Category: Mobile

Automate, automate and automate!

Recently I’ve spent several days on find the best way to set up an automation process for Javascript developers and I investigated several tools strictly related to the Javascript world.
These tools allow you to save a lot of time when you perform repetitive and sometimes boring tasks in order to test your HTML5 game, website or web app.
In this post I’d like to share with you what tools I’ve found and used to create a full-stack Javascript automation pipeline for any front end developer or team.

Let’s see what a Javascript developer or a team could automate in their machine to have a better code quality and to save a lot of time when they are working on their own library or projects.
For this purpose, in my pipeline, I’ve used different CLI tools like mocha, grunt, yeoman, blanket or plato.
Each of this tool allows you to perform a specific task but combined all together these tools will provide in your projects:

  • tdd, bdd and unit test
  • code coverage
  • dependencies management
  • (custom) project template
  • static analysis
  • tasks automation (live reloading, deploy in localhost folder, files concatenation…)

These are only few of the multiple options that you can have “playing” with these tools, but let’s try to go a little bit more in deep to see what tool can effectively help to accomplish each of the item present in the list above.

TDD, BDD and UNIT TEST

Surfing on the web about this topic on Javascript you’ll find really a lot of good libraries, the one I decided to use is Mocha because is very well integrated with Blanket (code coverage) and karma (tests runner) and because it’s based on node.js so you can create your libraries and then testing in pure javascript without any need to pass through HTML pages and if you need to test javascript code that will run only inside the browser you could fake the window object with libraries like jsdom integrated in your test cases.
Mocha allows you to work in BDD, TDD and in Unit Testing you can easily mix with several assertion libraries and writing also async tests became really really easy.
Other libraries that could be useful could be Jasmine or QUnit.

CODE COVERAGE

As I wrote before I found an interesting library that work perfectly with Mocha that is Blanket.js.
Blanket is very simple and easy to use library in particular when you have all your test written in modules (node.js style) instead of a mix between html and js files.
Blanket works not only with Mocha but also with Jasmine and QUnit, so basically with the most famous testing libraries!
One thing that I really appreciate of blanket is the final output that could be exported in an interactive HTML where immediately you can recognise what it’s not tested yet and jump from a file to another one following the menu on the right side of the template.
Another one that it seems quite interesting is Istanbul.js, I didn’t try yet but it’ll be the next one for sure, I heard really good experiences from other developers with this library!

STATIC ANALYSIS

When you want to use a static analysis tool in your pipeline on of the most popular is….
But I suggest to give a try to Plato in particular if you work alone or in a small team and you want to do a sanity check of your project.

8ek3snRZ22Eq898NOi-l9Dl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9
Plato, in fact, store all the information of your code project locally in some JSON files and you can navigate through the report directly from an HTML page created by the tool (above a screenshoot sample).
These stats are very interesting to check the are of improvement of your project and in particular with these tools you can have an immediate feedback on where your efforts should be focused in order to deliver a better product and be sure that the maintenance shouldn’t cost too much later on.
Obviously you can also use more sophisticated solutions like SonarQube and install it inside your server with the Javascript plugin and run your static analysis every time a developer push his code in git or mercurial.
Depends always the dimension of the project and the team, my suggestion is to start with Plato in a small project and then when you see the real value move to SonarQube also if you are a small organisation.r

PROJECT TEMPLATE

When you talk about template for Javascript it’s impossible to forget of Yeoman.
Yeoman is a scaffolding tool that allow you to create skeleton of project with your favorite JS library ready to use.
I really suggest to use these kind of tools because it facilitates the beginning of new projects and give you at the same time some standards inside your company and between your projects.
There are several generators ready to use and searchable from the official website, if you can’t find what you’re looking for it’s very easy use Node.JS and the APIs already built in Yeoman to create your own generator with the functionalities that your company or projects need.

TASKS AUTOMATION and DEPENDENCIES MANAGEMENT

This is my favourite part, I found in Grunt a really good tool to automate more or less everything that is not strictly related to write the project code inside my IDE!
Grunt is the glue to assembly in a pipeline all the tools explained above, easily in one line inside your CLI: “grunt”.
The community is really huge and you can find more or less everything for Node.JS or plain Javascript, from minify, uglify and concatenate your JS files, to compile your LESS or SASS files, to convert your ES6 code to ES5, to run static analysis or push your code directly on git simply with a grunt task.
One thing that I really like of Grunt is that you can easily scale the way you are working with it using a yaml file and different js files (one per task) and assembly them at runtime.
This allows to create some common tasks for the whole company and at the same time have the freedom to add custom automation for each project and/or department of your company.
I really suggest to take a look to the official website where you can find also many technical information and then start to automate your daily Javascript workflow.
Obviously if you’re not working with JS you can still use Grunt in combination with your favourite programming language or technology like Haxe, Dart, Typescript, Coffeescript or Adobe AIR; the flexibility of this tool is really impressive!

An Alternative to Grunt could be Gulp where the main difference is that grunt favours configuration over code and Gulp exactly the opposite.
The Gulp community is growing day by day and it’s interesting to see the different approach between these two great task runners, probably in the long term the Gulp approach will be more successful but for now Grunt is exactly what I was looking for.

Conclusion

As you’ve read the JS world has got really a lot of useful tool that will save a lot of time during your daily job as developer or company.
The mix of these tools allow to create a pipeline in pure Javascript and they could really improve your code quality and your flow to have standards inside yout projects and a solid flow that will able to scale your company or projects in an easy and professional way.
Obviously there aren’t only these few tools and libraries that I’ve tried, there are many others outside there that I’d like to mention like PhantomJS or Buster or Lineman and so on, but form the next five minutes before come back on what you were doing before reading this post, try to think how to improve your flow, trust me you will remain surprise on how more productive you’ll become introducing them inside your routine.

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Photoshop, Edge Reflow and Edge Inspect: the new responsive workflow

Today I’d like to talk about something that is not strictly related to development process but that it’s very useful when you are running your company as freelance or entrepreneur or if you are team leader of a team.
One of the most important thing for me when you approach a new technology is not only understand if it could fit all your needs but also understand when you introduce in your team or company how to have the best result as soon as possible.
That’s why I keep always a lot of attention on how to create a flexible and elastic workflow that allow my team to create or modify client side solutions without waste our time.
In last years we rapidly see the grow of an hot topic, strictly related to HTML5 and Javascript, like Responsive Design, so the capability to create an interface that is viewable and usable on different devices (from smartphones to web browsers for instance).
Personally, if I didn’t find anything that help my team to be immediately very productive I usually avoid to introduce new softwares in the actual workflow, but this time we are in the middle of a big revolution where HTML5 and Javascript are the main protagonists.
During last Adobe MAX I saw a couple of interesting demo on Edge “family” and I was impressed on the capability of Edge Reflow and its interaction with Photoshop CC to create user interfaces for different devices in really few time, that’s why I was really waiting to test this feature and I’d like to share with you my first experiment.

rwdTools

Photoshop CC and Edge Reflow

I think a lot of designers create the UI for a project with Photoshop, last Monday (9th September) Adobe released an update of Photoshop CC and Edge Reflow, but we start with Photoshop because the news are really cool.
One of the most boring activity for a designer (or for me when I did it as freelance :D) is to cut all images and prepare assets in different folders for the developers.
Photoshop CC helps us introducing a new feature called Adobe Generator, a new way to automate this long and tedious phase, where the designer has only to follow some simple rules on how to nominate Photoshop levels and the software automatically export all the assets for us, ready to be delivered to the developers team!
For instance if you want to export a particular level as PNG you need only to nominate the level with a PNG extension (for example: “background.png”) and run the new Photoshop command Generate > Image Assets to have all our files ready to be added on the real project.

Photoshop Generate command

To know more about Adobe Generator and in particular to know how to set the name of each level I warmly suggest to take a look to Photoshop.com where there are all the information to do that.
Another option that we have (as you can see in the image above) is the capability to export the UI structure and the assets to Edge Reflow.
If you don’t know what is Edge Reflow I explain it in few words.
Edge Reflow is a tool useful to create responsive design layout and, from yesterday, completely integrated with Photoshop CC.
In fact now you can import in Edge Reflow your layout and you can start to customise it visually for any screen resolution your project will work.

Edge Reflow

The most interesting thing is that you can export from Photoshop an Edge Reflow project, or you can synchronise in real time the changes when the 2 softwares are open.
Then you can create your layout for different resolutions only copying and paste the code generate from Edge Reflow in your favorite code IDE; I mean copy and paste for now instead of import because probably (at 99%) you’ll have to improve or change it a little bit after paste but it’s really a good step forward for a software in preview like Edge Reflow.
With Edge Reflow you can create <div> adding box elements in your layout and you can show or hide elements present in different screen resolution simply with the options in the left side of the software interface.
Another very cool thing is the capability to work with your Typekit account (integrated in your Creative Cloud subscription) to download the fonts needed in the layout made with Photoshop.

Edge Reflow and Edge Inspect

Last but not least, Edge Reflow is integrated with another cool product of the Edge family called Inspect.
Edge Inspect is a simple application that you can add as plug-in in Chrome or you can download in your iOS or Android device from the relative store, and it allows you to test in real time all the changes you are doing in a website or more in general in HTML, JS or CSS file checking in real time the final result in one or more than one device simultaneously.
This is a capability that partially missed in the flash development workflow where the mobile test was a real pain (in particular the first releases of Adobe AIR on mobile), in this case with all those new technologies Adobe decides to evolve and improve this experience giving good tools to develop.

From a developer perspective

Personally I think that the integration of a technology like Node.JS in last Adobe softwares (Brackets, Adobe Generator, Edge Reflow and so on) is giving a real boost to them, and they are opening new horizons in the desktop application field, in particular I suggest to take a look to Node-Webkit, an open source project that allow you to work with HTML5, Javascript (Node.JS obviously) and WebGL to create desktop application for different platforms.
There are many other tools that could help to achieve the same goal like TideSDK for example, but I think Node-Webkit could be very interesting if the project will be well approach by the community.

Conclusions

Demo Photoshop and Edge Reflow

Finally the big players on the market are delivering tools that allow us to create engaging and amazing experience with HTML5 and Javascript like other technologies did in the past (Flash Platform in primis).
The combination of Photoshop CC, Adobe Generator, Edge Reflow and Edge Inspect give us a real flexible and integrated workflow where in few steps we can save a lot of hours spent on the code with great results.
Obviously those tools are new and in “preview” so they are not perfect but they are stable and useful enough at this point to be integrated in the actual daily workflow giving immediately importart results.
I really hope this is the first steps to give us the freedom to create instead became crazy to have layouts working in different browsers and devices.

A long weekend with Tizen, CreateJS and JQuery Mobile

Let’s start from the end of my weekend, this is what I’ve just finished:

And now it’s time to explain what there is behind.

What you have just seen is a PoC (Proof of Concept) for an application that I’ve in mind, it allowed me to study, test and having fun with different technologies, in this post I’d like to share what I’ve learnt in less than 24 hours.
I worked with different technologies as the post title suggest, I was really curios to see how I can create good application UI on Tizen OS and understand more about its limits (if there were of course) and performances.
At the beginning, I worked on the 2.5D animation where I had to scale, skew and rotate any images chosen by the user from the Gallery application.
When I started this part I tried immediately the CSS3 transitions, I thought: “They are new, so probably they care about performances on mobile!”, so after 3 hours to play with CSS3 transitions and trying to have a smooth animation on Tizen, I decide to move on Canvas!
CSS3 transitions are very good for web and desktop, but for mobile when you start to do many heavy animations they really suck, in this Tizen device (it has an hardware similar to Galaxy S3) that is so powerful everything has to work well and with them I can’t achieve my idea.

So I moved to Canvas, but I thought to find something that could help me during my “coding time” and that it feels me more comfortable so I remembered that I’ve used long time ago CreateJS for some test and in this case it helps me a lot.
When you work with CreateJS, more or less you are working with Actionscript with some small changes, for any Actionscript developer it should be a good start to move on Javascript, but there are many other options as Dart or Typescript for example that are good enough for any developer that is looking for something more than Javascript (my 2 cents).
But in this case CreateJS  helps me a lot because is highly focused on Canvas development so definitely what I was looking for.
I haven’t any trouble with this library on Tizen, the performance are so good as you have seen on the video and I didn’t write so much code, my Javascript file for the whole app is less than 260 lines, not a lot I guess.

After that I moved on and I start to work with Tizen web APIs to get images from the Gallery application.
In this case the Tizen developer forum and the online guide help me so much, in fact I found a working example in the forum that I had only to customise for my PoC.
The big issue that I found here is if I want to select more than one image, working with Gallery instance, I couldn’t do that or maybe I couldn’t find a way to do that, so I decided to create a quick picker (at the beginning of my application) to allow me to choose more than one image to the time.
To do that I had to work with filesystem APIs instead of the Gallery one, but in a while I had done everything, this is the code to retrieve all images from Image folder of Tizen OS, but you can use to retrieve any kind of files on Tizen OS:

function onResolveError() {
    console.log("error retrieve data");
}
function onsuccess(files) {
    for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
        console.log("File name is " + files[i].name + " and URL is " + files[i].toURI()); 
    }
}
function onResolveSuccess(dir) {
    dir.listFiles(onsuccess, onResolveError);
}
function openImages() {
    tizen.filesystem.resolve('images', onResolveSuccess, onResolveError, 'w'); 
}

After that I spend few hours to skin my app and get the right look and feel I had in mind with CSS and JQuery mobile and to create this post with the video.
A quick recap of my last experience:

  • on Tizen if you need to improve performances try to work with Canvas instead of CSS transitions
  • when you have to retrieve files (images, video or whatever) remember to set the right privileges on config.xml and then add the code you can find above
  • CreateJS is a really good library if you want to work with Canvas efficiently and without wasting your time
  • CreateJS has a good community and if you have a problem you can find a lot of solutions and suggestions
  • CreateJS is familiar for any Actionscript 3 developer

That’s it!
Ah, if you are asking if I changed my “religion”? Don’t worry, soon you’ll have news about Flash Platform in this blog, but sometimes I want to experiment new things.

Dart: elements iteration and CSS manipulation

In my exploration of Dart I’m trying to work in some easy examples that could help me to understand how to accomplish some tasks with this technology.
In this example I tried to understand better how iteration of elements works in Dart, how to create a layout with custom elements (more or less the same topic of a custom item renderer in Flex for example) and finally how to create some animations with CSS3 at runtime.

To accomplish those topics I decided to create a responsive image gallery that works on smartphone, tablet and web too.

image gallery with dart

Responsive image gallery

Iteration

Dart gives few opportunities to iterate trough elements:

  • with Dart language (a classic for cycle)
  • with an HTML template
  • with elements composed by an HTML template and some dart code to cover the business logic of the final element

I jump directly to the second and third method, the first one is quite easy for any developer 😉
In my sample I decide to use a simple HTML template, so basically you can define inside your html a tag <template/> that will allow you to repeat the HTML inside this tag associating it to a list for example, I give you a quick sample:

 <div id="imageCont" class="wrap">
      <template iterate="data in results">
        <div class="image">
          <img id="img_{{data[0]}}" class="faded" src={{data[1]}} width="320" height="240" on-click="onClick($event)" on-mouse-out="onOut($event)" on-mouse-over="onOver($event)" on-load="fadeIn($event)"/>
          <img id="zoom_{{data[0]}}" src="images/zoom.png" class="zoom"/>
          <h2><span>{{data[2]}}</span></h2>
         </div>
      </template>
    </div>

First of all take a look on how I can iterate this part of code; I add a simple iterate attribute associated to a list object (called results in my example) added in my dart file as a public variable.
The list could be a plain list or a list of objects, in this last case you can create multiple iteration item inside the template cycling trough your objects in the same way you have just seen.
I can substitute my data variable with any other name and I don’t need to define in my dart file, as you can see I can also define some variables inside the template getting values from my list object with this syntax: {{data[0]}} (or {{data[“value”]}} it’s the same, depends how you have create the list object).
If you need, you can also made your source variables bindable and any time you’ll change the values of your list, also the view will change the number of elements or the values showed in the HTML page.

Finally when you need to create an iterable object with a complex business logic and you want to separate from the original HTML file you can do that creating a Web Components, but in this case I suggest you to take a look to the Dart language guide that explain very well how to achieve this topic.

Modifying CSS with Dart

Another interesting topic is how to change, add or remove css styles to my DOM objects.
In Dart is so easy like any other javascript library, so basically any DOM element in Dart has a property called “classes” with its associated method add and remove, so when you want to change your CSS class with another one, you have, if you have any classes already associated to the element, remove the old class and then add the new one:

var myDomObj = query("#idObject");
myDomObj.classes.remove("class-to-remove");
myDomObj.classes.add("class-to-add");

You can also style any single property directly with “style” property and set them directly in this easy way:

var myDomObj = query("#idObject");
myDomObj.style
             ..color = "0xFFF"
             ..fontSize = "15px";

As you can see working with CSS in Dart is relative simple, if you want to take a look to the whole project feel free to download it.

Another cool thing that is so useful when you work with mobile apps or websites is to test quickly and frequently your content on the devices, so with DartIDE (you can find it downloading Dart SDK) you can easily test your content trough a web server that starts any time you are testing your app into the browser.
It’s so interesting because you save a lot of time in this way!

I’m trying to figure out right now an hypothetical workflow to create web app, web sites or any other thing with Dart and HTML5.
I believe that use Dart in combination with Edge Reflow could be the best way to create responsive application for any kind of devices, but we have to wait until the release of Edge Reflow (17th June) to know if my supposition is true or not.
When it’ll be released and I’ve few time to invest, I’ll prepare another tutorial around this workflow.
In the meanwhile I hope you are enjoying those experiments with Dart and if you are interesting in any kind of topics on Dart feel free to suggest trough a comment in this post or sending an email

Having fun with Adobe AIR

Hi All,
this post will be in Italian, in particular is dedicated to the whole community of Italian mobile developers.
Having fun with Adobe AIR is a free event in 6 different Italian cities where people will learn how to create or improve own cross platform applications made with Adobe AIR for mobile devices.
For any question feel free to leave a comment to this post or drop me an email.

logoOfficial

Ciao a tutti,
mi chiamo Luca Mezzalira e sono l’organizzatore di “Having fun with Adobe AIR” un evento dedicato a tutti gli sviluppatori mobile che vogliono avvicinarsi ad una tecnologia cross-platform, come Adobe AIR, per la realizzazione delle proprie app o game su smartphone o tablet.
In collaborazione con alcuni importanti sponsor, come Adobe e BlackBerry per esempio, che ringrazio innanzitutto, sono riuscito ad organizzare 6 tappe in giro per l’Italia dove in una giornata andremo a scoprire le potenzialitĂ  di Adobe AIR, andremo a sviluppare degli esempi pratici che possano far vedere il workflow per la realizzazione di un’applicativo mobile.
Infatti l’evento è basato sulla formula BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) dove ogni participante dovrĂ  portare il proprio computer con installato Flash Builder dove potrĂ  creare i proprio applicativi e installarli poi nel proprio tablet o smartphone.

Se ti stai chiedendo se è una perdita di tempo perchè Flash è “morto”, beh credimi, non è cosĂŹ.

Infatti Adobe sta continuando a sviluppare questa tecnologia dando nuove potenzialitĂ  per la creazione di applicativi mobile e desktop, dall’accelerazione in GPU all’integrazione con Native Extension e molto altro ancora!

Durante l’evento avremo la fortuna di avere con noi degli speaker Adobe, in alcune tappe, che ci daranno la possibilitĂ  di scoprire su cosa si sta concentrando Adobe e quale sarĂ  il futuro della piattaforma.
Un evento totalmente gratuito che credo possa far piacere in Italia a molti sviluppatori che vogliono iniziare a muovere i primi passi nel mondo mobile oppure quelli che giĂ  ci lavorano ma vogliono alternative valide con cui sviluppare.
L’evento avrĂ  un massimo di 20 partecipanti circa per tappa e sarĂ  di una giornata, le cittĂ  in cui si svolgerĂ  saranno Milano, Torino, Bolzano, Padova, Firenze e Bari.
La registrazione è obbligatoria e dev’essere fatta tramite il sito dell’evento: http://www.havingfunwithadobeair.com/
Se invece preferisci seguirci direttamente sulla nostra pagina facebook ecco l’indirizzo: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Having-fun-with-Adobe-AIR/430003473713246

Per qualsiasi dubbio o domanda non esitare a contattarmi via email o lasciando un messaggio su questo post.
Spero di vederti ad una delle tappe del tour!
A presto

Luca

Dynamic embedding fonts without using Flash or Embed Metadata

I’m working in a new project where we have to automate the integration of fonts loaded on a server by users and integrate them in a Flash / AIR project.
In the most cases, if you search online, you can find 2 main solutions:
1. first one is embedding fonts in a class with [Embed] metadata
2. second one is create a swf file and instantiate the class of Font embedded inside (this method require Flash Pro)

Searching well you can also find a solution with swfmill but there are some problems to integrate with AS3 projects.
Like you know, in my spare time, I’m playing with Haxe and Corona SDK and in this case Haxe help me to accomplish my task.
I found a great library called hxswfl made with Haxe that allow me to create a swf or swc file directly from an XML, there are many other usage of this library that are described on online repository of this project, but what I need this time is use it to create a library with embedded fonts inside with a class name assigned to each font.

So first of all, following the library XML schema, I create a lib with a list of fonts in this way:

<lib>
 <font file="Palatino-Bold.ttf" class="com.insideabit.PalatinoBold"/>
 <font file="Palatino-BoldItalic.ttf" class="com.insideabit.PalatinoBoldItalic"/>
 <font file="Palatino-Italic.ttf" class="com.insideabit.PalatinoItalic"/>
 <font file="Palatino-Roman.ttf" class="com.insideabit.PalatinoRoman"/>
 <font file="Verdana-Bold.ttf" class="com.insideabit.VerdanaBold"/>
 <font file="verdana.ttf" class="com.insideabit.Verdana"/>
</lib>

Any node has 2 attribute, file attribute where I set the path to find my font on filesystem and the class where I set the class name of my font that I’ll use in my actionscript class later.
After download source of hxswfml library (and obviously before anything I’ve installed Haxe in my computer), I go with Terminal in bin/neko folder and I launched neko file (hxswfml.n) with those parameters:

neko hxswfml.n xml2lib librarySWF.xml lib.swf

I’m telling to my neko program that it has to convert my xml to a swf library, embedding inside all fonts described in the XML file with that class name.

Now we have our SWF file with fonts, we can create our Actionscript project and load with a loader object our swf file.
Then, when SWF file is loaded, we have to register our fonts inside the SWF library, you can accomplish this task like this:

 for(var i:int = 0; i < _fontsArr.length; i++){
 var FontLib:Class = _loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition(FONT_NAME) as Class;
Font.registerFont(FontLib);
}

Ok, now you can use any fonts that you have in your SWF without install them in your laptop and without create any AS3 class, this is a really easy way to work with external fonts in a dynamic way.


Obviously I prepare a sample to download if you have any questions feel free to leave me a message to this post.

It’s not finished yet, because I’ve a question for you: what happens if I use the same technique for different devices?
On web and desktop (AIR application) there are any problem because I can load any external SWF file, the same on Android and Playbook but on iOS?
With iOS you can a SWC file instead a SWF file so your SWC library will be embedded at compile time in your application for iOS and you can access to fonts more easily instantiate directly your class name.


For more information about this technique I suggest to read this article on Adobe DevNet.

Introducing Starling: book review

Hi All,

first of all I apologize with people that usually read this blog if I didn’t insert any new post since last year but I’m working a lots in these few months to open a new market opporunity for my company out of Italy and I’m totally absorbed in this new activity, but in the meanwhile I’m studying during my spare time and I’d like to share with you my thoughts about “Introducing Starling”.

This book is for any Flash Platform developer that is looking to create next generation of mobile and desktop apps (or games).
It’s a book so practical that introduce you to the Starling framework, explaining how it works with simple examples of code that you can put in practice in a while.
Thibault guides you showing each object presents in this framework, that is an abstraction of Stage3D API introduced with Flash Player 11 and AIR 3.
With Starling you can aim better performance in your 2D applications thankfully the GPU acceleration added on Stage3D, with this book you can discover what there is behind and starting to develop with it.

Flash Platform Galaxy: why choose Flash Platform

In those days I’m reading a lots of mailing lists, forums, blogs and so on where Flash Platform supporters are so disappointed about the latest marketing movement of Adobe.

In fact yesterday Adobe announced that they stop the development of Flash Player on Mobile devices (on Desktop they are going ahead).
The road is clear HTML 5 inside the browser and Flash Platform for RIAs, Games and out of browser in combination with Adobe AIR.

For me Adobe for the second time (the first one was during Adobe MAX) has totally mistaken how to communicate this news and obviously tech blogs bring this announcement like the end of Flash…
Personally I don’t think that is the end of Flash but I think that Flash is moving on a new position in multimedia world probably out of browser.
I’m an Adobe addicted, like you know, and in particular I’m a Flash Platform supporter, so I think that we have to move on and make something to spread the word about this foggy situation, guys, Flash Platform is ALIVE!
To do this, I start making a pdf file called Flash Platform Galaxy that could help people to have an idea of what is Flash Platform and why choose it ( I know, I’m not a graphic designer but I think it could be useful), if you want to add more informations or change something feel free to leave a comment at this post or drop me a line via email.
Let’s go guys, we have a platform to save 😉

It’s time for a new web design era… probably without Flash

I’m here in L.A. for Adobe MAX, before the beginning of the conference we were very excited about the 2 keynotes because we were waiting for amazing news about our favorite platform… but it didn’t happen, instead we find 2 days very focused to designers (and it’s normal I guess) and to HTML 5, JQuery and CSS 3.

This is an important signal from Adobe, in 2 keynotes they mentioned Flex 2/3 times maybe, all the new stuff for Flash was focused on games and 3D and AIR had only 5 mins to show the new release and its new features.

So the message from Adobe is quite clear: “Use HTML 5 for the web and Flash for the game and out of browser”.
This recommendation from Adobe would change online web design classes significantly in the future.

It seems crazy but it’s the truth… the same company that in the beginning of 2000 was scared from the little Macromedia and its best technology Flash, today substitued the player with a new one.

In latest years I took part of different Flash Platform projects, mainly desktop and mobile applications and I hoped to embrace the right direction with the Flash Platform, with this MAX I’m pretty sure  that I made the right decision.
I’m disappointed that my favorite platform will be out of the browser but I’m more disappointed that Adobe is following the market instead of make it.

Today I can say that it’s time to move on and start again to study new “trendy” technology instead of a good and solid technology like Flash Platform.
Could Flash be the new mobile and desktop technology? I really don’t know but I’m sure that this year a new milestone of the web was put by Adobe.

Playing with Google+ API and Actionscript 3

Yesterday I saw that Google has released Google+ API, so I started to played with in my favorite part of the day: the night!

For now Google has published only public APIs that allow you to retrieve user’s informations and his activities list, all API are made in RESTful and JSON that are so easy to add in your project.
When Google will release next APIs, I hope soon, you can consume them with an oAuth 2.0 authentication, like Facebook.
I made a simple example to retrieve data from my Google+ profile in Actionscript for Android, you can download the source files directly from here.

If you want to play with Google+ API, first of all you have to request your Google+ API key; to do that go to Google API console and activate Google+ service, then in the details page you can find your key.

Google+ RESTful services get us a JSON response, to read it in your Flash/Flex application remember that you need as3corelib that have the JSON deserializer, for example you can push in a generic Object all data retrieved from Google+ service or if you prefer you could create a Value Object that it could be more useful.
In this case I decode directly in a generic Object, like you can see in this code snippet:

var data:Object= JSON.decode(dataToRead, true);

then now you can easily access to informations:

var icon:String = data.image.url;
var name:String = data.displayName;
var tagline:String = data.tagline;
var description:String = data.aboutMe;

Another easy feature that you can add in your Google+ application is a static image of the map, like in your web page, using Google Maps Static API.
You can easily make a query to Google Maps passing in GET params like: the dimension of image, the location and the zoom; you can also add more params that you find in the docs of Google Maps Static API.
Here a code sample to add this feature in your Flash application, in those line I request for an image with width 480px, height 200px, with roadmap skin and with a zoom of 15x:

var mapLoader:Loader = new Loader();
//city is a variable with the name of the place that you have to retrieve.
mapLoader.load(new URLRequest("http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center="
+city+"&zoom=15&size=480x200&maptype=roadmap&sensor=true"));
mapLoader.y = this.stage.stageHeight - 200;
addChild(mapLoader);

Like you can see work with those APIs are pretty easy, so now we have to wait for final release and then we can start to create our Google+ integration with the Flash Platform.