Nathan 5.x RIA Journey

Announcing AFPS 2010: Ready for the awesomeness from Adobe

Nathan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:10:35 +0000

Before announcing this year’s most awaited Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010 let me share some wonderful moments from Adobe Developer Summit 2009, Bangalore, it happened exactly on the same month one year before.

“Adobe DEV Summit 2009, Bangalore – behind the theme Awesomeness Defined – as this line says there were plenty of awesome, cool, and more useful sessions organized by Flash Platform team from Adobe.”

What an amazing crowd, there were nearly 1400+ Flex /Flash Developers had attended the Summit. There were two tracks – Track1 and Track2. The sessions under Track1 are mainly for Flex Developers who is already having some experience. Track 2 is for designers / developers who are ready dive into Flash Platform. Since I have had little bit experience, I joined in Track1.
Audience @ Developer Summit 2009

Some of my favourite Platform Evangelists – Serge Jespers and Ben Forta came there to give Key Note and Introductory speech of Flash Platform Technologies.

Ben and Serge during the Key Note Presentation.

The features were shown on Flash Platform Technologies was awesome; if you would have there you could really taste the awesomeness.

Here is the list of things were demonstrated and presented

* Flash Platform Technologies and its road-map.

* Adobe Flex 4 SDK.

* Flash Catalyst (My favorite ))

* Flash Builder (Next version of Flex Builder) as we are playing today.

* LCDS / BlazeDS ES for J2EE Integration.

* Integration of Flex App with ColdFusion / PHP.

* Features of Cold Fusion 9.

* Mobile Applications Development using Flash Lite.

This year after the tremendous effort of Adobe Flash Player team we are able to run Flash Player in mobile devices. Really encouraging the Flash Developers to do more. Kudos team ! ! ! The journey of Flash Player (10.1) on mobile devices started from Android based phones, especially Google’s Nexus One. Let’s wait and see for some more cool demos on Mobile App Development – Time to see the mantra – Develop once, run across the devices is not so longer we are almost near to that.

As I mentioned in the list here we go for the brief details about the sessions,

Flash Platform Technologies Introduction by

Ben Forta, Director Flash Platform Evangelism and Serge Jespers, Platform Evangelist.

Serge has opened the Developer Summit with the introductory speech about Flash Platform; moving further Ben started his speech from Features and Availability of Flash Platform Technologies across multiple devices. Everyone in the Summit were thrilled and got freeze for few minutes, not because of the climate, because of the awesomeness, features and future of Flash Platform.

Ben speech mostly about the business and marketing aspects of Adobe Flash Platform, since he is from Director of Evangelism team especially from Cold Fusion. Serge speech was related to the Key Features of Flash Platform Technologies which includes Flex, Flash Player and AIR. During this fun filled and thrilled session, Serge took a challenge to himself. Here are the words of Serge, “I’m going to build the Flex Application starting from the Design to Back End Connectivity within 15 minutes”, everyone in the Summit was murmured with themselves about this hard challenge Hope the developers would know that. Finally he had finished the Challenge successfully within the fixed span of time, which shows the POWER of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. If you won’t agree, just give a try.. During this challenge everyone was keen to watch his activities, it was very interesting and funny . After this interesting Challenge, the video was shown from Adobe Flash Platform Team – it’s all about the Features of Flex and AIR Applications from Advertising Industries to Enterprise Industries.

Adobe Flex 4 SDK Features a Walk-through by

Anirudh Sasikumar, Technical Evangelist

He was talked about the following main things in Flex 4 SDK over Flex 3 SDK,

* Spark Architecture - it has advanced UI Components, this is fully based on the skin level design / development. They have introduced lots of pre-defined skinnable components. It is the cool and interesting feature to work with.

* MXML 2009 – it has the new tags and namespaces in Flex 4; more tags available for Playing with Effects and Animations even with skins. Separate namespace for Spark Architecture like , we can also use the existing MX components along with Spark Comps.

* Flex 4 Effects – This is about the new ways and tags available for doing and playing Effects and Animation (I like this very much, since it has plenty of new things to play) . It has rotation, 3D and more..

* Layout Containers – Introduction of new Layout Components namely Group, VGroup, HGroup, and many more..

* FXG – Flex Graphics Components. This is very cool, nice of defining and declaring the graphical elements.

* Finally Advanced CSS having more style selectors – we can use descendant and ID selectors, and multiple style name in the styleName attribute.

Give a try guys.

In general Flex 4 SDK mainly focused to avoid Designer – Developer Gap.

Adobe Flash Catalyst Features and Demo by

Harish Sivaramkrishnan, Platform Evangelist

WOW.. He is one of my favourite and frequent meets-up platform evangelists, because most of the times he used to roam around the country. His demo was started from Adobe Photoshop-to-Flash Builder to build an end-end application. He has developed the mini Twitter application in Flex 4 using Photoshop (PS), FlashCatalyst(FC) and FlashBuilder(FB). He has given a quick and simple four steps for this Application Development.

Here we go,

1. UI Creation in Photoshop / Illustrator / Fireworks

2. PSD / AI / FW files to Flash Catalyst ( FC )

3. Conversion of UI parts to Flex UI Components. (PSD Layers to Flex components)

4. Flash Catalyst to Flash Builder (FXP to Flex)

FXP is the file format of Flash Catalyst design to Flash Builder. We can also test and run the design directly from Flash Catalyst by pressing Ctrl + Enter. As we do in Flash Professional

About the developed mini-Twitter Application,

Components:

One Text Input
One Data List (New list on Flex 4 SDK).

ItemRenderer : Image (Profile Image), Label( Tweets) and one more label for Profile Name. This ItemRenderer was used in the DataList to show the list of Tweets and Profile Image of the Particular person (typed from the TextInput) – hope you knew this.

He has completely designed this Renderer in Flash Catalyst (you can also check with duplicate data on-the fly) and switched to Flash Builder by importing the FXP file. While importing the FXP file to Flash Builder, it will create the Complete Package Structure (model/view/components) and main.mxml file for you. So there is no need to create the separate package by own, WOW.. what a feature it is ! ! Really it will help you in terms of productivity. Then he added the Twitter API inside this package and connected with real time Twitter site. Application was finished within 30 minutes. Everyone gave their applause with smile.

In Flash Catalyst we can do the following main things,

* Build and design the New Components apart from the imported UI Layers.

* Common states Effects and Transitions.

* ItemRenderers creation and testing with duplicate data.

* Apply the event handlers for the UI Components.

* SWF / AIR file export options.

* Code and Design view checking.

Flash Builder 4 – Deep dive into the Data Centric Development by

Mayank Kumar, Computer Scientist.

He talked about the RPC Services in detailed. He has demonstrated the simple employee application, with the integration of MySQL database using Apache server. It shows the Powerful feature (RPC Service Panel) of Flash Builder 4.

In this Employee application, he has written the code to fetch the Employee details from the MySQL database using simple configuration in the Flash Builder. Done within 5 mins of time, if you did the server side code already. It is the great and much need feature of Flash Builder. It will really help and save our developer time to connect with the server-side. He also added two lines of code to create the complete employee form (details of the particular employee).

Abouth the application : It has data fields namely First Name and Last Name in the DataGrid, while selecting any item in the Grid, the respective Employee details will be fetched and displayed in the Form on the fly. We need not write any code for this form, using simple wizard with few steps we can easilt create. can’t you do on the fly ?? This wizard has full set of Configuration of Services.

The interesting thing here is Automatic Paging; it saves more space in the Browser. Next interesting thing is, if any item fetched from the DB, it is stored internally, if the same item needed in future, we need not make a new service call to get that item. It will get the data from the internal storage and display it on-time. WOW.. superb feature.. It’s the power of DataCentricDevelopent (DCD) framework in Flash Builder. If you start using that you would really rejoice the freedom and awesomness of Flash Builder.

In Flash Builder we have the following cool features,

* Services Panel like Properties and Navigator Panel, which will help us to integrate with backend connectivity. The back end connectivity might be J2EE , PHP , .Net , Ruby, WSDL and ColdFusion services. You can also montior the data-transfer and performance.

* Pre-defined Themes availability.

* ActionScript Doc generation. Most awaited feature.

* Auto Event handlers and getter/setters generation.

* Profiler for performance and memory leakage analysis.

* Unit testing facilities.

* Report Generation.

* Live Recording of the application.

* DataCentricDevelopment (DCD) framework.

* Custom File Templates (we can customize the MXML file structure for maintaining uniformity across all the developers). My favorite one

* SVG Support.

* Conditional break pointers.

and more..

LCDS / BlazeDS ES for J2EE Integration by

Sujit Reddy G, Technical Evangelist.

He has started the discussion from comparison of LCDS (Live Cycle Data Services) and Blaze DS. Both are used for J2EE integration. BlazeDS is an OpenSource Data Management service from Adobe having optimal features compared to LCDS ES. Live Cycle Data Services – Enterprise Services (LCDS ES) 3 Beta having powerful features for the J2EE Integration. It can support AMF/AMFX encoding as well as SOAP related web services. It has improved RTMP / RTFMP Streaming facility.

They also had introduced new DataModel – FIBER for flexible Data Objects management between Flex and J2EE. This Data model provides the Entities, Services and Annotations details of the Class and Data Objects present in the server. Easy way for accessing the data model… The File format of this DataModel is .FML ( Fiber / Flex Markup Language). Due to short span of time, he was unable to demonstrate the complete Integration of Flex with LCDS 3.

It was fully about J2EE technology integration with the Flex front-end.

Mobile Applications Development using Flash Lite by

Raghuram CG, Senior Program Manager.

Theme of this session was Create -> Package – > Distribute -> Discover.

How effective and easy it is !!!

This session was started with N95 application demonstration; in the pipeline they have shown Flash Lite 3.1 in mobiles. Finally he has deployed some Flash Lite Applications in mobile using Adobe Mobile Packager. The output format of this Adobe Mobile Packager is .CAB file, which is capable to install the application in most of the mobile devices.

Finally the Adobe Team shown some interesting features on Flash Player and its availability across the world. Everyone in the Summit were excited about this real-tim technology. Really impressed ! ! !

Video about Flash Platform

According to the survey, there are millions of Flash Player download happening everyday, Adobe Team said. Adobe AIR is about 27+++ millions downloads on the desktop. This shows the Power of our favourite Flash Platform.

Hey guys this year we have Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 as we requested in last year summit, Adobe brought this two great run-times on time. Thanks a lot team …We also have this two runtimes in Android mobile devices !!! awaiting to see more info on these two incredible runtimes.

Within a Single day and single track I got plenty of things on Adobe Flash Platform Technologies, but this year we have two cool days. Oh my god ! ! ! It is going to be two awesome days in all the flash platform developers journey..

Coming to Adobe Flash Platform Summit, 2010 the theme behind this summit is Functional Intent Meets Pixel Perfection. Going to hack thousands of developers-designers mind as already hacked last year.
Mantras @ AFPS 2010
Design

Develop

Plug-in to the Web

AFPS, 2010 will feature everything from innovations in Flash and Flex to bringing great experiences to mobile phones and devices, to the future of the Flash platform. You have the opportunity to learn new technologies that enable integrated design and develop workflows, and innovative ways to monetize content. You will go back to your home with the skills, insight, and contacts to take advantage of these opportunities as they transform our industry.

Adobe community members and Adobe teams from across the sub-continent, a diverse set of topics ranging from the more technical Flash, Flex, AIR and processing to pure design, mobile, and the coolest and best from the industry going to offer two awesome days for us.

An overview of AFPS 2010,

* Two full days of conference and networking with leading designers and developers
* Over 40 sessions and workshops presented by industry leaders and Adobe experts
* Over 2000 attendees expected from around the sub-continent
* Over 70 internationally renowned design and technology presenters
* All tickets includes Lunch, Coffee, an event grab bag and a special Adobe giveaway

Are you going to miss this great show ???? Ah ah.. If your answer is yes, you’re really going to miss the two awesome days of your life.

If NO, come and join with me.. Let’s enjoy the awesomeness ….

How can you join in this great show ??

If you register, you will get the following benefits from AFPS 2010 along with the awesome technology experience.

Benefits and features

You also get the latest updates on AFPS 2010 through Twitter,

Follow now >> AFPS twitter: http://twitter.com/adobesummit

For more details on AFPS 2010 : http://bit.ly/adobesummit

You can also post the banners in you Blog or Web site showing that you’re one among awesome Flash Platform community and part of esteemed AFPS 2010. Get the banners and logos >>

Still 54 days guys .. Register now and get early discount… Bye bye ! ! ! See you there @ NIMHANS Convention Center, on Aug 25-26.

Amazing Technology – ‘Augmented Reality’ from Adobe Flash Platform

Nathan — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:27:15 +0000

“Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.” — Wikipedia

In other words, “Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer science that involves combining the physical world and an interactive, three-dimensional virtual world.”

My simple and tiny observation of AR, “Using a web camera, the Adobe Flash player, and open-source tools, it is possible to generate animated 3D objects in real-time. This Flash Augmented Reality utilizes the Papervision3D project and the FLAR Toolkit.” These are two tools for generating 3D objects that are free. Hope this will help you to identify the play behind Flash AR.

What is FLARToolKit?

FLash Augmented Reality Toolkit. It is a Flash Actionscript port of ARToolKit, a software library for building Augmented Reality applications. The FLARToolKit will bring all of this to your webbrowser when you have a webcam and a latest Flash Player.

This is one of the most exciting and great Flash Stuffs I’ve ever seen as of now. Saqoosha, a Japanese Flash developer has developed this FLARToolkit with plenty of cool features. You will need a the Flash Player 9, a webcam and you’ll need to print out this marker. This is Flash! My Favourite Flash’s best one .

Augmented Reality @Adobe MAX 2009,

This is the sample widget of Adobe MAX 2009 AR Show.

SmartGrid Augmented Reality by GE

General Electric corporation showcased Augmented Reality in a recent marketing campaign for its Smart Grid, renewable energy program. http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

Best Sources which I’ve found for you to get the complete idea of Augmented Reality in FlashPlatform,

Step by Step procedure to create AR using Flash CS4 Professional by Samuel Ashe (Flash Designer/Develoepr)

FLARToolkit Details | Start-up guide from Saqoosha (original developer)

Download the sample and Source of FLARToolkit

Some interesting Getting started article (Superb tutorial to implement AR in real-time)

Augmented Reality @ MAX 2009 - Perfect demonstration of AR

Real time play by FLARToolkit

Grid Card | SmartGrid

Videos : Interactive 3D Boating | Topps 3D (good meat for eyes )

Do share your thoughts on this real-time Technology.

Adobe Flash Platform Summit is Back

Nathan — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:58:27 +0000

Finally the most awaited event came home ..

Adobe Flash Platform Summit Official site.

In the journey of Grand shows by Adobe’s Flash Platform, this year Adobe organizing Flash Platform Summit 2010 @ Nimhans Convention Center in Bangalore, India on 25-26 August 2010.

Be ready for the Grand and awesome show…

Previous Grand Show >> Adobe Online Creative Festival

A Hidden framework in the Flash Community

Nathan — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:38:55 +0000

Recently I read some article about a hidden / two year old Action Script 3.0 framework, which was pretty surprise. Thought of share with you all,

Name : FlightBorn : 2008

Here is an overview of Flight Framework,

About Flight Framework,

The Flight Framework is the evolution of an ActionScript framework that has been around for a few years. It was originally designed for web-based, design-centric applications such as product printers and book builders. Even now the framework ships with the CommandHistory – an entire solution for undo and redo – and other practical utilities that strengthen its offering.

Flight Framework maintains an emphasis on supporting capable clients: Flex and Flash applications that are much more than just pretty faces to server implementations. Through features like domains (modular MVC systems) and a prescribed structure, the framework transforms component scripting into real application development.

Hope this framework will add more values to your Flash / Flex applications development.

Source,

Flight framework | Flightframework @ Google Code | Getting Started

Microsoft’s pretty site ;)

Nathan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:05:15 +0000

Microsoft has created a cool and clay-based site to show their products theme and objective, etc,..

The products and sites are my-favourite Microsoft Expression , TechNet and MSDN net works…

http://www.microsoft.com/youshapeit/

Interestingly they have the option to create a wallpaper by our self with our name.. There u can create your own wall papers in different resolution.

Here is my try from Nathan5.x,

1.This is the text I’ve given ,

Nathan5.x Test

2. Then the output is,

Output Wall-paper

View full image

3.I made some transparent play with the above image and I got the below one,

Some Mixing

This application developed in Silverlight…

Enjoy creating your Wall-papers..

Rocking Adobe CS5 is coming ! ! !

Nathan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 07:49:25 +0000

Ready for the Game Changing features from Adobe . .

Join the Great CS5 Launch Event in Online to taste the stunning features of Creative Suite 5

Join now >>

MapQuest – Map ActionScript API for Flash and Flex

Nathan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:04:30 +0000

Hi Flex Bees, we got an interesting API for customizing Maps in our Map based application. This will give more and cool features to our apps.

“MapQuest is committed to providing the best mapping experience in the Flex environment and are continuing to innovate our AS3 and Flex toolkits. MapQuest provides not only mapping, but industry-leading geocoding, routing and spatial search capabilities, all within easy-to-use Flex components that allow for drag and drop creation of your mapping interface.”

Sample screenshot from TourDeFlex

Interesting news is we’ve this API for .NET / JAVA / JavaScript as well. Please checkout the resource page for more details.

Useful Resources,

Developer Documentation

AS3 Flex – Samples and Tutorials

The MapQuest Platform is available to everyone for free (Free Edition). The Enterprise Edition includes everything available for free, plus account management, live support, service level commitments and enhanced data offerings. If you wish to try the full power of the Enterprise Edition before buying, A Developer License is also freely available and can be accessed here.

Premium Data Sets are also available with MapQuest Platform Enterprise Edition, for both display and search. Datasets in North America include business listings, neighborhoods, parcels, zip codes, counties, demographics, school districts and school points. See more at http://platform.mapquest.com.

Hope this will be useful .

Great showz @ Adobe Online Creative Festivals

Nathan — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:07:10 +0000

Once again Adobe has shown and opened it’s awesome products demonstration with cool tips and tricks among the regions like India, South East Asia, China, Japan, and … some…

This Festivals held on Feb 23, 2010 in Online through Adobe Acrobat Connect with huge number of Audience across the regions. There were two Seminar rooms, a Chat Room, a Gallery and a Adobe Store had created to make the festival in a great and much interactive way.

Room I for Photoshop and other related suites (Design Premium Suites).
Room II for Flash, Web2.0, Flex, Action Script and Photography.

Since it was the parallel tracks, I have attended only the Seminar Room II sessions.

A Chat Room to chat with Adobe Experts for instant doubts and queries from the sessions.
Gallery – You can upload your own creativity stuffs created with the help of Adobe Products. It can be an Audio, Image or SWF. Great way to promote yourself..
Adobe Store – good opportunity to become a Ambassador of Adobe India. I simply subscribed since I’m a great fan of Adobe. If god wishes, I will become a Ambassador of Adobe India, not an easy task but have to work hard.. Let’s see..

This is the Adobe Online Screen on Creative Festival

Home Screen

Sessions @ Seminar Room II

Vyshak Venugopal sessions

AS2.0 and As3.0

Web 2.0 Session

These two above sessions are my favourite one .. So I simply taken screen-shots. Oh ! oh !..Other sessions were also great .. But I’ve already had some experience with other session demos, so I didn’t concentrate much on that.
1. Flash CS4 essential Tips and Tricks

2. Fireworks CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4 for Web2.0

3. AS2.0 and AS3.0 comparison coverage

He spoke a lot about Dreamweaver CS4 , Fireworks CS4 and Flash CS4 for creating Web 2.o apps. I had a great time by knowing some cool tips and tricks from these two sessions. He also shared some clear and confined details on Action Script 2.0 (AS2.0) and Action Script 3.0(As3.0), some doubts were cleared from my popping mind .. If you would have attend these sessions, definitely you would have been enjoyed on these products ..

Harish Sivaramakrishnan session

I. Flash Catalyst

Oh! Oh! .. Coming to Harish’s session, I had attended many sessions of Flash Catalyst by him.. All are pretty unique and clear demos.. Keen to watch his space for the upcoming secrets from Adobe. He said we may expect a full version of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder in this year. How great ! ! ! Can’t wait Adobe..

Bhende session (I forgot the full name )

I. Tools for Photography

This is the cool and nice session for Photographer, if you would have attend this session, you would definitely try to become a Photographer .. not joking guys.. He has shown some cool tips/tricks and work flow of Photoshop, LightRoom and Bridge CS4. LighRoom is the much needed product for Photographers.

I knew you’re gonna start using Adobe Suites. See you with another awesome suite experience..

AS3DModLib – Effects Library for Flash / Flex

Nathan — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:19:59 +0000

We have an interesting 3D effects library for playing 3D animations in Flash and Flex. This library has four interesting effects namely Perlin, Bend, Twist and Noise. Here is the snapshot of different effects.

Source: UV Blog

Read the complete details with demo | Download Samples

Sonoflash – Audio Flash Components

Nathan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:30:43 +0000

No MP3’s. No WAV’s. Making sounds from Flash Components for free.

SonoFlash Logo

Sonoflash team has created Audio Flash Components for developers /designers who wish to create particular kind of sounds.

Below- the snap shot of various sliders, you can adjust it and create sounds as you like, and download it on the fly for free.. Its pretty cool and interesting stuff for Flash Designers / Developers.

Sound Creator page

Audio Creator

Here is the list of other interesting applications available in Sonoflash.

Component Showcase

Visit the site and make use of it.

Source: Sonoflash.com