Adobe Suppressing Little Helper Like Apple Did

I’m surprised, puzzled and concerned by Adobe’s act to go after its freelancing technology evangelist by hinting trademark infringement. This happened to an Adobe AIR promoter FreshAIRapps.com, an Adobe AIR application showcase blog by James Whittaker. Apparently, Adobe is not happy about Whittaker’s use of the name “AIR” on hist domain name. According to Adobe:
Adobe® AIR™” is a trademark of Adobe that may not be used by others except under a written license from Adobe. You may not incorporate the Adobe AIR trademark, or any other Adobe trademark, in whole or in part, in the title of your Developer [...] Continue Reading…

Flash on 64-bit OSs

Long ago, people belonging to the Linux community filed a petition to Macromedia, Inc. through PetitionOnline requesting them to release 64 bit Linux Flash and Shockwave players.

In a technote affecting Flash Player 9, Adobe addressed the issue a few months back: Adobe is working on Flash Player support for 64-bit platforms as part of our ongoing commitment to the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player. We have not yet announced timing or release dates.

Tinic Uro, an Adobe engineer working on Flash Player, once mentioned that “it is not a question of ‘recompiling’ the source code, there is lots of generic [...] Continue Reading…

One Year of Flex Camps

I wish all Americans a Happy Independence Day. Let us hope that the economy woes will soon vanish.

Last July, the Adobe Flex people conducted their first Flex Camp in San Francisco. Ever since there have been several camps held even outside USA: Romania, Italy, Canada, Singapore, Portugal, Poland.

Every Flex Camp is filled with talks, presentations, and products demos. These camps are hosted by Adobe and attended by experts of the Flex community — inside and outside Adobe — and offer everybody a fun-filled chance to learn, network, and gain exposure. Often, there are also hands on events conducted to [...] Continue Reading…

b.Tween Bridges Gap Between Adobe and Apple

Adobe Flash Player is not yet on Apple iPhone. But Flash Lite apps can now be ported to iPhone or iPod Touch.

Thomas Joos from Boulevart and Emanuele Cipolloni from Barefootsoft have successfully ported a Flash Lite project, the “Rock Werchter Mobile Guide”, to the iPhone taking advantage of all the oppurtunities the iphone UI has to offer.

Below is the cool video demo of the final result.

They used b.Tween, which in turn uses eyeGT, for porting the app. eyeGT, or Enhance Your Experience Graphical Toolkit, is a highly efficient graphic renderer, capable of handling vector graphics and bitmaps. b.Tween is [...] Continue Reading…

Enhanced search string ComboBox

The standard behaviour of the Flex framework combobox, is to adjust its selected option as the user types in characters. However values are looked up only by the first character, i.e. user types in ‘a’ and the first option starting with ‘a’ is selected. He then types ‘b’ and the first option starting with ‘b’ is selected.

Now this may be good enough for short lists of options, but is probably insufficient for longer lists and for intensive data entry, where forcing the user to switch from the keyboard to the mouse makes the process inefficient.

Ideally one would like the combo box jumping its selection [...] Continue Reading…

Mozilla Prism Apps aren’t RIAs

Apart from Adobe, Microsoft and Sun, even Mozilla took notice of the surge in RIAs. It started a project called WebRunner long ago, with a goal “to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform,” and later renamed it as Prism towards the end of last year.

‘Prism’ is a better name that explains the project’s intentions. The below picture will show you what I mean.

Using Prism, you can create your own web apps and add them to your desktop. They will function as stand-alone applications. With Firefox 3 still [...] Continue Reading…

The illusive itemRenderer

The item renderer is a powerful concept in Flex, that enables custom implementations of data presentation and input within controls like Lists, DataGrids and Charts. In our last post, we saw how a custom item renderer can be used within a bubble chart to enable interactivity. We showcased that using a chart with one data point. That was intentional as there was a bug that starts showing once we add multiple data points.

See the below flex app, demonstrating buggy behaviour:

As the user drags one of the bubbles, the other one occasionally jumps close to [...] Continue Reading…

Flash is now Searchable

Fantastic news for all users of Flash technology! Today Adobe announced that they are teaming up with major search engines such as Google and Yahoo to make Flash search-able. Adobe is providing Yahoo and Google with optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to enhance their ability to search the SWF file format and uncover information that is currently overlooked.

This is a major boon to RIA developers as they will no longer have to modify their websites to appear in search engine results. Currently search engines are able to index links and static text in the SWF format but they will [...] Continue Reading…

Trend Check on Flex, Silverlight and JavaFX

It’s almost half way into 2008. I think it’s about time to have a reality check on what’s going on in RIA space. Specifically, what’s up with Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX, the so called RIA trio. I believe what people want and look for show the best way to measure the trend. That’s why I went to Google Trend. A quick check on the three gives back a chart tells an expected story: From this chart, Flex shows a very consistent growth. The year 2007 is really the year sees accelerated increase in searching “Flex” [...] Continue Reading…