Category: AIR

I become Adobe Certified Expert on Flex 3 with AIR, I suggest how to prepare the exam

Today I become ACE on Flex 3 with AIR… I’m so happy!!!
I’d like to suggest some stuff, to prepare Flex 3 ACE exam to help other developers that would try this… experience.

First of all download ACE PDF file where you can find exam outlines on adobe.com site.

Then start you preparation reading Flex 3: Training from the source, the official Adobe press book, I know that it could be so easy for advanced developers but you can find interesting stuff that go in deep about particular arguments.

Another PERFECT resources are Adobe documentations that explain very well and very easily how to use Flex and Adobe AIR API, in particular for AIR the best official stuff is Adobe livedocs.
I suggest to take also others books about AIR because you must remember a lots of things for the exam, so take a look at amazon.comĀ 

Work Work and Work again with Flex! Find little or big projects, it’s not important but you can work in real problem solving issue. Also it’s so important to fix many concepts about how to work with modules, components and so on.

When I was at San Francisco MAX I went to Blaze DS and LiveCycle pre-event and it was very helpful for my preparation because LCDS is a part of exam and I’ve never take in consideration before this learning session, so I think you can take a course about LCDS in your country or town.

When you finish with all those steps you are ready to take the exam and maybe to pass it!

Feel free to comment this post with any questions.

Adobe MAX: day 1

Here we are, it has just started Adobe MAX 2008, I’m very excited and in this day I see a lot of cool and interesting things!

In General Session this morning we see new name of Thermo project, now we must start to call it Flash Catalyst, too long but not bad.
There are new interesting things on mobile side, Adobe is working in a new product that package Flash Lite contents in .sis or .cab file and delivery it over-the-air, maybe an important step trough a new Adobe mobile era.

Another interesting project that is in BETA now, it’s also my favorite one, is CoCoMo, I meet Nigel Pegg, amazing guy, that coordinate the project with Dr. Fang (:D).
Now CoCoMo is in Labs, you can download it and start to work with those components that allow you to implement your Flex applications with Connect Now features, so you can share your desktop, make a conference call with video, chat and so on.

There are other 2 minor project that Adobe releases today: Wave and Tour de Flex.

The first one is a social networking aggregator made with AIR that allow you to manage your social networking like twitter, flickr and so on in a all in one application.
Tour de Flex is another AIR application that is focused for developers and designers that approach Flex for the first time, I copy the purpose of the application from own site:

  • Provide non-Flex developers with a good overview of what is possible in Flex in a ā€œlook and seeā€ environment
  • Provide Flex developers with an illustrated reference tool
  • Provide commercial and non-commercial Flex developers a place to showcase their work

You can find those projects directly from Labs too.
I meet also a lot of developers and designers that are involved in very cool projects, but I’ve also the honor to meet Simone Legno aka Tokidoki! It’s one of my favorite designers! Max respect for him.

But I must write also that there is ONLY 1 WI-FI CONNECTION here for more then 5.000 people… it’sĀ unbelievable…Ā 

See you tomorrow for resume of second day.

MAX 2008: Pre-event labs day

Today Max started for me and everybody had a pre-event labs.
I followed pre-event about Livecycle and Blaze DS made by Christophe Coenraets, he was amazing! In a day we had a complete overview of how to work with messanging, remoting and data service with BlazeDS and LCDS.
I must start to work with BlazeDS beacause there is a lot of things to do with it, in fact it is faster than FMS communication with client side.

But the most amazing thing is data service with LCDS, they are the best solutions when you want toĀ synchronize AIR application data with a server side solutions.
In fact you can manage data service cache to save data locally and work with them until to computer turn online again… that’s perfect for a lot of enterprise solutions.

There is also a bad thing of this MAX, until now, we don’t receive great gadgets like others years, we have a shopping bag with MAX, Adobe and partners logo and a t-shirt… last year we received a very cool bag… I really don’t understand why they choose this solution.

Tomorrow we’ll start MAX for everyone and also we’ll see a lot of new Adobe solutions, if you want discover them, stay tuned!

Adobe MAX SF… I’m coming

Yes, also this year I’ll go to Adobe MAX, the biggest Adobe event with more 4600 attendees that are ready to see the future of Adobe softwares.

We will see Thermo (2 sessions during the event), the new Adobe IDE for interaction designers and multimedia designers that allow to simplify Flex Interface customizations.

But also, I’m sure to find a lots of old and new friends there like Mobile guys (Biskero, Scott, Mark, Dale, Bill…) and girls (Mariam…) and have lots of fun with them.

I’ll have a speech about AIR and SQLite during 360Max the event in Ā event that is totally free for all people that are at MAX.
During my session I’ll talk about:

  • introduction to SQLite
  • how to connect AIR to a db
  • create, modify, delete and search into records
  • transactions and prevent SQLinjections with parameters
  • AIR data encryption and others technique to encrypt data
  • SQLSchema and others utilities to work with SQLite
  • embed a db in an AIR application
  • best practices & limitations

everydayĀ I’ll put my impressions, photos and news about this great event, so if you are interesting to follow MAX, feel free to come there and read it!

See you soon… or maybe at Adobe MAX.

360Max, an event in THE EVENT!

Today, John and Tom have revealed own partecipation during Adobe MAX in San Francisco with a particular event.

In fact they create an event in THE EVENT, so during MAX you can see 360MAX sessions also!
I’ll be speaker there and I’ll talk about SQLite API, in particular I’ll show how to save encrypted data, how to work with transactions and how to move your first steps with SQLite and AIR.
My session will be 19th November from 12.30AM to 1.30PM, you can find the schedule directly from 360MAX wiki.

See you there guys!

Next events until to the end of years

When September starts, there are so many events until to the end of years, it’s a magic period for me to find new friends, talking with developers and find “old friend”!
This year I put in my agenda a tons of them.
In the end of this week I’ll go to Brighton at Flash on the beach 08, the most inspire event for flash developers, this year I’ll find there a lots of friends like Piergiorgio, Zohar,Ā Peter, Franto, Marco, Scott and I’m sure to find my belgium and australian friends that I met last year at FotB very cool time spent with them.

Then I’ll have SMAU, the only IT event in Italy, where we are there to show Let’s course, our traning project with Thomas and Tiziano for all event days.
There we’ll make 2 sessions per day, totally free in our stand.
We’ll show interesting tips & tricks of Photoshop, Illustrator, PHP, Flex, AIR and… a very very big argument… but I can’t say it now.

In november there is Flex Camp in Italy made by actionscript.it Italian Adobe User Group, this year there are a lots to talk about Flex and AIR and I’m sure to find very cool italian flex developers.
If you are interested to take part of this event, it’s totally free, you can register yourself at Flex Camp form.

The least but not the last… ADOBE MAX in SAN FRANCISCO…

I think that I must not talk about this event… this year in San Francisco, my first time in California, and I’m sure to find tons of developers and people that love this job like me.
I bought a pre-event session on Blaze DS and Livecycle, I’ve not worked yet with them so I think is a good opportunity to start learn them in depth.Ā 

Probably I’ll go to Adobe MAX in Milan also, but only for a day… there are too many events in few time… but I must meet Matt and other guys that come here from all Europe!

So, you know, too many events, too many opportunity to share skills and find new friends.
If you find me in one of those events, please feel free to stop me!
See you there guys!

My last 2 posts about SQLite in AIR cookbook

In last weeks I spent a lot of time to work with SQLite in AIR for a course that I made in an italian company, so I decide to create a couple of posts in Adobe AIR cookbook about transaction with query and how to works with existing SQLite database included in an AIR application.

You can find in AIR cookbook Ā section in Adobe.com site.
In those posts you’ll find full HTML/Javascript and Flex/Actionscript samples.

I suggest to use this great section to share your AIR or FlexĀ (there is also Flex cookbook section obviously)Ā Ā skills and experience with all developers community.
For any kind of suggestions or comment, please contact me directly.

New Flex resource: flexets forum

Today is my last at work, from tomorrow to 23 August I’m on holiday.

But before to go on holiday, I want to share with you a new resource made from Franto that is a new Flex forum where you can talk about Flex, AIR and actionscript 3, share your knowledge with other developers and so on.

It started a couple of days ago so there are few people now, but I’m sure that could become a great resource for all Flash Platform developers.

Flexest launches also a service called Coaching forum, where new developers has a traning coach on Flex, AIR or Actionscript that helps to learn this stuff.
If you have few minutes during this holiday period, take a look and register in this community to start share your Flex exeprience! see you there guys!

Working with big images and AIR (memory issue: SOLVED!)

A couple of weeks ago I solved a big problem in an AIR application that I’m working on.
This application is an images manipulator; the most important problem when you work on a desktop application is that a user could be uses any kind of images, from 200kb to 5mb!

This problem is not easy to solve when you work with a lots of images because memory use increase a lots.

First of all I tried to use a “normal” load of an images working with Flex Image component, but every time that I load an 3MB image from a folder in my desktop, allocated memory grows up a lot! I arrive to use, with 10 images of the same dimension (3MB each one), 750MB of memory allocated for my application… that’s crazy!!!Ā 
If you want create a batch you have so many problem to preview images and working with them.

So I find a good solution to use less memory (30 – 40MB for all AIR application) working with BitmapData class and Loader class.
I create a zip file where you can find a sample with a couple of images, download it to take a look.Ā 

In this sample you can find 2 buttons, the first one load an image with Image component the other one load image with a class that I made to solve this problem.
When you try it, please open Task Manager (on Windows: right click in system bar) or Activity Monitor (on Mac: Applications>Utilities) and take a look at process and memory that every method use to do the same thing.

If you have any comment, suggestion or so on, please feel free to add a comment at this post or contact me directly.

Enjoy!

final day at Scotch on the Rocks

It’s finished, I’m in the final keynote of SotR.

What a cool conference, cool atmosphere, strong developers and crazy staff!
I’m must thank you andy and all SotR staff for the opportunity to speak at this great event, I hope to come also next year!

Last day session was very impressive, a lots of stuff and very cool sessions.
So now I relax myself until sunday evening… see you in Italy againĀ