Adobe Singapore,
PageMaker Room,
8 Temasek Boulevard,
#06-02, Suntec Tower Three,
Singapore 038988

You can register for the event by responding to the thread here:
Registering will help us make sure we have enough seats available in the meeting Room at adobe ;)

If anyone's willing to go for a beer after the sessions, I'd be game. See you all there!

Singapore FUG meet - 14th nov 2007

This post has been overdue for a longtime now, blame it on my laziness.

We had the first FUG meet in Singapore on Wednesday evening. It was a great start, I should say. We had more attendees than we expected. Finally looks like the UG meetings here are starting to become more interactive! And to top it up, we had a good bunch of adobe folks joining in!!

Unlike last year (and before) this year Adobe decided not to 'MAX' in Singapore.

Marianne Young, our contact point for the UG activities in Singapore had attended the MAX conference at Europe. And for this UG meet she agreed to do a presentation about things she saw and liked at MAX. Sorta like a highlight. To be honest, I was expecting just a simple presentation with pics she probably snapped during live presentations. Boy! She went ahead and collected real demo material that was used in the actual MAX presentations. A whole bunch of them!! And did a great session to kick start the meeting.

Her session included demos for Flash player 10 - hydra, text improvements etc, thermo, etc. Thanks Marianne, you are awesome!

And during the presentation we had a surprise guest peeking in. Prayank Swaroop, the Flex Evangelist for Asia Pacific is in Singapore for some internal projects and he dropped by at the meet as well. And so did Jack Lim, the BD manager for Enterprise BU from adobe. Suddenly our small little user group meet looked so filled up with celebs ;o)

The second session was from our own homeboy, Lionel/Flashmech. He presented about the PV3D based Effects classes that Tink has put through. Like his session before in the FSUG meet, he did a very impressive job here too!





We also had Stefano Virgilli of AdobeSoftwares.com join us in the meet! Its great to have you Stefano in Singapore!.
He did a brief intro about the upcoming Flex camp and other events. Check out the event pages here:

http://flexcamp-singapore.eventbrite.com/
http://cs3-mobile-workflow.eventbrite.com/
http://flash-lite-integration.eventbrite.com/

I'll be attending the FlexCamp for sure. Haven't decided about the rest yet.


And ArulKumaran mentioned that he will be in India for the next couple months. You'll be missed in the upcoming UG events!

I got a few more pics of the event on my picasaweb album

Thanks everyone for coming. And thanks to Shunjie for putting things together to make the event happen :)

See you all at the next month's event! Go ahead and post your thoughts about what sessions you'd like to see next month here

Singapore Flex User Group meeting

After a couple of months of silence, the Singapore Flex User Group is back again. Its got its own home now - and we have a forum set up as well for discussions.

The first meetup of singapore FUG is gonna happen on the 14th of November. Check out the details here. If you are in singapore, and are excited about Flash platform development and Flex in particular, do join us for the meet!

Adobe will be sponsoring some food and drinks, and Shunjie has promised to give away some free eclipse as well ;o)

Flexplorer - an easy and neat tool to explore Flex SWCs

Over the past few months, Arul Kumaran, has been silently developing a set of ActionScript developer tools. Those who attended MAX 2006 at Singapore had a chance to have a sneak preview at his AS code editing tool, written completely in AS.

I've been lucky to know him in person, and hence have more previews of his work in progress. The last time we met, he showed me a bunch of other related apps. Being built to target the Flash/ AIR runtime, these tools will definitely open up an unexplored approach to Flash platform development. Among those was this application that can parse .swc files and display the components/ classes inside the swc. Its a pretty nifty tool if you wanna explore the APIs inside a swc file. It also keeps track of recently opened SWC files, so it can function as a repository explorer for all your SWC files! And adding a new SWC file to the app is as easy as dragging and dropping the SWC to the app!
I'm sure this tool will be a great addition to any Flex developer's toolkit.

He has now packaged a 'limited' version of the tool - christened as Flexplorer and released a public preview version. This tool is also his entry into the adobe AIRDerby contest. ( I say limited because I've seen more features in the app, which he is holding back probably for refinement ;o) )

You can try Flexplorer by downloading the .air installer file here. This app installs itself over the AIR public beta 1 runtime. If you don't have the runtime, get it here.

Did I mention, flexplorer has a real slick look?

Adobe planning a move into the Office tools market?

via http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/adobe_officedocs

My best guess would be: They'd acquire buzzword for the word processor element; acquire sliderocket, and they'll have a presentation tool; right now i don't remember any spreadsheet program on flash, but well, a wrapper over the new enhanced datagrid would suffice it?

And these apps would work on the browser using flash player, or u can take them standalone, using AIR.

+ +

Of course, these are just some of my personal assumptions, but what I know for sure is adobe (read adobe-ians) likes buzzword and sliderocket - a lot. If they were to really get into office tools development, they would seriously consider getting these two apps.

And if adobe can have all these apps ready around the time AIR makes its debut, AIR adoption is definitely gonna sky rocket!
Hmm.. interesting!

AIR based Instant Messenger - airTalkr - check out!

Hu Shunjie, a colleague and friend, has created an AIR based Instant messaging application, named airTalkr. Besides the native IM service, users can also connect their existing Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, ICQ accounts, thanks to JiveSoft's OpenFire server he uses in the backend. airTalkr also has a video module, which lets users view videos from YouTube, and a photo module, which lets users browse photographs from Flickr.

Its his personal AIR project based on Flex2. AFAIK, he developed the entire application, in a remarkable time period of around two months thanks to his amazing speed at churning out code. And thats besides his day job in our client team for velvetpuffin, (and not to mention, his newly married wife at home!). airTalkr is also a demonstration of Flex's (and AIR's ) rapid application development capabilities.

He is currently calling out for alpha testers for his application. Check out his post!

Singapore Flash Usergroup meet - MoM

I'm just back from the Singapore Flash Usergroup meeting, for the month of July. It was a day of information overload! We started off at 10 AM, and ended the sessions at adobe (the venue for the meet) at around 1:45 PM, and a few of us then continued to discuss about the future sessions etc., over lunch. In short, it was a saturday, well spent!

Ryan started off with a overview of what today's sessions were gonna be. He also talked about the FSUG site, and his Flex (and AIR) experiments on the site, using the RSS feeds for his forum. Am still amazed about how this guy single handedly handles a site that heavy; not to mention, He has a busy day job as well!

Then followed 3 full length sessions - Hu Shunjie started off with a session on AIR. He showed how the AIR commandline utilities ADT and ADL coupled with flashDevelop can be used to create AIR applications. He also demonstrated a few sample applications he had been developing using AIR. Everyone seemed to enjoy his icicle application ;o)

And then Lionel aka Flashmech started off his session where he showcased a few interesting flash extensions that he found around the web. Boy, this guy had a huge collection of extensions installed! I assume He must be hosting a detailed writeup about the extensions he demo-ed today, in his blog. Watch out his space!

And then there was this lousy presentation by yours truly. I had a tiny presentation that I aimed at 'demystifying Flex' to newbies. I spoke a little about the history of Flash based RIAs and then continued to talk about how flex came into being what it is now. But to be honest, though I've been following the developments in the flex world, I haven't really written any flex application that really does anything interesting. So I made this presentation a perfect reason to attempt something worthwhile. I wrote up a complete newbie style Flex application using the beta of FlexBuilder 3, which takes a tag as an input from the user and searched Flickr for pictures associated with the tag, and displayed them in a TileList component.

In total I spent about 1 hour building the application on stage - in the process also explaining the flickr REST API. I could've used the AS3 API for Flickr, but I did also want to demonstrate how easy it was to consume a REST response and parse it up using E4X. Luck was my side, and without any major glitches, the app was up and running! ( I've uploaded the files here)

We had Arul Kumaran attending the sessions today as well, and being an early Flex adopter, I could see him all irked by the lousy coding I was doing ;o) But like I said there, it was a demo of how a novice Flex developer could write some working flex application, in about an hour's time :D

Aftermath:
After the sessions, we walked over a bit to a food court, for lunch, and discussed on a wide range of subjects, ranging from future usergroup sessions to general tech stuff to velvetpuffin to movies. There was a whole lot of enthusiasm in everyone, which was great to see!

We finally parted around 4:30, after a whole load of geektalk. Expect to see a lot of improvements in the FSUG activities soon!

Thanks to all attendees, and thanks Adobe ( and Marian specially) for helping us with the venue and those donuts!

FSUG updates + ATTN: Flash / AIR platform developers from Singapore

A few quick notes on the happenings over the last couple of days:

A few Singapore Flash Users group(FSUG) members attended an informal meet at Adobe Singapore yesterday. Mike Downey did a presentation about AIR and demo-ed a few AIR applications; The eBay app, buzzword, scrapBlog, to name a few. Had some nice fun time,(and nice snacks, thanks to adobe ;o) ) [Ronnie Liew has a writeup about the meet.]

Mike presented today at iX2007 Academic Forum as well.

A bunch of FSUG-ers met again today at Starbucks to discuss about the upcoming sessions of FSUG meets. We decided on making the sessions more friendly to designers as well. There will be more sessions targeted towards designers in the future. So do drop by at Adobe Singapore, on the second Saturday of every month. ( check out http://flashmove.com/fsug/ for updates)

Finally, following the steps by Abdul, I thought I'd collect links to Singapore based Flash/AIR platform developers and designers. So if you are a Singapore based Flash / AIR platform developer please leave a comment on this post.

Thanks!

enabling cookies for AIR ( apollo) - enable it on IE

I had an issue a while ago with AIR ('apollo' back then)'s HTMLControl not being able to log me into gmail.com. Attempts to login showed me a gmail error page stating that cookies were not enabled for the browser. I had no idea on how to enable cookies for webkit browser plugin inside apollo.

Every now and then, I'd see some people come up with applications that load gmail, and I used to be wondering, why wouldn't it work just on my machine! An attempt to get help from apollocoders mailing list didn't work either.

And today I was trying it on the latest public beta release, and still had no luck. Then I was reading about manageCookies method on URLRequest class documentation , which mentioned that for windows, clearing cookies on IE would clear cookies for apollo as well.

So I got this doubt and checked IE, and IE couldn't launch gmail as well. (\I hadn't used IE for a real long time now. The last time I used it on my laptop was when IE7 was launched, and I just installed and tried it; That was it. )

When I checked the privacy settings for IE, it was set to 'High', where most of the cookies get blocked. I changed this setting on IE to default, which is 'medium', and gmail loaded just fine.
Now when I try loading gmail into my AIR test application, it launches just fine as well!

So, just in case you had any cookies related custom settings in IE, remember, AIR applications are gonna be affected as well.

I seriously wish this changes with the 1.0 release. I mean, how would a user know, that AIR was dependant on IE, if they had abandoned IE and moved on with FF?

But ideally, I'd expect AIR to pick up settings (that are not directly possible on AIR itself) from the default browser on that machine. Not from a specific browser on each platform.

apollo beta 1(now Adobe AIR ) available on labs

The new homepage for AIR Beta1 is available here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
A download for FlexBuilder 3 beta ( code named Moxie ) is available here
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs%5Fadobeflexbuilder3

yay!