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

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 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!

Diesel - Flash CS4

It looks like Flash CS4 will arrive in 2009. My last post I was talking about the Flash player 10 and the features that we’ll see in the player. Today though I have read over some interesting blog articles about Flash CS4 and what they have planned for it.

It looks like the Flash CS4 environment is going though a major overhall. Instead of the main time line you will be able to place objects on the stage, right click them, click add motion Tween and then move your object to the end location, and whala all done. By the sounds of it Flash CS4 is going to be even easier for the end-user who is design oriented to perform even more actions with out having to code a line.

Some of the features that look like there on the agenda for Flash CS4 are:

inverse kinematics (Things like capturing the movement of a human arm)
A new Tweening model. (Which should make it even easier to make animation)
3D capabilities (Like I said in my last post about 3D in Flash 10)
Advance text components
XFL a new source format

These features alone are going to take the new Flash authoring environment a hell of a lot easier to use.

Out of the features above the one that catches my eye is the new XFL source format. The reason for this is the *.fla format can only be used by the Flash authoring environment. This new source format, which is a XML document, will be contained in a zip archive with all the assets of the Flash project. Having the source format like this will lead to other applications being able to open up the Flash project for editing. For example say Photoshop could open the source format and inspect each component in the Flash project. You can then edit each image asset in Photoshop and when you open it back up in Flash CS4 you would see the changes made.

This makes Flash framework more flexible for the community. If a bunch or even a developer got cracking they would be able to create a Flash authoring environment that could be made out of Adobe AIR and coded in ActionScript 3.0. So you would be developing content that was created in the content that you are creating in. (That sounds right….. yeah I think so. [Brain freeze])

June 30, 2008
Tags: Adobe, cs4, Flash, xfl