Scotch on the Rocks 2010

It’s finished!!! DAMN!

SOTR 2010 is end, I hope to come again next year, but now I want to share with you my experience here in London.

SOTR was organized at TigerTiger club near Piccadilly circus in the heart of London and believe me, It’s my first time that I take part in a conference where stop for a couple of days a club! That’s totally crazy, but this is SOTR and I love it! (Obviously free drink inside ;P)

Location a part, sessions were pretty cool, I really appreciate Aral and Serge one, the first was an inspire session based on clients UX and I grabbed very cool suggestions; Serge’s session was about AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 on Android devices… I really love those stuff!
It was impressive a performance benchmark where the same animation created with HTML and JS (7fps), another made with HTML 5 and canvas (9fps) and one made with Flash Player 10.1 (25fps !!! I really love Flash Platform) obtains different results on Android… and what results!!!

I was at SOTR also to speak about AIR 2 printing API, AlivePDF and PurePDF, I made an inspire session that allow you to have the right solution when someone (your boss maybe?!) ask you to create data reports or paper documents in a Flex RIA or AIR application.
My English a part, I think that people enjoy case history part and first twitter messages are agree with me, so believe me guys at SOTR, thank you so much for your time.
Finally in my session I shared my “thoughts” about HTML 5, Apple and so on (many photos on this slide, I was sure that you appreciate it! :D).

You can download all the stuff made for AIR & Printing session directly from this blog and if you weren’t in London and you want ask me more details about this cool shit, feel free to contact me or leave a comment at this post!

Ok, it’s time to come back to reality but before that I must say a big THANK YOU to Andy Allan that organize this amazing event, Cyril and Guust (and his girlfriend) for the great time spent together in London talking about Coldfusion and our beautiful countries.

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Directly from Barcelona: MWC 2010 impressions

I’m here in Barcelona at 3GSM world congress, crisis is arrived here too.
There isn’t Nokia stand, only few evening party, there are less people than last previous editions so really, I hope that 2010 could be a new year with new opportunity for everyone because this is NOT the mobile world congress and this is NOT a good scenario to see.

Come back home and start to talk about Adobe news… first of all, my favorite one: Adobe AIR 2 on mobile!

Yes finally is arrived or better, finally I’ve seen it! We really don’t know when will be released we only know that it runs on Android, probably on NVIDA Tegra II, probably on Symbian devices and for sure on Blackberry; so a new market opportunity will be open with Blackberry adoption.
And WIN mobile?! They said to wait 2/3 weeks and there will be a press release about that, meanwhile I see Window phone 7 and it looks nice, not bad but I’m interesting to know how will be integrated with Flash Platform.

Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices will implement AVM 1 and AVM 2 so probably there will be retro-compatibility  with Flash Lite contents, I say probably because I’d like to test it before to say: “YES It’s alive!!!”.
But I’m sure that AS3 contents will run so well if they will be optimize for mobile; I’m scared that AS3 developers approach this new opportunity like Flash Lite one where everybody know AS2 was automatically a Flash Lite developer, but believe me it’s not the same thing also with Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 on mobile.

Both mobile technologies will be the same of desktop one so we don’t lost any API and it’s great announcement, finally could we start to work in a real platform experience!? I think so!

And Flash Lite?! So now we have a new versione Flash Lite 4 that you’ll can use with Actionscript 3 and will be distributed on S40 and low powerful devices.

I asked also about distribution and probably we will find FP 10.1 and AIR 2 directly with a firmware upgrade of own phone; for now we don’t know there will be OTA distribution also.

So finally, I see great Adobe technologies… but for the future, because when will be release there will be more time to wait to have a great distribution so if you think that will solve all your mobile problems, I think that you’ll wait few months again.

Today is my last day here, I’ll try to grab more information about those news and if you go to FITC in Amsterdam next week, see you there mate!

Multitouch with Actionscript 3 and AIR 2.0

AIR 2.0 is out with a BETA version on labs since a couple of weeks ago more or less.
It introduces a lots of new features like UDP protocol, Socket server implementation, access to raw micrhophone data, multitouch and gesture support and so on.

When I see multitouch and gesture support I start to think how many devices are touchscreen based and they are growing a lots in those months, so I start to investigate about that features.
First of all I suggest to read a cool article on devnet made by Christian Cantrell, he goes in deep about this new features and give you a lots of information about Multitouch, TouchEvent and gestures.
It’s so interesting because you can see compatibility of that features with different OS also.

In this post, I’d like to share with you a little sample on how you can create an AIR 2.0 application with Flash Builder and test it with a macbook trackpad.
In fact, you can use macbook trackpad gesture because they are supported on AIR and it’s so interesting, for example, if you want to test an application for new Wacom Bamboo pen & touch and you haven’it.
Wacom Bamboo has a new AS3 SDK for Flex and Flash that allow you to work with multitouch and gesture too, it could be so interesting if you don’t have a multitouch for an expo and you want to buy a cheap solution to give a cool interaction for your possible new clients.
Bamboo has also the availability to create “minis” that are applications dedicated to Wacom Bamboo, but you can read more at Wacom developer website.

So, in this sample we load an external image and we use gesture to try our macbook trackpad:

package {


import flash.ui.Multitouch;
import flash.ui.MultitouchInputMode;
import flash.events.TransformGestureEvent;
import flash.text.TextField;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.display.MovieClip;
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
import flash.events.Event;


public class MultiTouchSample {


Multitouch.inputMode = MultitouchInputMode.GESTURE;
private var sq:Sprite;


public function MultiTouchSample() {


sq = new Sprite()
addChild(sq);


this.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_ZOOM, scaleObj);
this.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_PAN, panObj);
this.addEventListener(TransformGestureEvent.GESTURE_ROTATE, rotObj);


var l:Loader = new Loader();
l.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, addImg);
l.load(new URLRequest("img/sample.jpg"));
}


private function addImg(e:Event):void{
sq.addChild(e.target.content);
sq.scaleY = sq.scaleX = .2;
}


private function rotObj(e:TransformGestureEvent):void{
sq.rotation += e.rotation;
}


private function panObj(e:TransformGestureEvent):void{
sq.x += e.offsetX * 2;
sq.y += e.offsetY * 2;
}


private function scaleObj(e:TransformGestureEvent):void{
sq.scaleX *= e.scaleX;
sq.scaleY *= e.scaleY;
}
}
}

You can see that is so simple work with gesture, a couple of suggestions before starting work with them:

  • remember to verify which gesture are supported on your system, more information you can read on devnet article about multitouch and gesture
  • TransformGestureEvent is event class dedicated to gesture
  • you can use TouchEvent also

Feel free to leave a comment and thank you to visit this blog.