Finally it’s coming!!!
OnAIR tour is coming in Europe, 12 dates from March to June in all Europe… that’s wonderful!
Registrations are open so choose your city and register yourself, I’ll go to Italian date (13 June) in Milan with a lots of Italian developers and designers.
If you come in Milan, please send me an email so we could meet to have dinner togheter!
We are in Xmas time and a new gift made by Ribbit team is under our tree!
Ribbit is name of new project that give us the ability to make and receive calls or messages (and more!) with new API for flex and air projects, so the team announces a new flex and air contest with big prizes like $2.500 (first prize).
In Ribbit site you can find more information about challenge:
“Build the best Personal Ribbit Phone Application for either the web (Flex) or Desktop (AIR). Similar to Joe Johnston’s award-winning AIR iPhone (now considered the most downloaded AIR app to date), your personal Ribbit Phone will provide an incredible and creative experience for someone to use and enjoy Ribbit services, primarily making and receiving phone calls. “
Take a look at Ribbit blog and good luck guys!
I’m working in a project where my application calls some web services to retrieve data for popolate SpringGraph component (very cool component made by Mark Shepherd).
After extends and change component’s classes, I find a documented issue with HTTPservice and Internet Explorer 7.
In fact you must put server header with no-cache because randomly calls to service don’t work!There is also some comments about this problem in Adobe livedocs (search “ie7” in the page).
So be careful and Flex yourself!
Zinc 3.0 codename Pandora will be release at Q1 of 2008, but now you can see first images for Macintosh and Windows directly from Jaspal Sohal blog. You can also try to enter in Candidate BETA program if you are registered in multidmedia.comIn fact they said:“The Public Beta will be a Release Candidate Build with all functionality that will be in the final release. Registered Users will have an opportunity to download the Public Beta and test it over the Holiday period. The Zinc™ 3.0 Public Beta will be available for both Windows and Mac OSX.”
One recent project that I produce is a touch screen software, obviusly I made it with Zinc.
So I’d like to share my experience with my blog readers.
First of all, I must say that Zinc has a too bad documentation, a lots of examples don’t work and there are some big bugs.
ZINC and FTP CONNECTION
In my last project I add a routine to download new files from touch screens.
Zinc FTP API works only in Windows, but for this project, all touch screens had OS Win, so no problem.
In this case, I found 3 problems, first of all I can’t download all files togheter because Zinc had some issues to do this operation, so when I download a file, when onComplete event triggered I launch another one.
Probably Zinc didn’t copy all bytes from FTP server to client and it crashed.
So I put a setTimeOut function to call a new file after 1 second and it works!
Finally, using close method of FTP class, FTP session is still opened…so I delete FTP istance and it works! So crazy!
ZINC and Flex
Recently I produce 3 projects with Flex and Zinc…I found a lots of interesting issues.
When you work with Zinc in Flex, you must add SWC library to use Zinc API, so you bring it from 2 folders(one .swc in for Flash and one for Flex, but you could use both in Flex) and there is different way to implements same API with .swc for Flash or for Flex, so take a look of which .swc you could use to work.
Another problem that I found is when you create a transparent application and you have mx:TextInput, if you have focus in textinput component and you try to use keyboard arrows to move cursor, you’ll receive an unknown error!
In Multidmedia forum Peter suggests to me to use callLater function, but it doesn’t work.
So those are some problems that I would share with you, I hope that they are useful for everyone.
Surfing on web, I make a search with google and I find learn.adobe.com, a wiki site where you can find some examples about Flex and Device Central.
The site is in BETA, so I think that propably they’ll release next weeks… I don’t know, it’s first time that I see it.
In home they write:
This site lets you:
Share tips and techniques with other members of the community
Edit and update information from Adobe, including Adobe Help documentation
Rate and comment on content from Adobe and others.
that’s so interesting!
Second day at FotB was better than first!
If English people said: “God save the Queen”, I say: “God save Mario Klingemann“… he is a big geek and a showman!
You can find Mario’s preso directly in quasimondo.com (his blog), so Mario show us how to use BitmapData class and create very cool effect. It was an amazing session and it registered SOLD OUT.
Another big preso was Ted Patrick‘s session where he explain us the worst practice to use Flex! Ted is a big speaker, in few slides he show us what we could do to create solid and good projects, very interesting.
So now I’m starting the last day here… talking with Mr. Davey, that organizes FotB, he said me that next year FotB probably starts in the end of September, so take a space in your agenda and come in Brighton!
First day at FOTB was fantastic, speakers prepared great session, in particular inspire sessions are crazy!!!
Joshua Davis is an amazing speaker so cool presentation!
But another amazing thing is after the first inspire session where out of Pavillion Theatre the guys of Plug-in Media create a flash installation where you can interact with and when you move yourself starts from some areas one or more fireworks, very crazy!
After this we came to Brighton Casino and we gambled and eat all night!
When I’ll come back in Italy, I’ll create a Flickr account and put in all FOTB and Chicago MAX photos there.
And now I’ll start a new FOTB day! What amazing event!
On saturday I leave Italy to my first Flash on the Beach edition!
I take a look at seminars and there are 3 intensive days, lots of strong speakers and I hope to meet there new friends!
Obviusly in this blog I report my impressions about this event and share ideas or knowledge.
So stay tuned!
First day at Max is amazing!
In general session Adobe presents Flash Player 10 with a lots of cool features like text API implementation, 3D API implementation and new Filters API for new runtime effects.
New DevCenter area in Adobe site is well organized and so easy to search articles or tutorials about our favourite technology.
They present also great AIR application and with a lots of cool features, in fact they release in labs.adobe.com new AIR BETA version, AIR ROCKS!
Seminars are so interesting, this year there is a big interesting on Flex and AIR and a lots seminars too on those technologies.
What a GREAT EVENT! ADOBE ROCKS!
lucamezzalira.com 