journal

The little AIR app we created for the Adobe AIR release got best of show, tied with Buzzword! Check out the article… http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9878909-2.html

Following the release of Adobe AIR, my company, the ichameleon/group, has been working with Adobe and the New York Times on a small AIR demonstration app called SHIFD.  SHIFD is an awesome little app that saves data you see online and you can pick it up on the website, your mobile phone, iphone app or the AIR based desktop app.  The Adobe Air app was written entirely in AJAX wrapped around the Adobe AIR shell.  You can signup for an account at http://www.shifd.com or download some of the free tools at http://www.shifd.com/tools/ Here’s  a great article on SHIFD

Here’s a great little code snippet that shows off the power of AIR and flex.

  bitmapData = new BitmapData(this.width,this.height);
    bitmapData.draw(this,new Matrix());
    var bitmap : Bitmap = new Bitmap(bitmapData);
    var jpg:JPEGEncoder = new JPEGEncoder();
    var ba:ByteArray = jpg.encode(bitmapData);
    newImage = File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath("Images/" + fileName.text + ".jpg");
    fileStream = new FileStream();
    fileStream.open(newImage, FileMode.UPDATE);
    fileStream.writeBytes(ba); 

Props to EverythingFlex for this example…

Flex Builder 3 and Adobe Air have been released.  I kind of knew about it already, we developed a sample AIR app for Adobe at my company that I hope you all enjoy.  Have fun with the new AIR people!! 

I’ve always been fond of Eclipse for its incredible community. And I can’t say enough about Adobe’s move to the Eclipse platform with FlexBuilder. The Flash IDE has always been locked into this schizophrenic designer vs. developer experience. Breeding alot of interactive devigners. But I think its safe to say that we can finally split the roles back to designers and developers. Flash being the animation designers and Eclipse being the development environment. And maybe that’s what Adobe wants. Maybe Thermo will become the Interaction Designers IDE of choice and Flash will become the animators IDE. But for now, with that in mind, I’ve setup my environment in FlexBuilder/Eclipse and I just wanted to provide you all with some great tools I’ve come across over the years to facilitate a great coding experience in Flex.

So there are two forms of FlexBuilder right now, 2.0 and the beta 3.0. Both are using two seperate versions of Eclipse which is very important to how you setup your environment and what plugins and features you can use. First off is FlexBuilder 2 which comes bundled with Eclipse 3.2. To keep things kosher, it may be important for you now to just download the FlexBuilder 2 with Eclipse included because now the Eclipse environment is already in Eclipse 3.3 Europa and unsupported by Flex 2.0. Some of the plugins I’ll refer to that you can add to Eclipse are already included in Europa and you may not want to install them in Eclipse 3.2.

I’ll add the update manager links next to the websites. The update manager, for those of you not familiar, is the best way to install plugins for Eclipse. If you go to help, software updates, find new features to install. You can add a remote site, give it a name like Aptana Updates, add the link to the update manager, and it will install the latest updates for that plugin. For those links that you need to go to the website and perform a standard download, you can add a local site and point it to your local directory. I’d keep them all in a lib folder outside of Eclipse. And my best adivce is to refrain from dragging and dropping the plugins and features into Eclipse as much as possible. It will definitely break at some point and you’ll be cursing for hours. Believe me

So here are my plugins of choice:

Aptana : Update Manager Aptana is probably the best plugin out there for web development. Its seriously important to start here because it includes coding support for html, css, js, debugging support for js and ftp. Everything a web developer would want to start out with.

XMLBuddy : Xml buddy is one of the best freebees out their for xml support. If you’re hardcore like I am, you’ll want to jump right into Oxygen but it will cost ya. If not another tool I recommend is the XPath plugin below.

XPath Developer : Update Manager Comes with a slew of other great plugins, Multi clipboard for copy and paste craziness, QuickREx which is a great little regex tester much like Xpath dev, and tinyHTML which provides itty bitty html formatting.

JDT    Java Development Tools, if you’re downloading FlexBuilder 2 you should download this to get Ant Support.  Downloading is a bit different though, go to the Eclipse.org updates, which should already be added to FlexBuilder 2 and select the jdt option.

Subclipse : Update Manager Subversion is definitely the one and only cvs system out there and a great way to manage the repo.

FDT 3.0 : Update Manager For those of you totally interested in FDT I’m going to provide a link but 3.0 is still a little weird and buggy to me as far as AS3 is concerned. Plus the fact that it doesn’t support AS3 debugging yet is a show stopper for me.

FMS : Flash Media Server Editor, if you’re working with the Media Server this plugin is a no brainer and highly recommended.

So here’s a great list of tools that you’ll want to pickup. As far as Europa goes and Flex Beta 3, there are alot more great plugins for you to use that take advantage of the Eclipse Web Tools Project. These involve more of the scripting languages like php and ruby. But installing Aptana will give you alot of what you need. There are installation instructions on how to install other scripting language tools on the Aptana website and I’m just not going to get into them here to keep this post primarily Flash based. But when it comes to other languages there is ALOT more plugins out there.

If you have any other plugins that you like, go ahead and add a comment on the blog and I’ll post them up for others.

Adobe has released AIR Beta 2. This release tackles a number of issues and dramatically improves desktop integration. What’s new:

• System Tray icon/Dock Bar Bounce
• Synchronous database API
• Native menus
• Drag and drop enhancements including bitmap support
• Windowing improvements such as Z-order control and enhanced Activation and focus support
• Improved Install dialog look and feel
• Application-initiated runtime updates
• HTML security model improvements
• Mouse support for double-click and scroll-wheel
• Per-machine runtime installs
• Performance and memory enhancements
• XSLT support
• Support for Windows 2000
• Hundreds of bug fixes

Full details of these changes can be found in the Developer FAQ.

Security Updates

Adobe spent a lot of time revamping the security model for AIR specifically breaking out security into two sandboxes to allow developers to better manage their security needs:

The AIR HTML Security FAQ goes into great detail about the rationale behind the changes and how they might effect AIR application development.

Important Links

Adobe AIR
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Develop with Adobe AIR with HTML and JavaScript
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/develop_ajax.html

Migration instructions (moving from Beta 1 to Beta 2)
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Migration

AIR SDK for Building Applications:
http://www.adobe.com/go/getairsdk

Sample Applications:
http://www.adobe.com/go/air_samples

AIR Dreamweaver CS3 extension
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Dreamweaver_CS3_Extension

Aptana plugin (beta 2 compatible)
http://www.aptana.com/air/

Alright EverythingFlex.com has released examples of a connection manager class to make sure your AIR app is connected to the internet and an update manager class that checks the internet to see if you’re application is up to date. Great examples.

Adobe published the latest Flash stats, showing that as of June 2007, the Flash Player had more than 90% reach. From today, Flash Player 9 and AS3 should be the preferred format for publishing Flash content.

The latest Flash stats shows that Flash Player 9 is reaching the magical limit of 90% distribution - a number sought by many content providers. Mature markets, US and Europe are just above 90%, Asia is just below. The numbes are just as expected, but it also means that since this number is from June 2007, Flash player 9 should be well above 90% since the time of this survey.

This means that there is no more excuses to not learn Actionscript 3 and reap the benefits of the speed increases in Flash Player 9. Keep in mind that Flex 3 will be fully based on actionscript 3 and the Flash Player 9, so this is the standard for the months to come (and there’s more fun just around the corner…)

Read the full stats here…

I must have missed this one, here is an awesome example of Aptana, Ext, and Air. There are two versions actually created two versions both online and offline.

Building a desktop application with Ext, AIR, Aptana and Red Bull

Some of the features are

• AIR Project contains all necessary files for out-of-the box launching of Adobe AIR applications
• Export wizard for bundling and deploying Adobe AIR applications
• Easy import of Ajax libraries into Adobe AIR projects
• Integrated content assist for Adobe AIR SDK
• Help and online documentation

Download Here