AIR tour, last date in Milan

AIR tour is finished! Last date was in Milan and obviusly was very cool!

Location was pretty nice, great organization, cool food and a lots of stuff (T-shirt is amazing!).
A very friendly atmosphere, Adobe guys made a great overview about AIR from the beginning to final deployment.
I appreciate a lots Serge Jesper and Andrew Shorten‘s session, they talked about how to deploy and sign an AIR application and a great overview about LCDS and Blaze DS.
But my favourite one was Brimelow‘s session, he showed a lots of cool samples and in a very cool and funny way.

This weekend I’ll publish all photos made during the event in my Flickr account

 

Mobile inspire video

I’ve just receivde EDGE newsletter, please take a look at Adobe XD Mobile and Devices team, very cool contents and ideas, if you want inspire yourself, watch the video.

Very interesting stuff! 

23 June: Colin Moock comes in Italy

Yesss! Finally Italian Flash developers could see for the first time Colin Moock!
He is the Actionscript man, he wrotes bibles about Actionscript and he is Colin Moock.

You can find him at AtaHotel Executive on 23 of June where Mr. Moock will make a FREE day talking about Actionscript 3.
To take part of this event you must register yourself at Adobe site where you can find also more information about the event.
Quickly guys, because there are few many free seats!

 

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!!! 
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. 

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 again 

Let’s tour is (quite) ready

Yes guys, we are coming!!!

5 italian cities, an half day totally FREE with 6 shoots of 30 minutes each one, 3 teachers, a lots of technologies to show you (Flex, AIR, Flash LIte, Photoshop, Illustrator, PHP, PDF) that work together to create a final and amazing product workflow… that’s the Let’s TOUR!

Thomas Baggio, Tiziano Fruet and me will drive trough Italy (Florence, Milan, Turin, Verona and Padua) to make this show in the beginning of July, you can’t miss it!

Feel free to register yourself at the event and see you there guys!

Scotch on the rocks second day

Sotr second day at Sotr is finished.
Today there were very cool and interesting sessions! In particular about Flex and AIR.
First of all was Peter which a great session about OOP and Actionscript 3, he made an overview from base concept of OOP until to Design patterns, very cool preso. You can find slides in Peter’s blog.

Second session of the day was Andrew Shorten that show the power of AIR with showcases and some technical tricks.

Then another session on Flex and print classes made by Scott Stroz that explain very well how you can manage data to bring it and put on the papers. 

Finally I finished this day with Andrew Shorten with Inspired AIR session, my favourite application that I saw is AdobeDude for European Soccer Tournement; if you have a couple of minutes to spend, take a look at the site, very cool!

So now I’m finishing stuff for my tomorrow morning session about Flash Lite, Flex and AIR, see you tomorrow guys!

SotR… Rocks! first day impressions

Here we are! I’m at Peter’s session about AIR but it’s the final session, after this we have Bird of fathers.

First day is very interesting, I meet very skilled and strong developers like Nico and also I have a great lunch with Neil, Peter and so on.

Atmosphere is very fresh, Edinburgh is an amazing but very relax city, I love it so much.
Event starts with Ben Forta and Adam Lehman that make a keynote about Coldfusion and integration with Flex, LCDS and AIR, very cool!

First session of my day is Working with OOP and CFML, Matt Woodward shows us why developers must work with OOP and which are benefits.
Then I follow Nico session about google analytics, I learn that old counters are better than analytics… no that’s a joke! He shows the true powerful of this google solution and give us some news about new features (native integration with flex and air… cool!)
And finally now Peter give us an overview of AIR API with a lots of samples, great work Peter!!!

If you are plan which event to follow next year, take in consideration Scotch on the Rocks, very friendly and fantastic atmosphere! 

Working with AIR, files and XML configuration: tips & tricks

In last months I worked so hard with Flex, AIR and files. I’d like to share with you some tips that I think could save your time when you work on it.

 1. Don’t copy, write or do anything else with File.applicationDirectory. In Windows Vista, when you install an AIR application in Program folder, you can’t copy or update a file becuase Microsoft policy don’t allow to work on files in this directory and in all subdirectories.
If you try to make it, it fails silently so stop to execute the code immediately.

2.  You can’t set an <installFolder> different of Program or Application folder. If you try to set a different path like ../ or anything else in AIR configuration xml, when you create .air file, procedure fails with an error.
So you can only set Program folder (Windows) or Application folder (Mac) or a subdirectory like: Applications/myAirAppDir/

3. Attribute <programMenuFolder> is ONLY for Windows.
When you set this attribute you can choose path of Start/Programs menu. It’s optional attribute.

4. Remember to set <name> attribute without special chars.
If you try to make it, or you accidentally copy this attribute in the same XML configuration file, it fails with an error.

5. You can’t install AIR applications in a computer if you don’t have system privileges.

I hope that those suggestions could help in your daily development.

Merapi project: a bridge between AIR and Java

From Rich Tretola blog I read an interesting news about a new project called Merapi that it will be a bridge between AIR and Java.

I think it’s an interesting project and they are searching alpha tester for now, so take a look at the project site and submit yourself!

Merapi team is amazing: Adam Flater, Dave Meeker, Juan Sanchez, Andrew Powell, Rich Tretola, Rhazes Spell and Alex MacCaw.

To take a look at this great solution see Merapi video page.
Have a great work guys.