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)

Google's experimental site - searchmash - has a Flash UI

Searchmash has been around for more than a year now, and their current UI has been written in Flex!

A few things that I noted:

Their data transfer with the search server is in JSON.
Google maps is being loaded on an iFrame over the SWF.

pretty cool. The only problem I see with this approach is, If a user right clicks on the SWF and selects the 'settings' option, he's pretty much stuck. Only way to get over it would be to refresh the page. This is because the Flash app pops up the settings modal window, and since the iframe sits above the flash app, the user can never interact with the settings window.

I like how they've integrated a video search tab - which searches for the video in google videos ( and hence, youtube) and loads the video player swf from the corresponding site. Simple, and neat.

Techcrunch isn't very thrilled about the app being Flash. They question 'why flash'; and I ask, 'why not?' I mean- searchmash is a site for experiments, isn't it?
The author of the techcrunch article wonders if Flash is as fast as AJAX, and quickly decides to assume its not! He should probably take a look at the benchmarks here

Searchmash also shows snapshots of the results , using snap.com's technology. Apparently, guys at snap.com are very thrilled about this: http://blog.snap.com/2007/10/25/breaking-major-news/

simplespark - a download.com for webapplications

Check it out: http://simplespark.com/

I was amazed at the catalogue for video apps they had. It ran into 28 pages! How many people out there can name something other than youtube?

Flex 3 Beta 2, AIR Beta 2, Adobe Media Player, Adobe Share, Buzzword, FlashLite 3.0....

Spry, Flash player9 update, AIR update for Flash CS3, AIR update for dreamweaver ...
Phew!

All those are available today. And probably more!. Check out Adobe Labs homepage, and its almost full of brand new builds!

FlashLite announcement press release is available here. ( Btw, I heard from some highly reliable sources, that FlashLite 4.0 - planned for 2008 is gonna have AS3 support!!! )

Share is another product (Also built using Flex!) from adobe that goes public today. I see it as an online storage + flash paper thing. It lets you import . Nice to see that adobe also offers a 'widget' to include documents from share to your own webpage. I guess its the first widget from the company that helped all ( or almost all?) companies to create their webpage embed-able widgets? Ironic, hmm?

I also got an invite for Buzzword, if you don't have an invite yet, go ahead and check register yourself at http://preview.getbuzzword.com/. You might get lucky as well!

Like Ryan posted earlier today -"Big Day for Adobe" indeed!

Adobe buys virtub - buzzword

A few weeks back I saw an article on wired.com suggesting that adobe might move into Office tools market. My immediate guess was that they would buy virtub's Buzzword. I was so sure about it, I went ahead and posted about it.

And today Robert Scoble and Ryan Stewart posted the news about Adobe's acquisition of Virtub!

I also another prediction about sliderocket in the same post. Go ahead adobe, make me proud! ;o)

Thermo - a new member in the Flex product line?

Since last week blogs are busy speculating what Thermo would be. Sam Robbins blogged about discovering a job description for an Engineering Manager Position on Thermo. And Ted posted a note about it. Mark Anders was sad that he wasn't the one to expose thermo first, like he had planned ;-P

Well, as of yesterday Ted has a new post where he mentions that he will be blogging abt new features in Flex 3 Beta 2. He also has a little mention about "the expansion of the Flex Family." being a part of the announcements on Oct 1st. That confirms a few speculations that said Thermo had something to do with Flex and the Flash platform.

My guess is that Thermo would be something that would bridge the gap between Flex builder and graphical asset editing tools like Flash / Photoshop? Would it create visual effects - like transitions, and save it into an MXML? ( like what the 'Copy motion as Actionscript3.0' feature in does Flash CS3? )

Its kinda fun to play the guessing game isn't it ? ;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?

India's 60th Independence Day anniversary today

August 15, 1947 - 2007

Happy Independence day to all Indians out there.
( image courtesy: www.rediff.com)

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!