Blogs

Hi there,

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.

Hi there,
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!

Well. That was neat.

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!