Adobe Flex in a Week!!

The adoption of Flex is going strong, and Adobe is doing everything in their power to make sure the wave doesn’t die off. That is why they have created “Flex in a Week“. Flex in a Week is allowing developers to learn Flex online through online video tutorials over a span of a week. If you are a budding developer it is worth your while to check it out!

Flex is taking it’s time to take off. I think though in the next 12 months when Gumbo (Flex 4) comes out, it won’t take off… It will sky rocket at the speed of light to light years and beyond. After all Gumbo will help designers to step in to develop user interfaces and leave it up to the developers to develop.

There are some great resouces out there, and this “Flex in a week” looks like it’s another one. Jump into the deep end and try it out. Who knows the water might be warm!

July 29, 2008
Tags: Adobe, Flex

Nice Ajax app!

I was browsing around today and found this nice Ajax app. The app is called Twiddla. It allows you to mark up websites graphics and basically anything else with a group of peers.

At first I thought it was made out of Flex until I right clicked. Twiddla Impressive!

July 21, 2008
Tags: AJAX, RIA

My work or yours?

I was talking with one of my mates the other day about using open source code for commercial products. We touched the subject of maintainability of it. One of the things I said was that if you are going to use it make sure that it is well documented, because most of the time the open source community code comments for any language is very lazily written. I was also going on about if you leave a company and not acknowledge that the code you used is open source and developed by someone else plagiarism might come into play.

Now I love open source code! The thing I am getting at though is make sure that you reference where you get it from, document it to the standards that you use – so you can understand it, and most of all understand how it works. If you don’t understand how the code works, and you just throw it in your work with out knowing the ins and outs, when something goes wrong! Ahhh good luck with that!

Just thought I would mention it because I get work that has been done by someone else who has used open source code, and you can tell that they used it because it only gave them the result they wanted. They didn’t care how it worked.

If you are trying to make money out of your software take the effort to learn how it works and take it to your level of coding, don’t sell your self short! Who want’s to be average? Be the best!

July 18, 2008
Tags: Open Source

Flex 4 available for download!

That’s right Flex 4 (Gumbo) is available for download. Of course it is only in beta as it wont be realease until 2009. I suggest that you download it anyway if you are a Flex or AIR head so you can get a feel of what the next version will hold.

Ely Greenfield has post a video on what is in Gumbo, you should check it out.

July 15, 2008
Tags: Adobe, Flex, Gumbo

Flash Penetration!

Since the realease of Flash Player 9 the penetration that the player has gotten is fantastic. Flash Player 9 alone has gone up to 97% and Flash Player 9 with update 3 is up to 82%. It shows that the Flash Player and it’s content is still strong and there is no sign of it dying off. (Yippeee)

The thing to wait for now is when Flash Player 10 comes out. What will be the stats for that? Will it have the same impact as Flash Player 9? (I’m thinking hell yes!) With the capabilites of Flash Player 10 it will mean that Flash Player 10 will penetrate even more then Flash Player 9. I even suspect that whole pages will be created out of Flash that look like an XHTML site. Why not? Flash content is now searchable with Google and Yahoo!.

July 12, 2008
Tags: Flash

Flex SEO Competition!

Ryan Stewart has announced that he is doing a contest on the most searchable Flex app. He has come up with the phrase“Fleximagically Searchable” in which you have to have searchable in your Flex app. Right now if you type that into the search engine you get not results for Flex apps.

There are some conditions of course for entry:

It has to be a Flex application
“Fleximagically Searchable” must be dynamically loaded. It can’t be static text inside of your application. - But I don’t care how you load it, in fact that might make a difference in how Google ranks you.
The first link must be deep linked directly into where you load “Fleximagically Searchable” into your application. Feel free to use any deep linking methods out there.
Nothing in your code can dynamically load the phrase automatically. It has to be the result of a user interaction.
You must provide source code and be willing to talk about exactly what you did.
Multiple entries are allowed if you want to try different things.

So if your are up for it, give it a crack!

To go to the official competition page the link is here

July 8, 2008
Tags: Flex, RIA, SEO

Move over XHTML!

I won’t deny it, but XHTML is a beautiful language. It’s is vast and is practicably translatable on every computer. It is based off GML which many other well known languages are based off, but I am going to look into the future and tell you what I can see in my crystal ball…

“Over the next 5-10 years XHTML will phase out as the main language that is interpreted by the browser. The language that will exist will be a compiled language that will need a runtime to run it. Now don’t get scared! You don’t have to learn formal programming skills to code with this new language. This is because this new wonderful language will be based off GML as well. The difference to what you are doing now to what you will be doing in the future is compiling it before you give it to the world to see. “

For web sites to become more interactive and more diverse in what they can do, a stronger language has to be used. Right now XHTML is for presentation only. It can’t perform actions with out the help of JavasScript. JavaScript will be upgraded to 2.0 shortly, which will enable vast improvements, but will it make a difference. Hell yes! It will put it into the league every one else is playing. AJAX will vastly improve and blow people away.

Javascript 2.0 is based off EMCAScript Edition 4, which is the same as ActionScript 3.0. This means that JavaScript 2.0 will have power, that same power as ActionScript 3.0. I believe that eventually XHTML will be called something else and it will be designed like MXML or XAML (Microsoft Silverlight version of MXML). It will represent different classes as tags for easy building.

But like I said above I’m only looking into my crystal ball to the future, and of course it is hazy.

July 6, 2008
Tags: AJAX, JavaScript, MXML, XHTML

Flex 4.0 - What’s to come!

With Adobe Flex 4.0 to be launch in 2009 makes you wonder what they’re going to have in Flex 4.0 that they don’t have right now.

First off Thermo! Thermo will be new tool for the Flex developer community. It’s going to make it incredibly easy for a designer to design an application so the developer only has to code the actions to the design. It will help separate the development stage from the design. Having a work flow like this makes the end RIA a better performing application, which is also visually stunning. It allows the developer to concentrate on one thing and one thing only, development; vice versa for a designer.

Fig 1.0: Screen shot of the Main interface for Thermo

Improvements will also be made to MXML to make it even easier to develop with. Improvements such as new components, for example new vector primitive graphic tags. These tags will help in developing custom components as you will be able to draw primitive shapes directly through MXML.

Of course there are going to be improvements to the framework so that overall performance will be increased.

I think the 4.0 version will be released around the same time as CS4 as the interoperability will be amazing.

It is still a while off before the actual release of the next version, but this is for sure, Adobe is going to amaze us with the new capabilities and improvements.

July 5, 2008
Tags: Flex, MXML, RIA, Thermo

ActionScript 3.0 a brief intro

Even though ActionScript 3.0 has been around for a while now, some developers are still hesitant to migrate to ActionScript 3.0.

Grant Skinner has put together a slide show for a intro into ActionScript 3.0. If you have every wanted or even got the inkling to have a crack at ActionScript 3.0, this is a resource you should check out.

ActionScript 3.0 Slide show!

July 4, 2008
Tags: ActionScript

Flash Searchable

On the 30th of June 2008 (Monday) Adobe anounced they will be working with Yahoo! and Google to enable search on Flash content.

Both Yahoo! and Google will be given a special version of the Flash player that will be able to open up SWF content and search through it. The Flash player will also be able to perform user actions so the content can be crawled.

Adobe explains why they have chosen to do this:

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player. We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers, and end users”

Having Flash content searchable is going to open up the doors (or should a I say flood gates) for even more Flash content. I can tell you this, when I heard this a little bit of wee come out! It will be spectacular as all the RIAs and Flash content that I develop will be searchable which will lead to the content being listed on Yahoo! and Google.

When will this new searching begin though? Well Adobe has anounced that the new SWF searching has already been implmented in with Google and that you should be seeing better results already.

Excuse me, but now I have to go and clean my self.

July 2, 2008
Tags: Adobe, Flash, Google, SEO, Yahoo!

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