Tag: Flex

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):

ADBE stock 2011/2012

 

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:

ADBE stock 2012/2014

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.

ADBE stock 2009/2014

 

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

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Flash Platform Galaxy: why choose Flash Platform

In those days I’m reading a lots of mailing lists, forums, blogs and so on where Flash Platform supporters are so disappointed about the latest marketing movement of Adobe.

In fact yesterday Adobe announced that they stop the development of Flash Player on Mobile devices (on Desktop they are going ahead).
The road is clear HTML 5 inside the browser and Flash Platform for RIAs, Games and out of browser in combination with Adobe AIR.

For me Adobe for the second time (the first one was during Adobe MAX) has totally mistaken how to communicate this news and obviously tech blogs bring this announcement like the end of Flash…
Personally I don’t think that is the end of Flash but I think that Flash is moving on a new position in multimedia world probably out of browser.
I’m an Adobe addicted, like you know, and in particular I’m a Flash Platform supporter, so I think that we have to move on and make something to spread the word about this foggy situation, guys, Flash Platform is ALIVE!
To do this, I start making a pdf file called Flash Platform Galaxy that could help people to have an idea of what is Flash Platform and why choose it ( I know, I’m not a graphic designer but I think it could be useful), if you want to add more informations or change something feel free to leave a comment at this post or drop me a line via email.
Let’s go guys, we have a platform to save 😉

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.

Flex on mobile: first impressions…

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 suggest to take a look at Adobe TV, Adobe labs and Adobe Opensource to start work with Flex HERO!

UPDATE

take a look here to the Flex mobile performance

mPresenter, flash platform presentation tool

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!

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

mPresenter: new tool for speakers

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!

How to switch from Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3… in September for FREE in Milan and Rome

During September I’ll take part of Arrivano i Guru Tour, an Italian event that allow designers, developers and photographers to learn new stuff for FREE about Adobe technologies!
In fact, the event starts in September until to the end of October and you can see it in 10 differents Italian cities.

In the last event you can find a special guest… Katrine Eismann, on of the most important person in creative digital retouch world!
I decide to talk about a big problem for a lot of developers: How to switch from Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3 during my sessions in Milan (27th September) and Rome (5ht September).

During my session we can see the power of new AS3 features,  architecture of new Flash Player and differences of both languages.
You can see a real mirror from AS2 scripts to AS3 scripts and how to porting your daily “Actionscript life” to a new step: more interesting and powerful!

If you’d like to have more information take a look at the site or feel free to contact me leaving a message on my blog or dropping me an email.

I hope to see you during this event and remember that is a great opportunity to learn more and for FREE!

See ya!

Flash Builder Beta is out… my first tests

Finally is OUT! New Flash Builder version is out in labs.adobe.com

I spent all the evening to try new features, so I think that could be useful talking about that in my blog.
The new features that I like so much are:

  • States / Library / Modules: States are totally changed in a new version that make easier write in MXML, I love so much includeIn and excludeFrom attribute to decide in which state you can put or remove a particular component.
    If you want you can work also with group and add in the same group N states.
    Library is a new object that works like Flash library, so you can create a Definition (like a Symbol) and reuse it during your application, make attention because you are working with Element and not Child!
    States and Library increase a lots application KB so I prefer work with Modules that load in runtime mode. They have a new particular argument when you try to load it that is ByteArray (more information on Migration Guide on labs).
  • Automatic getter / setter / event handler: YESSS! I switch to FDT in last month because I increase my productivity to write AS3 code, now with Flash Builder you’ve a couple of actions to create getter, setter and event handler, that’s so cool!
  • New Drawing API: we have a lots of new interesting MXML tag to define a shape like a square or a rectangle, but the most interesting is Paths that allow you to create particular lines and shape with bezier curve via code
  • Advanced CSS selectors: another interesting feature is the new way to refer a component via CSS, in fact you can interact with MXML structure (all buttons in an hbox must be red and all buttons in a vbox must be black).
    Very easy and cool!
  • Flex Theme: that’s one of my favorite features, in fact with Flash Builder you can create custom Flex Theme and skin your application in a second! You can find more information about Theme in Ted Patrick blog.
  • DateGroup: Instead of using Repeater to repeat a particular object, now we have DataGroup that defines a dataprovider and how to render it via an ItemRender or an ItemRenderFunction.
  • Switch a Flex project to AIR: finally if your client doesn’t know what he wants, you can swtich a Flex app into an AIR desktop application directly from context menu of Package Explorer (new name of  Flex Navigator panel).

Remember to read Migration guide, it’s so interesting! Stay tuned for next Flash Builder and Catalyst tests!
Another great resource that is now live to see Flex 4 features is Tour de Flex that you can view directly from Adobe web site.

Bye bye

First impressions about Flash Catalyst

Yesterday I was in Milan at From A to Web and I saw Serge Jespers session about RIA workflow with Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

In 30 minutes he made a real Flex application that interact with Coldfusion to retrieve data from a database and he started from a normal and static AI file… that’s totally AMAZING!
Flash Catalyst will be a great software that will help us to create desktop applications and rich internet application, in particular could be very interesting to create animations and user interaction on own GUI.

When Serge showed Flash Builder he interacted with a CF script (you can work with WS, XML and other back end tecnologies also) trough a panel and in few steps he was connected to data source… COOL!
I’m so excited, Flash Catalyst will change RIA and desktop apps workflow definitely! I’m sure about that… BUT…

I’d like to investigate more about Flash Catalyst when Adobe decides to release public BETA on Labs, but I asked a couple of questions to Serge during his session to understand better the power of this new software.
For me the first problem is that FC doesn’t work with Flex Modules but only with States and in big projects it could be a problem.
Yes, you can copy MXML code and  paste on a Module, but it could be more easy to choose if you want to work with states or modules or better, export your GUI like module and not only custom component.
Another thing that I’m scared is that FC is very easy to use, open new way of business and make your daily work more fast, so designers and developers that approach for first time RIA and Desktop apps could start to release tons and tons of “bad apps” like Flash in 90s… I hope that Adobe will teach around the world with free training courses, not only with one day events, or will begin a new HORROR ERA for RIA and Desktop apps.

That’s my 2 cents, if you’d like to talk about FC on this blog, feel free to leave a comment.