Tag: flash mobile

Flash Camp Milan review

Yesterday in Milan we had the Flash Camp about Mobile topics and then we had the Flash Camp Party at NH Hotel… really wonderful time.
Like you know, in Italy it’s not so easy to organize those kind of events because usually people don’t move to another city like other foreign countries but Flash Camp had a great success.
This camp was organized in the same place of WhyMCA the mobile revolution, an italian conference focused on mobile topics.
We had 50/60 people per session and I’m glad to say that my session had 80 people so I’m happy about this little success.
All the sessions surfed in deep about CG, design patterns, video optimization for mobile, flex on mobile and so on, so I was really excited to take part in this event.
My session was about Design Pattern for Mobile, I talked about 3 design patterns: Singleton, Observer and Presentation Model.
With a couple of samples (that you can download from this link) and few slides I made an application that run with the same base code on tablet and smartphone; this is an hot topic now on mobile world in particular on Flash Platform side.


In next few weeks I’ll make a post about Presentation Model to share my thoughts about this argument and how to use it in your project , but if you want to start with this topic, take a look at this great post on RIArockstars.

Finally I’d like to thanks the Flash Mind, Adobe Flash Platform User Group Italy, to give me this opportunity, WhyMCA staff for the amazing organization, other speakers of Flash Camp for great time spent together and people that came to talk with us during the Flash Camp and to the beer party too.
I leave also a link to some photos took during Flash Camp in Milan.

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Playbook development with Flash Platform

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.

Android development with Flash Platform

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.

You can download my presentation slides with some samples directly here, for now slides are in Italian but if someone is interesting in an English translation feel free to add a comment here.

UPDATE
Here you can watch the seminar: http://www.archive.org/details/AndroidDevelopmentWithFlashPlatform

Think different?! NO… but maybe…

I want broken my silence about Apple vs Adobe “war” and share with you my thoughts.

It’s an hot topic and probably not all people will be agree with me but I feel to tell you my point of view.
First of all, today we are sure that Adobe will not invest anymore on iPhone packager for Flash CS5, so from a developer point of view I’m totally agree with Mike Chambers and Adobe too.
Android is a really amazing mobile OS not only for smartphone but also for MID, I saw on a Nvidia Tegra 2 and performance were really impressive.
I had an iPhone a year ago and now I’ve a HTC Hero with Android, guys believe me, it totally changes my life, everytime I say: “Android takes best features of Blackberry, iPhone and Nokia in one OS! Oh yes… phone calls work on Android :P”.

I saw AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 on Android in action during 3GSM in Barcelona and … WOW, Adobe is working very hard on that technologies and I test a Flash website not optimize for mobile on FP 10.1 and it works very well.
Future on Android will be very cool for every Flash Platform developers… but…

I’m also owner of a company and I know a little bit my customers or potential ones and if you talk about iPhone or Android they feel an app or game in different way.
I think the big problem is that few people known the powerful of Android OS and Google is not advertising so much it.
People that use Android after iPhone they don’t come back again, they are so happy about OS but if you take a look at carrier’s advertising they prepare great iPhone campaign but I didn’t see any Android campaign or carrier’s advertising dedicated to Android phones.
Adobe made a good job with iPhone packager and Apple close doors to it, if I see from point of view of both I could think that Adobe didn’t develop anything for iPhone and will not do that in the next future, Apple lose tons of possible applications in own store but they preserve their ecosystem, and freelances or IT companies?! Did you ever think to them?!

We are in a particular market moment where everybody is seeking a new way to make business or to invert the trend, those strategies could be useful in 80’s or 90’s not in 2010! Customers are not so happy to bring a company that make an iPhone app, another one for a RIA on web, another for a desktop apps and so on, or maybe one big company that make all but ask tons of money that there aren’t in this historical moment!
Lots of companies and developers were waiting for this new marketing possibility and probably, this possibility could create a win-win situation for everybody.
Companies and developers work more and have new possibilities to make business in a particular market moment, Adobe would be the first company that introduce in the market a technology that is real cross-platform, with AS3 I can develop on web, mobile, desktop apps and so on; probably many people upgrade to Flash CS5 only for iPhone packagers so they have a high ROI; finally Apple would have tons of new developers that will buy their products, probably approach Objective C maybe only to take a look but they will approach it, and they gain more revenue from the store… so everybody win nobody lose.
Probably it’s a poor point of view from a little man, but a win win situation could help in this moment…

I spent a couple of days to understand what is happening between Adobe and Apple but I think that nobody could know and nobody tell us the truth.
For now we can only wait and change our marketing strategy focusing on Android devices, maybe a day we could count more in big companies decisions… or maybe not…