First of all a big THANKS to Mihai Corlan, Adobe Evangelist, that is helping me during this “journey”.
Everything start last year during MAX when I saw for the first time the new BlackBerry tablet: the Playbook 😀
It looked so nice, I thought that it was really amazing.
So after few months I decide to try… and now, I finally can announce that with Mihai we are working on a book on Playbook application development with Flash Platform!
It’ll be an hard job but I want to do it, I hope to receive useful suggestions and questions about this topic and believe me that I’ll be free to talk with you about that.
It will be a book made by developers for developers so I hope that you’ll enjoy it when will be released this september (more or less).
This book will cover following topics:
Build, port and optimize apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet device
Work with the PlayBook OS APIs, ActionScript, Flex, AIR and other Flash tools/APIs for PlayBook
Build a simple app and consuming data
Create multimedia and gaming apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook
Debug and optimize your PlayBook app
For any news about this book and about Flash Platform development follow this blog and my twitter or facebook account.
I’ve just released on Android market the CookBooks Reader application where you can read all new recipes about Flash Platform technologies.
It’s FREE and it’s based on Flex 4 and Adobe AIR so remember to download it before download CookBooks Reader.
If you try it, feel free to leave here comments with new features or suggestions… I’m looking for you! Let’s go Flash Platform geeks! 😛
Like you know I love work with mobile and embedded stuff, in particular I love working with Flash Platform on mobile devices.
In latest months I worked on Android and iOS with Flash Professional but in latest weeks I started to work with Flex HERO sdk.
I love so much work with Flex but on mobile I’ve never tried yet.
First impression is that work with Flex on mobile stuff is quite fast respect Flash because it adds a lots of usual features that a mobile application needs.
Splash page
Any mobile application that is called like that, needs a splash page to introduce the real application.
In Flex you can set it very easily directly in main MXML file.
The executable MXML file on mobile project is called ViewNavigatorApplication instead of WindowedApplication like every AIR application, this new class allow you to set splashScreenImage, splashScreenScaleMode and splashScreenMinimumDisplayTime.
Those properties allow you to choose an image file for the splash screen, set its minimum duration and finally how it works in each screen’s dimensions where application runs.
Views
I mention ViewNavigatorApplication, this is a new concept of Flex mobile applications, in fact each application is composed by different View components.
Views are so interesting because they have a lots of things pre-builted like ActionBar, activation and deactivation events, View title, caching data and so on.
Every view is managed by a navigator, with the navigator you can push or pop views (like an array) to change them.
You can also choose how they will be animated, by default you can see a simple slide left or right (depends if you are adding or removing a view).
ActionBar is a new interesting component composed by 3 elements:
navigationContent
titleContent
actionContent
Usually actionBar could be used like a context menu of the view, remember that on mobile development is necessary to go back in the previous mask and also remember that your user doesn’t work on an application like uses a desktop application so shortcuts are so important.
Mobile Components
The new Flex framework “Hero” added optimized components for mobile purpose.
Until now I worked with textinputs, labels and lists that works very well, I tried in 3 different Android phones and performance are quite good.
Another new component added is IconItemRenderer that is an optimized item renderer for list component for example.
This component could be customized with: title, message field, icon and a decorator class that allow you to add for example another image. This is an IconItemRenderer sample where I added also filters (a drop shadow in this case)
Device Interaction & Flex Performance
Another cool thing that allow you to save time is that back button on the smartphone is managed by the application and it automatically goes to the previous view when a user click on hit.
In my few samples I tried to work without using cacheAsBitmap and cacheAsBitmapMatrix to have better performance and believe me that you remain astonished by the performance.
In fact performance are so good, it is so optimized for mobile purpose and everything works well, I tried to add custom effects and filters but performance were amazing too.
Mobile project Architecture
This is my favorite topic, when I started to work on mobile stuff with Actionscript 3 I thought on how to have great performances but with a good architecture that allow me to maintain my application during own life.
So I investigated on how new mobile technologies work and I found that Nokia QT works on mobile with a MVVM architecture, usually instead of controllers you can use delegates but depends of the application.
Working with MVVM architecture and a good design pattern like observer you can solve any problem in a mobile project, performances are perfect and you can optimize your code in the best way you like.
There are other tests that I want to try, the first one will be using Signals instead of Observer, I’d like to know performances in a mobile project (stay tuned :P).
Final Conclusion
The new Flex framework is an interesting step to the future, with this framework I’m sure you can create cool application in few days focusing on details and not on the application skeleton.
I’m so excited to announce that I become Adobe Community Professional for 2011!
It’s my first time in this group and I’ve no words to say thanks Adobe and all the community staff that decide to get me in.
I hope this year to do a good job and I really want to meet other guys next MAX in L.A.
This 2011 will be for me and my company an year with tons of changing and becoming ACP gives me new forces to make them!
Thank you again to everyone 😀
Recently I made some test on iPad to test how to update contents of my mobile applications.
I tried some new AIR 2 API like open default program with PDF or XLS files but I get error #3000 (privileges error).
My idea is to create a routine where I’ll be able to update all contents on my application without passing trough Apple store.
So I tried with URLStream and AIR filesystem API, everything works well.
Code is so easy, take a look here:
//RETRIEVING IMAGE FROM ANY WEBSERVER
var urlS:URLStream = new URLStream();
urlS.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, downloadComplete);
urlS.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, showPerc);
urlS.load(new URLRequest("http://192.168.1.9:8888/oliviaWilde.jpg"))
//DOWNLOADED IMAGE BYTEARRAY AND LOADING IN LOADER
function downloadComplete(e:Event):void {
perc_txt.text = "";
fileData = new ByteArray();
urlS.readBytes(fileData,0,urlS.bytesAvailable);
bytes = urlS.bytesAvailable;
l.loadBytes(fileData);
l.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, saveIt);
}
//SAVE IMAGE INTO APPLICATIONSTORAGEDIRECTORY
function saveIt(e:MouseEvent):void{
f = File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath("a.jpg");
var fs:FileStream = new FileStream();
fs.open(f, FileMode.WRITE)
fs.writeBytes(fileData);
fs.close();
}
//LOAD IMAGE FROM APPLICATIONSTORAGEDIRECTORY
function loadLocalImg(e:MouseEvent):void{
var finalBA:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
var fs:FileStream = new FileStream();
fs.open(f, FileMode.READ);
fs.readBytes(finalBA, 0, bytes);
fs.close();
l.loadBytes(finalBA);
}
Using applicationStorageDirectory, you can save data into your application and retrieve it with AIR API.
In the video below, you can see a little demo where I load an image from a server, I save it, I unload click on the black right button and finally I load again but from ApplicationStorageDirectory, with the black left one, instead of loading from webserver.
A couple of weeks ago I became blogger reviewer for O’really, so I take this opportunity to open my mind and learn new stuff about new technologies, programmation languages, etc.
So this is my first review and I start with an HTML5 video course.
Why am I talking about HTML5 in this blog? Because I think it’s important to know and learn if it could be useful in some projects or not.
Starting with this idea I’ve decided to watch this video course about HTML5 on mobile development.
Video courses aren’t my favorite media to learn new stuff because I love to sign my books, add some notes…you know what I mean… but this time I was really impressed about how O’Reilly organized it.
Seems you are in a real classroom with teacher in front of you that show code examples, tips & tricks using HTML5, CSS3 on iPad or iPhone.
Course is focused on mobile development, Jake Carter, the author, shows also Android world, how to configure your computer to work with emulator and simulator for Android, iPhone and so on.
I really love the way that he works in the classroom because first of all he explains the powerful of a particular feature, then show how to implement it and finally a little part of Q&A from internet people (I suppose).
During this video course you can learn useful stuff, take a look at table of contents in O’reilly website.
It was my first time with HTML5 and I think is an interesting technology, in particular, during this course I learn how to work with geolocation, with JS and Canvas, with audio and video API and again how to save data directly on the device in a database.
I appreciate a lot al meta and css dedicated to iPhone and iPad, very useful.
Finally if you are interesting to learn a new way to develop on mobile, I suggest to take a look at this reference.
It’s useful, easy and I think is a fast method to learn.
mPresenter is a new tool that my company develop in last few months, finally is available to download.
Going in deep about this new solution, what is it mPresenter?
mPresenter is a cross-platform software composed by 2 different tools: a mobile manager and a desktop viewer.
It helps you during own presentation to your boss or clients, during a public talk or only when you want to show your holidays photos to your friends.
With mPresenter you can manage your presentation directly from your mobile device, you can draw or highlight on a slide, photo or flash file, change with next or previous content, receive comments that you add in content and so on.
You can download AIR version on mPresenter official website and Android controller directly on Android Marketplace.In next few days (I hope) you can find mPresenter mobile on Apple store too, so stay tuned for news about it!
Do you want watch mPresenter in action? Take a look at youtube video.
Do you want to have a free copy?! It’s easy, go to official website, add mPresenter banner to your blog or website and the first 10 people that add a comments to this post with a link at own website with mPresenter banner automatically win a free mPresenter copy!
Remember to leave in the comment your name, email and link to the site where I can find mPresenter banner.
Finally, if you are going to MAX in L.A. and you want to know more about mPresenter, you can find me there, so feel free to drop me a line to meet there.
I’m waiting for feedbacks and have fun guys with mPresenter!
First of all I’d like to say thank you to JUG Padova that give me opportunity to talk about Flash Platform in own Java User Group.
Saturday morning I got a talk about Android development with Flash Platform in a school in Padova.
There were 40/50 people more or less, students, Flash Platform devs and Java devs, so I’m glad about the final result.
I talked about my experience on working with Flash Platform on Android, suggested some tips & tricks to improve own applications made with AIR or web site for Flash Player on Android and finally I reported latest news from Flash on the Beach general session.
Adobe has just released Adobe AIR for Android so from last weekend you can download it and start to develop your own Flash Platform contents for Android devices.
I become speaker 4/5 years ago, after 30/40 talks in Italy and around the globe and tons of lessons like instructor, after study how to prepare slides for presentations, after a couple of courses about public speaking and so on, finally this January I started to think about how can I help speakers during own presentation?
When I answered to this question I started to think about mPresenter.
mPresenter is composed by 2 different applications: a mobile application and a desktop one.
Obviously everything is build with Flash Platform: AIR 2, Flex 4 and AIR for Android.
The mobile one allow you to manage your presentation, pointing or drawing on slide, changing them.
Also, it allows you to read notes added in each slide during preso composition.
AIR application allows speakers to make own presentation: moving slides in right position, adding notes to a slides and zooming on it.
You can easily drag and drop images from your OS to mPresenter and create the perfect presentation.
We are working to add new features on this software but for now you can see a preview video on youtube.
I really love if you can give us your feedbacks and suggestions to improve this software and become a really useful utility for all speakers.
We believe in you!
In this hot summer, I’m really glad to announce Flash Platform Geeks, a new Flash Platform community made in collaboration with Peter Elst!
Flash Platform Geeks is dedicated to all flash platform lovers like us!
Soon you can see online our website, our forum and so on, I’m really excited about this new adventure
It will be crazy, totally insane and if you go to Flash on the beach this year, believe me, when I say that you’ll remain astonished!
So please, start to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr too!
See you around guys and thank you in advance to spread the word and follow Flash Platform Geeks
lucamezzalira.com 