<![CDATA[ActionScript.org Flash, Flex and ActionScript Resources - Blogs]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources en-us N/A general.redirect@gmail.com Fri, 24 May 2013 15:33:25 CDT 20 <![CDATA[WebDU 2009 - Day-two Keynote]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/30/WebDU-2009---Day-two-Keynote.html
Again, like yesterday, the keynote was not given by only one person but was a two hours session spread over 3 speakers, and no-one from Adobe! Not that I don’t like Adobe, but they have a big presence at this conference and I wanted to hear a little more from the others, and that’s what we got. Entitled ‘Meet the Makers’, the session was given representatives of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and was really high energy and interesting. The three guys they had presenting (more detail in a sec) were all very slick and were obviously used to touting the wares of their respective firms at events just like this. Nevertheless, I was happy that they mostly managed to avoid this turning into a sales pitch and got down to laying some info on us.

Alan Noble, Engineering Director for Google Australia and New Zealand gave a run through of Google’s offerings in the online space. He mentioned the company’s focus, and success, with open source and mentioned that it is the openness of the underlying technology (the internets) that has been the cornerstone of their success. Google certainly have opened up a lot of API’s over the last few years (Maps for Javascript, Maps for Flash, Earth, Search, Docs, Adsense to name the ones I can name off the top of my head) and I for one have sort of taken them a bit for granted - I suppose we should feel lucky that we have a Google to keep giving us nice things. Is there a price? I’m not sure. Being a developer I really like all the stuff they do and I’m not too worried about privacy. One delegate asked the prickly ‘what are you doing with all of my data once it is in the cloud’ question but the response was typically diplomatic - you can opt in or out, and anyway, they would be stupid to misuse user data. What would it do to Google’s reputation if they began using your personal data in an evil way? They would lose the trust that they desperately need to make their services successful and that would be a disaster for them. Alan noted that all Google are trying to do is advance the internet to a better place - to make information more readily and easily accessible, and to make it easier for us to make websites and applications and make some money from ads if we like.

Next up was Neil Wilkinson from Yahoo. Sorry, Wilk. Or something. He didn’t seem that into using his real name. Nice guy. Wilks came to talk about Yahoo’s offerings in terms of online services and APIs. I like the look of the YUI Grid Builder, a CSS layout generator (and I have been really impressed with some of the other YUI stuff, particularly the rich-text editor that I have integrated into Drupal in the past), but he spent most of his talk telling us about and showing us examples of YQL, Yahoo’s new query language for extracting data from APIs. It’s cool in that it allows you to chain together queries that select rows of data out of their search, geolocation service, and flickr. This is is way easier for mashing together data from multiple sources because you can write some very SQL like code and avoid doing a whole bunch of custom Javascript.

The third speaker was Michael Kordahi from Microsoft. What a bundle of energy. This guy puts the ‘enthusiastic’ into ‘he was a really enthusiastic presenter’ (he also provided the he, was, a, really, and presenter). His chat was about user experience from Microsoft’s perspective and he was able to illustrate that with a whole range of their products, notably  Silverlight, Surface and X-Box (and X-Box Live).

I culled a bunch of quotable quotes from Michael’s talk, but I’m not sure of his original sources. Here’s a few anyway:

‘User experience = market differentiation’
‘The speed of your UI != The speed of your connection’
‘it’s not what the software does, it’s what the user does’

Clearly, Microsoft are starting to think a lot more about how their user’s feel about their products not only from the perspective of what they do, but also how they do them and how that feels. I’m certain that they always did care but even moreso now, when they see the effect that Apple’s aesthetic appeal has created in the market, and the way their rich user experience in products like the iPhone and iPod have spun off into lots of sales and successful tie-ins (app store). The new Silverlight is one area where I think this attitude toward user experience will pay off, as it has some great looking features for working with images, video and 3D that will rightly give Flash something to compete against.

It was excellent to hear all this stuff first hand from these three major players.
]]> no@spam.com (Gerard Mason) http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/30/WebDU-2009---Day-two-Keynote.html <![CDATA[WebDU 2009 Day One]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/29/WebDU-2009-Day-One.html
After the keynote I took it easy and soaked in bits and pieces. Last time around I was careful to choose sessions and sit them through from beginning to end. This time, I think that when something is getting a little tiring, I might perhaps quietly sneak into another session so I can get a nice broad experience. With that in mind, I dipped into Dale Rankine’s session on Flash for Mobiles. There are so many different kinds of phones and platforms, I get pretty confused, and it is good that people like Dale exist. He demoed some methods of getting Flash Lite content onto his Nokia phone, and spoke briefly about the open screen project. Surprisingly, it took until the last minute of the session for someone to ask him about Flash for the iPhone but unsurprsingly, he gave us nothing.

Speaking of which, you just wouldn’t believe how many iPhones I saw this morning.*

After that I dipped into Carly Gooch’s session on skinning Flex components. Now, I’m not really into Flex and some time into the session I decided to check out twitter and noticed the groundswell of positive tweets eminating from Simon Reid’s session entitled ‘The Digital Art of Pencil and Paper’. I love the title and Simon was a great speaker. He was speaking about methods for designing end user experiences without computers. Sketching was an obvious one but it wasn’t so much Simon’s suggestion that we eschew the laptop in favour of the pencil that made his talk worthwhile, it was his ‘out of the box’ suggestions for capturing and generating ideas to design experiences. For example, he suggested sitting behind end user’s while they worked to capture subtleties in their workflow, and also staring at media such as newspapers and magazines and attempting to fit an interface idea to the content (‘force fit’ I think was his term). I’m probably not doing his talk justice with these comments, but it was just really great to hear a voice from somewhere outside of the norm in terms of designing these experiences sharing his ideas and I gained a lot from it. Should’ve gotten in there from the start. Bugger.

After (delicious) lunch (with card tricks, see picture) I caught Michael Plank’s discussion on simultaneous development of online and desktop apps using Flash and AIR. I was pleasantly surprised at his simple technique of using conditional compilation with the command line compiler and the rest of his talk was considered and practical.

Probably my favourite session for the day was by Google’s Mike Jones. Mike spoke about some new innovations in the Google Maps API for Flash. I don’t know why, we’ve seen Google Maps before and the FLash API has been around for a while but Mike was a very knowledgeable speaker and the features he demoed - most notable 3D rotations of the map - were very exciting and my mind was ticking over long after. I’m not sure why more games haven’t been made using the maps Flash API so maybe that’s a job for someone out there.

Time for a beer and some food!

*lots.
]]> no@spam.com (Gerard Mason) http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/29/WebDU-2009-Day-One.html <![CDATA[WebDU 2009 Keynote]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/28/WebDU-2009-Keynote.html
I arrived at Star City this morning a little bleary eyed but a quick cup of outrageously strong catering-style coffee gave me the kick in the pants I needed to enjoy the keynote presented by Mike Chambers from Adobe, the chief Evangelist for the Flash Platform. Mike focussed mainly on AIR and web-based Flash and showed us some examples of people doing interesting things with the Flash Platform. Notably, he demoed some Augmented Reality examples using PaperVision 3D and the AR Toolkit (I think). These were real candy-type applications, the kind of thing a company might use as interactive bait to attract people to their site - the GE SmartGrid and another one that lets you create and animate a 3D sasquatch, all online and creating rich experiences using the webcam.

Mike also demoed two projects from the New York Times - the first a photojournalism blog which was a really slick online experience. I wish newspapers in Australia gave this kind of first-class treatment to their photojournalism because it is a really engaging and intuitive way to digest news and events online.  The second a desktop application using AIR called the New York Times Reader, that was basically a digital version of the newspaper that utilised the new text rendering engine in Flash Player 10 to create a better reader experience for the paper than can be represented on the traditional webpage. To complement this, Andrew Spaulding from Adobe demoed an online/desktop app created (by one guy) with Adobe AIR. This was a music service (sponsored by Sony) that used a slick tie-in between the online service and the desktop app by allowing users to buy songs and videos online and have them available for playing on their desktop or in the browser.

These are great demos, however I reckon there is a bit of a problem with the proprietary players being used in the two AIR examples in that, if I get a digital subscription to the NY Times or buy songs and videos from the aforementioned online service, can I view that media on anything else other than the supplied applications? For the newspaper, not so bad because once news is read once, it is rarely revisited (although they do cache it all in the app, which is great). But in the case of the desktop media player, well, I generally consume my music and videos on my laptop using iTunes, and I’m pretty happy with it. Do I really want or need another media player on my computer? I will need to chase down Andrew and find out if those videos and mp3’s are available for use across any app I choose, because for me and suspect a few others, that’s a bit of a deal breaker.

Steven Heintz from Adobe was the third speaker for the keynote (I think this keynote should’ve been credited as being delivered by Adobe, because Mike Chambers was only a small part of the show!) and he gave us a demo and first preview of Flash Catalyst for Windows. It was a slick demo and the workflow for creating interactive experiences quickly from artwork (PS, AI) looked really attractive for lots of users. He showed us how to make an application using just Flash Catalyst with data entered directly into the IDE, and then he also took the same app and hooked up the components to web services using Flash Builder. This would be great for designer friends of mine who would like a better way of creating simple apps from their artwork with a better workflow than is currently available using the Flash IDE and artwork tools, but also allows nerds to get in there and hook up dynamic data if need be. Excellent.

Terry Ryan was the fourth speaker from Adobe, and he was talking about Cold Fusion but I have absolutely no right to comment on that! I know nothing about Cold Fusion, I’ve always been a PHP guy and I’m comfortable with that. Terry mentioned some new features for the upcoming new release of Cold Fusion and a new Eclipse-based IDE called Bolt (those Abode people loves the Eclipse don’t they...) which looked good. Someone behind was gasping like it was 1967 and she had just seen John Lennon every time he mentioned a new feature. I like John Lennon, he is my favorite Beatle. Maybe I should use Cold Fusion...

So that was it for this year’s Keynote. Not quite as spectacular as last year (where they were showing off new apps from the unreleased-at-that-time CS4 package) but still interesting and exciting enough to keep me happy and eager to try some of that stuff out! Alas though, no superhero intros...
]]> no@spam.com (Gerard Mason) http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/28/WebDU-2009-Keynote.html <![CDATA[Webdu 2008: Day Two Wrap]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/14/Webdu-2008-Day-Two-Wrap.html
Just the one big post today! Been seeing some great things in hardware interfacing with flash, Google maps and 3D today so much to report.

Started with the keynote from Adam Lehman, Product Manager of the Flex Builder app taking us through his top five web trends for the near future. Adam focused on how web delivered content has moved past the constraints of the print world. We can now have design as an integral part of application development, especially for the web which was traditionally designed for displaying text in a standard, english-read left ot right fashion. We are no longer bound to this kind of printing metaphor as technologies rise that allow us to include richly designed elements.

Adobe are devloping 'Thermo' to deal with this, as it applies to Flex. Flex apps have oft been accused of 'all looking the same' thanks to the use of standard components and the reluctance or lack of time to apply extensive styling and skinning  by developers. Thermo allows a developer to create a Flex application template directly from a design (photoshop file for instance).

Another trend to look out for will be mobile development, which has been touted for years as the next big thing but has struggled due to the lack of a consistent platform for development. Google are developing Android to provide at least one stable and supported platform for rich development, and Adobe have their own set of solutions, that seem to be aimed at getting Flash player more ubiquitously supported across many platforms. The Adobe initiative is the 'Open Screen Project', which involves stripping royalty payments off of the use of Flash player on devices, as well as removing license restrictions third party developers creating their own players.

The second session for the day was by Michael Wise. He demonstrated a myriad of techniques for hooking Flash up to various hardware interfaces - most notably a home-made multi-touch touchscreen, a GPS tracker, an RFID (Radio Frequency ID) device and a WiiMote. It was good stuff and it is really great to see someone pushing this type of 'ubiquitous' computing and hardware interfaces. I'll be interested to see how he goes creating and selling products in what is a growing area (one only needs to remember that Apple has taken a big bite out of the multi-touch screen interface, and Microsoft even have their own table-top multi-touch solution as well).

Next up was a run through of the Google Maps Flash API. The API really takes advantage of all of
 the things that Flash can do easily that Javascript struggles with - like transitions between zooms and drawing many lines and shapes on top of the map without a massive performance hit. The API looks easy to use and I'm looking forward to trying it out. Also, I now possess my body weight in free Google pens, so thanks to them for that too, as well as for their nice API.


Lastly I saw Rob Bateman run thorugh the ins and outs of 3D on the web. Now this is really timely as yesterday we discoverd that Flash Player 10 will have some level of hardware acceleration. The lack of this has stopped 3D from really taking Flash 3D stuff (made with Away3D, Papervision and the like) to the level we saw with Shockwave early in the century, so I wonder if full 3D is going to be everywhere we look again, this time with a player that won't fade away after 3 years. 


]]> no@spam.com (Gerard Mason) http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/14/Webdu-2008-Day-Two-Wrap.html <![CDATA[Webdu 2008: Day One Wrap]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/13/Webdu-2008-Day-One-Wrap.html Day one of WebDU 2008 has wrapped up and all in all it was a pretty informative experience. Since the keynote I caught four more sessions - I'll share some details of those here.

Mike Downey gave us another hours worth of exposure to what is going on with the AIR platform. He didn't dig into the development side of things (there was plenty of that later in the day) but rather he filled us in on Adobe's plans for the platform and some of the cool new things that were popping up. He hinted at the possibility of Photoshop Express coming soon as a desktop AIR app - which had me thinking for a second: "wouldn't a desktop version of photoshop just be photoshop". Not sure I have an answer for that myself but I guess it would be a version that would integrate with the online service. That was one of the major facets of AIR that we heard a lot about today - it's ability to detect whether it was online or offline and sync cached data with the server accordingly. So if you were offline, you could still bring up the Photoshop Express AIR app and edit your photos, knowing that next time you went online those photos would be synced with your online photo service. Perhaps? Hopefully.

Stephanie Sullivan gave us a rundown of the built-in CSS templates in Dreamweaver. I've been using CSS for ages and I'm fairly comfortable with it, but Stephanie is something of a boffin (having actually been hired by Adobe to write the built in Dreamweaver CSS templates) so I thought it would be worthwhile. Although she ran out of time by the end, Stephanie gave as a great rundown of standards compliant techniques for creating CSS layouts. Her delivery was entertaining as well which helps when you are explaining the box model and why IE doesn't do it right to a room full of quiet web developers.

Thor Mitchell from Google gave us a run down on the latest goings on with the Javascript Google Maps API. This was a good start because tomorrow we're diving in to the new Flash API for Google Maps so it was quite worthwhile to hear what Thor had to say. He took us through some simple use cases and gradually built up the complexity. It was very cool to see him driving a buggy around on an actual Google Earth map like it was a game level. Amazing.

Lastly Andrew Spaulding took us through some realtime collaborative applications targeting AIR and Flex. Now, I'm no Flex developer so it wasn't all totally familiar to me but he was able to clearly demo the use of xml, remote services and BlazeDS to create a number of data visualisation apps in minutes. Over my head, late in the day but still very impressive!

Someone has mentioned free beer, food and bowling so that is where I'm headed for now. more tomorrow!


]]> no@spam.com (Gerard Mason) http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/13/Webdu-2008-Day-One-Wrap.html <![CDATA[Webdu 2008: Mike Downey Keynote - AIR, Flash Player 10 and various CS4's]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/12/Webdu-2008-Mike-Downey-Keynote---AIR-Flash-Player-10-and-various-CS4s.html
Just saw Mike Downey's (Adobe's 'Principal Evangelist') keynote, he showed us a bunch of AIR application demos. The built in Webkit renderer is a cool feature of AIR which allows developers to load entire an website into their application and render it inline. Actually, it seems Adobe has been busy integrating Webkit into other apps, as we also saw demos of Dreamweaver rendering pages (properly) using Webkit, which was quite a thing to behold (still wondering what would steal me away from Panic's excellent Coda app though).  Has me thinking that perhaps it would be nice to see some better HTML rendering capabilities in good old Flash. Those HTML textfields just aren't doing it for me these days.

We also got a really great sneak peak at Flash player 10 and Flash CS4.

Flash player 10 is sporting hardware rendering now - we were treated to a series of great realtime effects applied to vectors, bitmaps and video clips and they rendered stunningly without frame dropping.

Flash CS4 has some cool new stuff as well:
  • brand new UI
  • vertical Properties inspector!
  • new tweening tools - create motion paths on the stage that can be edited directly (no more guide layers then I hope)
  • the ability to pick up an animation and move the whole thing around
  • the 'super secret' motion editor - which gives After Effects style control to tweened animations
  • 3D transformations
  • and the coolest thing, the ability to do hierarchical animations via 'bones'. He basically drew an arm and then added an upper arm and forearm bone and then maniplated the bones which in turn transforms the shapes they are attached to! really cool...

more soon!
]]> no@spam.com (Gerard Mason) http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/12/Webdu-2008-Mike-Downey-Keynote---AIR-Flash-Player-10-and-various-CS4s.html <![CDATA[Webdu 2008]]> http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/11/Webdu-2008.html
Jesse at actionscript.org was kind enough to invite me along to the Webdu 2008 conference at Darling Harbour in Sydney. The good news is that I have arrived and am presently posting this courtesy of the 'bathing' we are recieveing in wireless internet here. Not bad. The coffee was good too, which was a welcome reset after my 5am start at Melbourne Airport this morning!

So, I'm gonna trot along to as many sessions as I can, probably with a focus on AS3, RIA development and AIR. I'll post my thoughts here over the coming days so please tune in!

All for now...

More coffee...
]]> no@spam.com (Gerard Mason) http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/11/Webdu-2008.html