Actionscript

Open letter to @Adobe and @Adobe Air: the hidden part…

I don’t know if you had already read the open letter that Gary wrote recently discussing about the arguable marketing choice made by Adobe on Adobe AIR but also previously about the Flash Platform in general, but I suggest you to start from there before read this post.

If you know me personally or you are following me in the social networks or reading this blog you should know that I’m a big fan of Flash Platform, in particular of Adobe AIR.
I’m very committed to deliver amazing and cutting edge projects made with this fantastic technology and I’m involved in the community to spread the word about AIR.
From a developer perspective I’m 110% with Gary and the community; an amazing technology like Adobe AIR with really a lots of success behind in terms of developers and companies that adopted this technology and in terms of numbers of apps in released during the past few years in different platform.
AIR, in my opinion, should have a better commitment from the company that create it (partially).
Obviously I agree also that there isn’t any competition between Actionscript 3 and HTML5 (read Javascript), what you can really do with HTML5 is what a flash developer could do 5 years ago more or less.
But you can’t approach a discussion like this talking only from a developer perspective, you and we should see it from different angles also.
What I’m asking you is to follow me until to the end of this post then you can send me an email and ask me if I became totally crazy or insult me with a comment, no worries 😀

I usually goes to Adobe Max since 2006, first MAX organised by Adobe, and I remember quite clearly that few MAX ago during both keynotes nobody said anything related to new Flash Platform improvements or plan for the future of the platform.
At the beginning I was so hungry and I spent literally hours on the phone to talk with Adobe people because the 100% of my business was based on this technology and they can’t really think that HTML5 could be better that Flash Platform, in particular in 2011/2012 where the most coolest websites, RIAs and desktop applications were realised with Flash.
But have you ever tried to think from a different point of view this situation? Let’s assume for few minutes that we are inside the meeting room of the Adobe.
You have an amazing technology that millions of people is using to innovate and create the best software in the world but you are not earning what you expect from it, don’t you believe me? Take a look at this chart (ADBE):

This is the graph of Adobe stock (ADBE) from January 2011 to December 2012, the value of the stock was for few months (close to October when usually Adobe Max takes place) lower than $28 and never greater of $35.
Great, obviously our white collars friends, aren’t so interested about which is the best technology in the market or how many people is using it; they care about numbers, how to increase the profit of the company and make happy the analyst to have a better position in the stocks market and with the shareholders.
These results weren’t so good for Adobe in fact, if you remember well, a lots of people started to leave the company, a lots of team was closed in USA or Europe to move the development side in India or in places where the developers are cheaper and Adobe started his commitment on the big new trend of new web technologies products like the Edge family for instance.
Everybody now knows very well the following story about the new products and how they are trying to improve the way to create websites and apps, and I guess the majority of us it’s not so happy about that.
But let’s take a look again to some numbers, the next graph will show you the Adobe stock value from 2012 to March 2014 basically in the period where Adobe left to push the Flash Platform and started to increase the investment on designers products:

I think is quite explicit that the politic to start selling their products on Cloud (first big mover in the IT panorama), the decision to try to improve a new technology like HTML5 with new tools and so on, create around the Adobe what the management was looking for!
I agree with you that there are many ways to make money but from the metrics perspective they are going in the right direction and they did the right choices for now.
I’m not an economist and I can’t say if this strategy will pay in the long term but for sure in the short term they arrived where they wanted to be.

With this post I’m not trying to defend Adobe, but after many years where the Flash Platform is in this status I started to leave my angry mood and to interrogate myself on why they took this decision, honestly I can’t say if that it’s the only reason that drives Adobe in these big changes but excluding the technical side that’s the only way I can see this thing and now most part of their decision make finally sense.
All the comments I’ve read in the past and also in these days after the Gary’s letter to Adobe is completely true but often, as developers, we forget that it’s not just a design pattern or a performance optimisation that could save the world, the marketing and the market are the real drivers, in front of them also a big corporation like Adobe could defeated.

UPDATE FROM ADOBE

Chris, the new product manager of Adobe AIR, replied to Gary’s open letter, you can read the answer in the official blog

Comparison of colours in Actionscript 3

In this post I’d like to highlight a topic that is not the classic tip to use everyday but when it needs probably this “recipe” could help.

In last few weeks I had the opportunity to study how to compare 2 or more images and find similar colors between them.
Sincerely when I started I really don’t know how to do that, so I tried to read on the web the best way to accomplish this task.
There are many different way to compare colours, the easiest way that I found it’s working with RGB color space but a lots of experts advice against this technique and they suggest to run away from RGB color space and work with different color spaces, in particular with which one work in 3D space.
The most complete is for sure the CIELAB so if you need to create an algorithm that compare in the best way colours I really suggest to work with this color space and read this post on this topic, in my case I need something in the middle so a colour space that could guarantee the perfect trade off between complexity and accuracy.
In fact I worked in this example with a 3D space like HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value), before go ahead with the post I warmly suggest to read more about HSV directly on wikipedia.

And now let’s go ahead!!!

I prepare a class that you don’t need to change if the idea behind it fit your needs, so this is the code to compare 2 images with my ColorComparision object:

var util:ColorComparision = new ColorComparision();
var finalDiffArr:Array = util.getSimilars(bmp1.bitmapData, bmp2.bitmapData);

As you can see, in the second line you will receive an Array of colors in RGB that you can use if you want in the UI or only as data if you want to add more complexity to this algorithm.

This comparison is made in this way:

1. I retrieve 64 average colors inside each image (inside the class ColorComparision I set a constant if you need to change this value)
2. I convert each colour from RGB to HSV
3. I calculate the distance between each colour of the first image compared with each colour of the second image

To be more complete as possible I expose also the capability to set the tolerance of the comparison in this way:

util.tollerance = Math.round(slider.value);

Finally I made a quick example where you can play with your images and see what happens, basically in this basic sample when you’ll click “compare” button you will find the color similar between 2 images you will compare.

Last but not least I leave you also this quick method to translate RGB color to HEX and use them in your Flash application:

function createRect(_obj:Object):Sprite{
 // the obj has 3 properties: r -> red, g -> green, b -> blue
 var intVal:int = _obj.r << 16 | _obj.g << 8 | _obj.b;
 var hex:String = "0x" + intVal.toString(16);

 var s:Sprite = new Sprite();
 s.graphics.beginFill(uint(hex));
 s.graphics.drawRect(0,0, 20, 20);
 s.graphics.endFill();

 return s;

}

On my github space you can find the source to use this algorithm, enjoy!

Adobe AIR 3.8 introduces Socket Server on Android and iOS

Hi All,

after long time I’m back for all the developers are working with the Flash Platform right now!
Sorry for that but it was a really intensive period for me with the organization of “Having fun with Adobe AIR” so I haven’t a lot of time to share with you my new experiments.
Yesterday Adobe MAX is finished with a lots of design news, great and inspire case histories for designers and a lot of amusement during the Sneak Peek where they have shown the real power of Adobe labs with tons of really cool features that we could see in next releases of Adobe’s softwares.
For a developer perspective there weren’t big announces so, as usual, we can do it by ourselves…. and here we are!

During last few days Adobe release the Adobe AIR 3.8 and Flash Player 11.8, both in BETA but you can download and start to play with them.
When Adobe releases a new AIR SDK I always take a look to the release notes to see the new features of my favorite platform, this time I’m glad to announce that they add the opportunity to create TCP/IP and UDP socket server directly on iOS and Android.
This is a very cool feature because you can really create amazing things in particular for applications and games, for example local multiplayer, chat and so on.
I worked a lots with sockets during last years in several projects and my big concern was that I can’t create a socket server on smartphone and tablet with AIR, I could do that only with native code but I was pretty sure to see this feature will be implemented in next releases of AIR!

Today I had few time to spend experimenting new stuff so I decided to try AIR 3.8 BETA on mobile and create something cool to share with you.
As you can see in this short video I create a socket server on my iPhone 4 that interact with a client made on my iPad mini (I tried also with my Android smartphone and it works as well):

To create this sample you needn’t to learn something new, you can use the same APIs you will use on a desktop application, so to create a socket server you write those few lines of code:

//creation of a TCP/IP Socket server
private function createServer():void{
server = new ServerSocket();
server.addEventListener(Event.CONNECT, onConnect);
server.bind(7934); // this is the number of the port where your socket communicate
server.listen();
}

Then, when a client socket will join in the same network and it listens the same port of the server, the magic happens and you can start to comunicate:

//on the server socket application
protected function onConnect(event:ServerSocketConnectEvent):void {
incomingSocket = event.socket;
incomingSocket.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA, onData);}

protected function onData(event:ProgressEvent):void {
if (incomingSocket.bytesAvailable > 0){
//here you can pass data to the client using writeBytes, writeUTFBytes and many other methods
/*an example could be:
incomingSocket.writeUTFBytes(String("HELLO!");
incomingSocket.flush();*/
}
}

// on the client socket application you have to create the connection and then manage (send and receive) data from the server
private function createSocketConnection():void{
socket = new Socket()
socket.addEventListener(Event.CONNECT, connectedToServer);
socket.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA, receiveData);
socket.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioErrorHandler);
socket.addEventListener(Event.CLOSE, closeSocket});
//pass to connect method the server IP and the port to comunicate
socket.connect("127.0.0.1", 7934); 
}
protected function receiveData(event:ProgressEvent):void {
// here you can read all the packets sent from the server
}
protected function ioErrorHandler(event:IOErrorEvent):void {
trace("ioErrorHandler: " + event);
}
private function connectedToServer(e:Event):void{
//yes! you are connected to the socket server
}
private function closeSocket(e:Event):void{
//your socket connection is closed
}

After that you can start to experiments with this new feature as I’ve just done.
Last but not least, as you can see on the release notes, Adobe adds another great feature, that is the capability to stop all movieclips are running on the stage calling a new method “stopAllChildren()” directly from the stage instance.
Simple, easy and useful!

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.

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 potenzialità 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 dovrà portare il proprio computer con installato Flash Builder dove potrà 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 così.

Infatti Adobe sta continuando a sviluppare questa tecnologia dando nuove potenzialità 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 possibilità di scoprire su cosa si sta concentrando Adobe e quale sarà 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 già ci lavorano ma vogliono alternative valide con cui sviluppare.
L’evento avrà un massimo di 20 partecipanti circa per tappa e sarà di una giornata, le città in cui si svolgerà 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

HaXe, my new toy!

After Adobe MAX 2011 everything should not be the same for me and maybe for a lot of flash platform developers around the world, Adobe brings some “directions” that didn’t find my consent mainly for the way that communicate these news and the impact that had in the market, but we know that Flash Platform is not dead and it will go ahead for many years.
Obviously nothing was the same after that, in fact many developers started to look around for new technologies and frameworks like Backbone.js, Sencha Touch, Ext JS and so on.
Personally I started to checked in last few months many Javascript frameworks because my aim was find something that could replace Flash Platform in the future and I have to spend time in next years to consolidate it and go ahead with Flash Platform too.
Last week a big friend of mine gave me this link: http://www.haxenme.org/ and when I started to read what you can do and how you can do it, I immediately started to go in deep with HaXe in my spare time and trust me that I had a lot of fun!

First of all what is HaXe?
HaXe is an open source multiplatform programming language, it allows to write once and deploy everywhere (in the right meaning of therm “everywhere”).
In fact with HaXe we can write in a programming language similar to Actionscript 3 (strictly typed, OOP, …) but more powerful (it has enum, generics, dynamic type, …), with HaXe we can target our projects for Flash, C++, Neko, HTML5, Node.JS, PHP, iOS, Android… if we work with multiplatform APIs we can write once and deploy our project for multiple targets.
So for many developers that come from Javascript, Actionscript, Java and so on, will be so easy to start deal with HaXe.
Another interesting thing of HaXe is that we can work with the library present in the SWF files and integrate movieclip in our project, we can create also SWF file without Flash Professional with SWFMill that is used for the generation of asset libraries containing images (PNG and JPEG), fonts (TTF) or other SWF movies.
That’s so interesting because it means that designers that usually prepare assets for developers don’t need to change own daily workflow!
If you need to extend your target platform we can add new features with external libraries, it’s so important because we can really cover everything with this feature; we can find a lot of ready to use libraries directly on the lib HaXe website.
With HaXe you can communicate between different languages like JS and Flash in both direction, you can easily find many frameworks and library porting in HaXe, for example javascript like JQuery, Sencha Touch, Node.JS and so on.

What about the IDE to work with HaXe (so important for a developer!)!?
On Mac you can use TextMate or FDT on Win FDT or FlashDevelop this one seems the best one but I didn’t try it. For more specs I suggest to take a look at HaXe site section, maybe you can find your favorite IDE in the list.

Finally I made an easy sample to understand better the powerful of HaXe NME, this sample loads an external XML file and an external SWF library with a movieclip inside exported for Actionscript, so I added a drag&drop feature to the list. Then I tried to compile it for iOS, Mac OS X Lion, C++ and SWF with the same basecode and everything work so well and smooth!

You can download source files here, to compile it take a look at HaXeNME section and you can find everything you need to try this sample and start to play with HaXeNME!

If you want to deal with HaXe, I suggest two books, the first one is really a good start to work with this fantastic language:
. HaXe 2 beginner’s guide
. Professional HaXe and Neko

Last but not least, next April in Paris there will be World Wide HaXe conference, I’ll be there to learn more about the future of this amazing platform if you are planning to be there it will be a pleasure for me catch up for a beer!

I hope soon to publish more experiments and informations about HaXe because it is a thrilling programming language!!!
So stay tuned!

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.

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!

Cryptation algorithm in Actionscript 3

One of my customers ask me to pass some sensible data to server with MD5 algorithm.
So I don’t know what was MD5 algorithm and I start search some news about it… I love wikipedia!

MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a cryptation algorithm made by Professor Ronald Rivest in ’90.
In this algorithm you can pass a string to a hash function and it returns a new 128 bit hash value (a new string).

Surfing on web I search how it works to create an AS3 version, but I find some free libraries in riaforge.org that implements
this algorithm and many other!
Very useful if you must pass any important data, so you can take a look at Houser’s AS3 library and Torgemane’s library (I love this one).

For italian developers I also put a little flex example in flex developers UG.

Enjoy!

UPDATE FROM ADOBE

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