Developers can now use the Adobe Flash Builder platform to develop applications for iOS devices, such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone, as well as for the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

Support for the devices (which had been announced in April) in Flash Builder 4.5.1 allows developers to create apps for a variety of popular devices and platforms using one code base with different presentation layers.

“The reaction from developers to the new mobile capabilities in Flash Builder 4.5 and the Flex 4.5 framework has been absolutely fantastic,” Ed Rowe, vice president of developer tooling at Adobe Systems, said in a statement today.

Adobe’s Flash Platform evangelist Serge Jespers shows us what “one tool, one framework, one codebase” means, and demonstrates an app developed for different devices using Flash Builder and Flex:

Developers from different industries have been using Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 to help them reduce development time and the cost of delivery to build some pretty amazing apps across the major platforms:

• Politifact.com: A project of the St. Petersburg Times and a 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner, the PolitiFact.com team extended its website content into a mobile app available across leading app stores. The PolitiFact.com app helps readers find truth in politics by investigating statements by members of Congress, the President, lobbyists and other Washington D.C. personalities.

• Netflix Queue Manager: Using Adobe AIR 2.5, Flash Builder 4.5.1 and the Flex framework, RIA design and development group UnitedMindset created the Netflix Queue Manager, which allows users to connect with and manage their Netflix queue across devices and features intuitive search capabilities. With success in the Android Market—over 340,000 downloads since October 2010—the app is coming soon to BlackBerry AppWorld and the Apple App Store.

• Mr. Mixit and Pyramix: Web design and development agency HD Interactive first released Pyramix, a word game combining the strategy of Cryptoquote and the simplicity of Boggle, and Mr. Mixit, a spin-based matching game where you mix record labels against the clock, to Apple’s App Store. The new updates allowed HD Interactive to use the same code to deliver the apps to Android Market and BlackBerry AppWorld in record time.

• Muni Tracker: Are you from the San Francisco Bay Area or maybe planning to visit? This app helps you track locations, arrival times and bookmark your favorite stops and lines for Muni (San Francisco Municipal Railway), San Francisco’s public transit system. The developer was able to quickly and easily port this original Android app to iOS.

• Conqu is an easy to use yet powerful task management tool designed to help conquer an e-mail inbox and get things done. Using Flash Builder 4.5, the developer, AsFusion, was able deploy the app on multiple platforms with minimal effort. They were also able to reduce the time to develop the app since there was no need to debug different code for each individual platform.

Adobe is pleased to announce the availability of Adobe AIR 2.7 SDK and the Adobe AIR 2.7 runtimes. Adobe AIR 2.7 includes new features for both desktop and mobile applications with mobile support for Android 2.2+, BlackBerry Tablet OS* and iOS 4+ operating systems. Companies can build and deploy AIR 2.7 apps using Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 with an upcoming update to AIR 2.7 later this month.

*BlackBerry Tablet OS is scheduled to receive an OTA (over the air) update of AIR 2.7 by the end of June.

New features in AIR 2.7

Mobile

• Enhanced rendering for iOS: AIR apps for iOS render up to 4x faster in CPU mode.  This change will improve the performance of many AIR for iOS apps, including those built with the Flex framework.  Watch the performance improvements
• Video: Adobe AIR 2.7: Faster App Performance on iOS (Renaun Erickson, Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist, demonstrates faster AIR 2.7 app performance on iPad)
• Faster development time for iOS applications: Developers can now debug and build iOS applications faster than with previous versions using a new mode available within the AIR Developer Tool (ADT). During the development of an application, developers can now choose to use “interpreter mode” to streamline the testing and debugging development cycle.
• AIR installation on SD cards for Android devices: This feature allows end users to install or move the AIR runtime onto the SD cards within their Android devices so they can free up storage space on the phone.

Desktop

• Integrated support for Media Measurement:  The Adobe AIR 2.7 runtime now includes the same built-in support for media measurement as Adobe Flash Player 10.3, allowing companies to simplify the collection of real-time, aggregated reporting data for how content is distributed and viewed by users. With direct support for Adobe SiteCatalyst, powered by Omniture, developers can implement video analytics for existing or legacy video players with as little as two lines of code. For additional information, see the article on measuring video consumption in Flash.
• Acoustic echo cancellation: With integrated support for acoustic echo cancellation, developers can now add real-time VoIP capabilities to games, enterprise, and other types of applications without requiring users to wear a noise-canceling headset. Users can now chat using the speaker built into their desktop or laptop computer. This new capability is also available in Flash Player 10.3.
• Navigation Improvements for HTML Content: Enables seamless weblink-style navigation within desktop apps such as magazine viewers and eBook readers.  Developers can now respond to a new event to be notified when content within the HTMLLoader control attempts to change the location of a page. This enhancement provides developers with a better way to implement intra-application navigation.

Rossignol Experience iPad Application was created and designed by La Haute Société thanks to Adobe Flash technologies.

For more information go to the Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog and read this article http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/06/adobe-air-2-7-now-available-ios-apps-4x-faster.html.

A few weeks ago, we decided to fly to Johannesburg to attend the “Meet The BlackBerry® PlayBook™” event at the forum | the campus on 24th May 2011 in association with Adobe. The event was split into a business track and a developer track, which catered for most of the attendees. A few of us went to both tracks and found the presentations to be very useful, gave us an insight into what markets BlackBerry are aiming PlayBook at compared to the Apple iPad and other tablet competitors. After chatting to many of the BlackBerry representatives at the event, they all said there has been a lot of interest from small, medium and large enterprises in South Africa regarding the PlayBook. So we are looking forward to the official launch of the device next month.

The reason ThoughtFaqtory is so interested in this device, is because we can leverage our existing Adobe Flash and Flex skills to develop great user experiences for the enterprise market. If you are interested in getting an app developed for the BlackBerry PlayBook, please get in touch with us on our website at www.thoughtfaqtory.com or email us inquiries@thoughtfaqtory.com.

We have also ported some of our apps over to the device already, if you are interested in seeing any of them please let us know via the details above.

Also, check out this video below regarding the “BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet for Business”.

Another video called “BlackBerry PlayBook – Flash”.

A year after Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4 SDK were released, new versions are available with Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 SDK! The main focus for Flex 4.5 SDK and Flash Builder 4.5 is the ability to build mobile applications that target the Google Android, Blackberry Tablet OS, and Apple iOS operating systems. Additionally, Flex 4.5 SDK introduces new Spark components and improvements for large application development while Flash Builder 4.5 introduces dozens of new coding productivity features for faster ActionScript and MXML development.

Adobe have really focused on mobile development for this release, offering developers one tool, one development framework and one codebase to build mobile applications on Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS. Flash Builder 4.5 also helps developers make these applications ready to deploy for an app store/market. You can immediately develop applications for Android, and support for BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS will be available through free Flex and Flash Builder updates in June.

Here are a few resources to get things started:

Build your First Mobile Application in Flash Builder 4.5

Build your First Flex 4.5 Application

Flex Developer Center

Mobile development using Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK and Flash Builder 4.5

Examples and case studies

The best way to describe the services is as follows:

“Juxio is a new visual way to communicate. Individuals and businesses use Juxio to combine images, text and more into mashable, visual streams called Juxes to share across social media and in print. Juxes are created on both our Web and iPhone apps. In the future we will support additional mobile devices. By making Juxio available anywhere at any time, we hope you find more ways to create new meaning.”

ThoughtFaqtory have been involved in the development of Juxio since the beginning of 2009. We were brought on-board to develop the web application, using Adobe Flex, Flash and ColdFusion. The biggest challenge in developing the web application was the client wanted the Juxios to be a maximum of 72″ x 36″ in size. One of the challenges we faced in the design phase was how we were going to handle the memory issues. We designed the application with these potential issues in mind.

The first idea we had was to use a tile layout and only render the tiles which were on the screen. This would reduce the memory load because only a portion of the Juxio would be stored in memory. But when zooming out so that the entire Juxio is shown we would have to store the entire Juxio in memory anyway. We could not afford to have the entire Juxio in memory because it could cause the application to crash due to insufficient resources. The team had to find a way to use less memory per inch of the Juxio. The biggest consumer of this was the images, so we looked at optimizing the system used to load and store images.

We worked on a system that would download an image stored in the cloud, scale and crop it to best fit the component it belongs to. A snapshot was taken of the transformed image and the original one is discarded. The smaller image is then rendered and kept in memory. Depending on the size of the original image we saved a significant amount of resources. The disadvantage of this approach is that when scaling an image we lose image quality. But because we are scaling down and not up, the loss is not as great. We also found that by taking the snapshot with Adobe Flash’s highest quality rendering mode we limited this loss.

One of the requirements was to render a 76” x 36” at 300 pixel per inch (PPI) PDF for print. Standard web graphics are 72 PPI to put this into perspective. An image of this size and quality would be 744 MB. While we could compress the image for the PDF, we would still need to create all of the pixels in order to compress them. It would be unfeasible to allow the Juxio to be edited at this quality. The team had to find a way to edit the Juxio at a low resolution and output it into a high resolution.

We decided to edit the Juxio with the standard 72 PPI and then scale it to 300 PPI when outputting to PDF. In order to create a 300 PPI image we needed to scale the Juxio up 4 times. Adobe Flash Drawing API is done using vector graphics and wouldn’t lose quality when scaling them up to the desired size. We used embedded font’s so that Adobe Flash would scale the text without losing quality too. But the images obviously pose a problem when scaled up 4 times the size. So we had scale the original image up by 4 to fit into it’s image component (explained earlier). Now the image stored in memory would be the correct size for the required 300 PPI to output to PDF. Essentially we were storing a 300 PPI image in memory. When the Juxio is edited, the image is scaled down and rendered at 72 PPI. Once the Juxio is being outputted, the image maintains its 300 PPI.

The screen shot below shows a set of images that have been cropped to match the exact size of the rectangle, so memory usage is minimal.

Screen shot of a Juxio created using the web application - built using Adobe Flex technology

The team were very happy with the results and the effort that went into prototyping the different scenarios, it definitely paid off. That was the first of many obstacles that we encountered in the design and implementation phases of the project. We are continually adding new features as users become more advanced which allows the creation of even greater content. In the next article we will dive deeper into the functionality of the web application that make it such a powerful and unique product.

Earlier this year Juxio asked us to develop an iPhone application that allowed users to create Juxes (*smaller versions of Juxios) based on selection of templates using there iOS devices. Designing a mobile application requires a different approach compared to a web application on the desktop. Firstly, the screen size is a lot smaller, you are required to think on a screen by screen basis when designing mobile applications. When we started to design the iPhone app with the client, we need to take into account the hardware, form factor, screen size, orientation, input methods and other capabilities such as GPS and camera etc.

The one major challenge when designing for a mobile device is to take into account the network connectivity. Users take their phones everywhere with them which means variable Internet connectivity or sometimes non at all. So ideally the application should work in offline mode and check whether a network connection is available before sending or receiving data from the device.

So that is exactly what our team did, we designed and developed the application to work with or without a network connection. The app is smart enough to know when a connection is available and sync the data appropriately. Implementing a robust syncing framework is quite challenging but when it’s working can be a very rewarding experience. This functionality was essential in keeping the users different devices and web application in sync. We kept the process very simple for the user, there was no conflict management, that was all handled within the framework.

The next biggest challenge was implementing a layout engine for the different templates that the user can choose from. This was developed using Core Graphics API and is a little more complicated compared to using Adobe Flex and the Adobe Flash Drawing API. Each template is rendered based on a data structure defined in XML, and both the web and iPhone apps understand this structure.

To enable cross device content creation, sharing and display, we persist XML which is used by the layout engine to render the Juxio. The XML used to create the Template is modified by the users when they add content to the Juxio. This XML which describes the user’s Juxio is persisted to the cloud and allows the iPhone or web application to load and render the persisted Juxio.

Link to the TechCrunch article on Juxio when it launched in August 2010 as a private beta.

* A Juxio is created using the web application

* A Jux is created using the iPhone application

]]> http://thoughtfaqtory.com/blog/2010/12/07/juxio-project-featured-on-techcrunch/feed/ 0 http://thoughtfaqtory.com/blog/2010/11/10/adobe-flex-mobile-overview-part-1/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=adobe-flex-mobile-overview-part-1 http://thoughtfaqtory.com/blog/2010/11/10/adobe-flex-mobile-overview-part-1/#comments Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:39:03 +0000 Simon http://thoughtfaqtory.com/blog/?p=538 We recently had the pleasure of attending the Adobe MAX 2010 conference in Los Angeles at the LA Convention Center. Adobe showed off some exciting new technologies that are either available to use today or in the coming future. What interested me the most was the latest Adobe AIR 2.5 platform for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Android, iOS and Blackberry Tablet OS. This allows us to develop applications using the next version of the Flex framework to build mobile and desktop applications using a common code base.

So once we got back to the office after 25 hours of flying, I handed our developers an Adobe MAX 2010 Adobe Flash Platform DVD with all the preview software. We dived straight into mobile development with the latest Flash Builder “Burrito” and Flex SDK “Hero” framework.

The result of our efforts was an iTunes Trailers application on the AIR for Android platform.

iTunes Trailers home screen

One thing that we noticed was, if you are already familiar with Flex, then you do not have to learn anything new. There are a few new components implemented to support mobile devices such as MobileApplication, TabbedMobileApplication and ActionBar. Also, you can have something up and running pretty quickly compared to other mobile platforms.

When you first create your project instead of extending Application, it extends MobileApplication. This class does a lot of work for you, including orientation support, persistence manager to save and restore state, listeners for the hardware buttons and the ViewNavigator (see description below).

“The ViewNavigator component is a container that consists of a collection of View objects, where only the top most view is visible and active. Views can be added and removed by using the popView() and pushView() methods on the navigator. When a new view becomes active, the old view’s instance is destroyed. When a view is pushed on top of navigator’s stack, the old view’s data property is automatically persisted and restored when it is reactived through one of the pop methods. ViewNavigator doesn’t provide index information about the Views that it is currently managing and strictly follows a stack navigation model. Jumping between a set of views similar to a ViewStack is not supported by this component. ViewNavigator displays an optional action bar that displays contextual information defined by the active view. When the active view changes, the action bar is automatically updated.”

iTunes Trailers movie info screen

You cannot define any visual components in the MobileApplication class, you will notice that it contains a property called firstView, which is the initial view your application will start with. Each view on the navigation stack must extend View. It extends Group and adds additional properties to communicate with it’s parent navigators’ various UI controls.

MobileApplication provides a way to persist your application’s view state and data when the application quits, so that the next time it starts, it can restore itself with the same current view and view history. This makes interruptions in your application’s life-cycle completely transparent to the user. This is very important on mobile devices, where the operating system can interrupt or kill an application at any time.

The ActionBar class defines a component that includes title, navigation and action content groups. In the context of a ViewNavigator and MobileApplication , the ActionBar is used as application chrome which is has content contributed by the active View. The screen shot above contains a back button in the navigation content group with the default title. The iTunes Trailers app we developed is using the default chrome and colors. Developers can however implement there own skins using ActionScript, FXG or bitmaps (recommended approach by Adobe for optimisation) rather than MXML and runtime MXML graphics. A good place to start would be to look at the ButtonSkin class under the package spark.skins.mobile. This will give you a good idea of how to go about developing your own mobile skins.

iTunes Trailers cast members screen

The List and Scroller components have added functionality to enable touch-and-throw scrolling. To enable touch scrolling, set the new property called interactionMode style to touch. If you are using the mobile theme, then this style is automatically set on all appropriate components for you, so no need to do anything explicitly. You may however, develop a desktop application using AIR for touch screens, which would require you to set the property. The default item renderer for the List component on mobile devices is MobileItemRenderer. This is a simple item renderer with a single text component.

There is a more advanced item renderer optimised for mobile devices called MobileIconItemRenderer, it contains four optional parts:

1. an icon on the left
2. single-line label on top next to the icon
3. multi-line message below label and next to the icon
4. a decorator on the right

The screen shot below is using all of these parts of the item renderer.

MobileIconItemRenderer

If you would like to create your own advanced item renderer then Adobe recommends that you create a new ActionScript item renderer that extends MobileIconItemRenderer. Most of the time you probably won’t need to create your own item renderers but on rare occasions you may need to extend the functionality.

In part 2 we will go into more detail on how we built the application and integrated the services using Flash Builder “Burrito”,  the design view to layout the views and how to package up the application for distribution on the Android Marketplace. Additionally, we will provide the source code for the application too.

iTunes Trailers watch trailer screen

For more information on Flex SDK “Hero” framework, check out these links:

• What’s new in Flash Builder “Burrito”
• Mobile development using Flex SDK “Hero” and Flash Builder “Burrito”
• Coding productivity enhancements in Flash Builder “Burrito”
• Introducing Adobe Flex SDK “Hero”
• Adobe Flex “Hero” sample applications and tutorials

The current positions available including the skills required to perform this job effectively:

Flex developers

• Adobe Flex
• Rich Internet application development
• Strong working knowledge of usability focused interfaces
• Object-oriented programming, analysis and design with ActionScript3
• Custom Flex component development built on Adobe’s Flex framework.
• Flex-Database integration using Web Services, Flash Remoting, and/or Data Services.
• Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES/ BlazeDS, Flash Communication Server / Media Server
• Eclipse and Ant
• Java
• AJAX development experience a plus.

UI developers

• Adobe Flex
• ASP.Net
• C#
• MVC Architecture
• Silverlight
• JavaScript
• CSS
• HTML/HTML5
• XML
• AJAX

Java developers

• Oracle, MySQL
• JVM (J2EE, JDK, JRE), API, XML
• Apache Tomcat
• Spring
• Redhat, Linux, Solaris
• Hibernate / JPA / ORM
• JCR
• Any web application framework
• Java2D, PDF, Postscript programming
• GWT, AJAX development
• Test-driven development
• Adobe Flex/AIR Development a plus

iPhone/iPad developers

• Experience in iPad Development
• Expertise in Mac OS X, Objective-C 2.0, Xcode, Interface Builder, and Instruments
• Expertise in device partitioning and code signing
• Expertise in consuming web services from iOS applications
• Expertise in SQLite and database work
• Experience with SCM toolsAbility to design consistent, easy-to-use UI’s
• Mastery of iOS API’s
• Self starter, able to work independently
• Good communication skills
• Ability to explain development concepts to other developers
• Experience with Subversion
• Experience with both SOAP and REST

Award-winning health insurance provider uses the Adobe Flash Platform to create a unique interactive online service empowering customers to lead healthier, happier lives.

A new take on healthcare
For many people, the concept of wellness is relegated to an occasional visit to the doctor at the first sign of illness or for an annual check-up. But with climbing insurance premiums — particularly for employees who make contributions to employer-sponsored plans — and frequent coverage from news outlets about the dangers of an unhealthy lifestyle, more citizens are rethinking their approach to healthy living.

“We’ve always viewed ourselves as a leader and innovator in the insurance industry,” says Paulo dos Santos, CIO at PruHealth. “Encouraging and rewarding our customers with discounted premiums and other services for living a healthier lifestyle would certainly distinguish us from our competitors. We needed to create a unique program to deliver that message. Adobe software and technologies proved to be the most logical choice to achieve that goal.”

Working with our business applications development team at ThoughtFaqtory, PruHealth adopted the Adobe Flash Platform, including Adobe Flex Builder, to create an interactive online, incentive-based curriculum that encourages physical activity, healthy eating, and smoking cessation among the many ways for customers to earn redeemable points and valuable rewards. The challenge for us was to build a rich experience, that was easy to use, enjoyable to work through and be able to retain the users interest throughout the completion of the health and fitness goals process.

With the Adobe Flash Platform, PruHealth provides customers with richly detailed and dynamically animated graphs and charts, giving them a comprehensive understanding of how their habits affect their health and wellness.

Leveraging the Adobe Flash Platform and Adobe Flex Builder 3, PruHealth delivered its innovative online Vitality Interactive application, a secure online portal to accompany the long-standing Vitality Program. The dynamic portal features a range of interactive wellness tools that enable customers to create their own health and fitness goals and timelines.

“With the Adobe Flash Platform, we created a richly animated site that brings a unique visual perspective to show customers how their daily habits contribute to their overall health and wellness,” says Greg Peringuey, development manager for PruHealth Online.

The application provides customers with a questionnaire about their current lifestyle choices—exercise habits, calorie intake, and lifestyle choices, among many others. They can watch as rich-media charts and graphs update instantly with their answers to paint a comprehensive picture of lifestyle changes they can make to live healthier, and save money.

The full Adobe Success Story is available here.

It is pretty simple process, just follow these steps:

• Download Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 and AIR 2.0 Beta 2
• Test your content on the new beta run times
• Log any bugs you find at http://bugs.adobe.com

Also, please spread the word on Twitter – Improve Flash 10.1 & AIR 2.0 via Beta 2 http://bit.ly/cty7Nm READ & RT #Flash #AIR #QUALITY

Discussing New Printing Features in the AIR 2 Beta 2 from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.

Adobe® have released AIR® 2 beta 2 on Adobe Labs. Adobe AIR 2 provides end users with exceptional application experiences while giving developers the easiest and most powerful way to develop desktop applications across multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux).

AIR 2 builds on the success of AIR 1 by giving developers new capabilities, and even tighter integration with the desktop. Some new features of AIR 2 include:

• Enhanced support for interacting with printers (beta 2)
• Support for TLS/SSL socket communication (beta 2)
• Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
• Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
• Support for native code integration.
• The ability to open a file with its default application.
• Multi-touch and gesture support.
• New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
• Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
• Global error handling.
• Improved cross-platform printing
• Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Two new features that developers may be particularly interested in are the following:

• Print Job Enhancements
  New properties and methods have been added to the PrintJob class to give you better control of the way content is printed from an AIR application, including the choice of printer, paper size, and number of copies. New properties also give you more information about the printer, such as printable area, whether the printer will print in color, and whether the print job is currently active. The new PrintJobOptions.printMethod property allows you specify whether to use bitmap or vector printing. The PrintJobOptions.pixelsPerInch property allows you to specify the resolution of print jobs. The new PrintUIOptions class allows you to control how much the end user can change the page range to be printed. See PrintJob, PrintJobOptions, and PrintUIOptions.
• TLS/SSL Sockets
  You can now connect to a server that requires TLSv1 or SSLv3 for socket communications. See SecureSocket.

For a complete list of features and to see what’s new in beta 2, please refer to the Release Notes. For an overview of the new features in AIR 2, please take a look at the following:

• Article: Rob Christensen’s Introducing Adobe AIR 2 beta
• Video: Kevin Lynch, CTO, demos AIR 2 during the MAX 2009 keynote (5:50)
• Video: Christian Cantrell’s MAX 2009 presentation, What’s Coming in Adobe AIR 2 (62:52)

The AIR 2 Public beta is your opportunity to explore new features and communicate your feedback. Please remember that that this is beta software, so there will be bugs, incomplete features, some performance issues, and some missing documentation. Therefore, please use the AIR 2 beta only for testing and exploratory purposes.

Demos

Adrian Ludwig demos various games from Armor Games and Miniclip.com with Flash Player 10.1 on Palm webOS using the Palm Pre (3:44)

Adrian Ludwig demos video and animation on the BBC, The New York Times, and Angry Alien websites on Android using the Motorola Droid (3:35)

Adrian Ludwig demos Flash Player 10.1 on Nexus One, the new Google branded phone (3:41)

Kevin Lynch demos multi-touch and gesture capabilities on the HP TouchSmart using AIR 2 beta and Flash Player 10.1 (2:54)

Adrian Ludwig demos various websites with Flash Player 10.1 on Palm webOS using the Palm Pre (3:02)

Adrian Ludwig demos Google Finance on Microsoft Windows Mobile using the Toshiba TG01 smart phone (3:04)

If you are a Flex developer or wanting to learn Flex, i highly recommend you look at Adobe’s video training course called Flex 4 beta in a Week.

The course is broken up over 5 days as follows:

Day 1 – Exploring the basic, Introducing object-orientated programming and Understanding components and layouts
Day 2 – Handling events, Validating and formatting data, Navigating application content and Animating components and states
Day 3 – Controlling text display, Controlling visual display and CSS and Skinning Spark components
Day 4 – Extending events, Accessing remote data and Creating a typed data model
Day 5 – Displaying data with the DataGroup container, Displaying Data with the DataGrid control and Deploying Flex and AIR Applications

Seasoned Flex developers may only find some of these areas useful, such as the Skinning Spark components and Displaying data with the DataGroup container (Coming soon).

[/kml_flashembed]

This is the the first post in the series, and each one will highlight a different component we developed for various projects throughout the year.

ThoughtFaqtory has been working on numerous projects this year and one of them required our team to develop a host of custom components with a specific look and feel. We had a couple of choices but we are very familiar with Degrafa and decided to use it to skin our components.

In the example application above, the component gives the user feedback on the progress of the slide show. This can be very useful component to show feedback within a wizard style user interface.

The progress bar has quite a bit of logic to work out the size of the sub-sections and labels based on the available width and height. It also supports vertical layout but had no requirement for this in the project. The colours (background, active and inactive) can be set using styles. The animation is done using AnimateProperty with a slight delay, and the easing function can be set in the styles.

In our next post we will use Flex 4 to create the exact same component and wait for it… the source will be included. This version will contain user interaction and we may even go as far as adding multi-touch events.

More to come…

This project required me to implement functionality that would allow the end user to export groups of images to PDF. The PDF needed to be high quality, 300 ppi (pixels per inch). After some searching I came across the AlivePDF website which appeared to be perfect for my requirements. Initially after using AlivePDF to generate a few PDFs, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to use and I thought that I had found Utopia. My joy however was short lived after the following error message was received:

AlivePDF had no alpha channel support for PNGs and the PNG encoder provided by Adobe always returns a PNG with an alpha channel. Even if you turned off the transparency you will get back a 32 bit ARGB PNG.

I continued searching for someone who had a method of successfully removing the alpha channel but my search proved fruitless. Hence I decided to do my own research into PNGs and found the following:

A valid PNG consists of:

PNG signature
IHDR chunk (only one)
IDAT chunk (one or more)
IEND chunk (only one)

The PNG signature:

89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A.

The IHDR image header:

The IDAT chunks contain the image data.
The IEND chunk marks the end of the PNG.

The colour type under the IHDR chunk needs to be mentioned here as that is where the image type is defined.

After familiarizing myself with PNGs, I revisited Adobe’s PNGEncoder.as class again and eventually managed to make certain changes that allowed the removal of the alpha channel all together.

After all the research this ended up being a lot easier than I had originally thought, all that I needed to do was change the colour type and extract the RGB values. Adobe’s colour type was 6 (True colour with alpha) I changed it to 2 (True colour only). Next I needed to isolate and extract the RGB values, this was done with a bitwise right shift operation and a bitwise AND operation.

// Build IHDR chunk
 
var IHDR:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
IHDR.writeInt(w);
IHDR.writeInt(h);
IHDR.writeUnsignedInt(0x08020000); // True colour (no alpha)
IHDR.writeByte(0);
writeChunk(png, 0x49484452, IHDR);
 
// Isolate RGB values
 
for (var j:int = 0; j < w; j++)
{
	p = img.getPixel(j, i);
	IDAT.writeByte(p >> 16 & 0xFF);
	IDAT.writeByte(p >> 8 & 0xFF);
	IDAT.writeByte(p & 0xFF);
}

The changes implemented resulted in the removal of the Alpha channel which allowed me to successfully embedded the encoded PNG image into a PDF with AlivePDF. This was the first of many problems I had working with PDFs, maybe you will get to read about the others in the not too distant future. Attached below is a sample application that will embed a PNG into a PDF.

[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="10.0.0" movie="http://thoughtfaqtory.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/pngalpha1.swf" width="630" height="400" targetclass="flashmovie" ]

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My transformation started with ThoughtFaqtory nearly a year ago and before that I was a new vehicle salesperson with a propensity for pyrotechnics. . . like blowing things up! With a burning desire to be in the IT industry, but without an opportunity to make the move to becoming a software developer, I was up the river without a paddle! A couple of years ago the motor industry experienced a downward trend in sales, realizing that this maybe a blessing in disguise, a Plan B was necessary. While sitting on the sales floor watching tumble weeds roll past, I embarked on teaching myself Java, as I was more than willing to invest that time in my future.  By the end of last year I felt confident enough to find myself an employer that would be willing to take me on. ThoughtFaqtory was on my radar, through a newspaper editorial, and contacted Simon and Phil Barber. They offered me this huge opportunity to learn from within their company and then spent the next 6 months on a rigorous training program using Flex.

So the former sales person was morphed into a developer, but I must share a little secret – my father was a programmer for Siemens, so let’s say it’s in the blood. ThoughtFaqtory offered me some time to research a technology of my choice and was given the opportunity to post this blog. Two weeks was invested learning how to use Pixel Bender; there are numerous amounts of resources that you can look at if you want to learn how to use it.  Keith Peters had a fantastic chapter on Pixel Bender in his book “Advanced ActionScript Animation” which was a great help and also adapted one of his examples to my needs in this example. Also available was some excellent info from Lee Brimelow and his tutorials on www.gotoandlearn.com.  A shout also goes out to Jonathan Hart who had an awesome example of RGB sine distortion on http://synja.com, which was adapted for this presentation.

This article does not cover the actual Pixel Bender code but shows you how to import the filters in Flex and create a small animation using 4 filters that were created in Pixel Bender. I implemented a base class that each of my custom filters could extend. This would give them the ability to dispatch an event when any of the properties on the filter have been updated. My application could listen for this event on each of the filters and reapply them to the image and update the display.

An animation class was created that would control this and allow various properties to be animated. I do realize that Flash actually provides such classes already but wanted to discover this unknown territory for myself and see how well I would do in solving any obstacles that were cast in my path.  It was another learning curve and an enjoyable one. The AnimateFilter class takes an array of Properties on the filter that should be animated. Provision was made for reversing the animation, setting a delay to start the animation and also setting a delay to reverse the animation. The AnimateFilter takes a target, which is the filter that contains the properties to be animated.  This can be set up in MXML.

The resulting image has the filters applied and you can see the result when you move your mouse over the image.  Four filters have been attached to the image and have an animation set up for each of the filters, which plays on the mouseOver event.  The combination of all 4 filters gives an unusual effect. . . at least I think so. CHECK OUT MY EXAMPLE ABOVE.

So there you have it. I am very proud of how far I have come from being a salesperson less than a year ago to where I am now. I would never have been able to absorb this amount of information without the help of all the awesome staff at ThoughtFaqtory. There is a realization though that with this kind of opportunity comes the responsibility to apply myself and work hard to achieve my goals. But in the meantime, I’m loving every minute of it and still blowing things up . . . only kidding.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

“Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge.

Behold the SortableList component.”

A few concepts in the article include Spark components, skinning and basic custom component development.

This is one of many articles we will be writing in the next few months.

Also, thank you to Rich Tretola and O’Reilly for giving us this opportunity.

United States of America

Having just returned from your magnificent country and gathered our breath, it was great to reflect on the truly amazing time that we had in America, the challenges ahead and the people we met on our travels.

Let me tell you – you sure have one hell of a country.

Adjectives like superb, wonderful, splendid, brilliant, outstanding, superlative spring to mind and I’m just describing your restaurants in Indianapolis, New York and Boston.

But one thing permeates throughout the people we encountered, that’s respect and a love of hard work, nothing is too much trouble.

“Wanna go to the Indianapolis Speedway” up steps David Bigelow of Nitro-LM and we were transported there.  What’s more we even drove around it, me at the wheel, pretty awesome and a dream come true. Thank you David and your sales team at Nitro-LM.

It was great meeting you and the Flex community at the 360Flex Conference and having a chance to talk, share life experiences and ideas as well. Two days traveling from Cape Town, South Africa made it all worthwhile. The guys at 360 Conferences Tom Ortega and John Wilker performed superhuman feats of endurance, organization, PR skills and still managed to keep their sanity as well as a smile, even though sleep deprivation must have been paramount in their mindsets. We thought the conference was well worth the price of admission if you take cognizance of what was on offer.

Knowledge was on tap, smart ways to utilize the source code, opportunities to educate yourself or your team. With presentation names like: Clients are stupid and other observations, The great mash up, The art of project management in large scale Flex projects, The business of a team instead of an army, The business side of Flex, The business side of selling Flex/AIR applications and Setting up your corporate library. There was something for all. Then there was the cool shit aka Doug McCune who blew us away with topics like: Steganography, Head Tracking Targets, Safe Sexting and Augmented reality demo with fake chests. . . AWESOME. You see something for everyone!

Balance, subjectivity and self education were the keys in all aspects of the other presentations whether it was  design, development or business related subjects. If I was a manager, it would be a no brainer not to attend. I would be scolding myself for not sending any representation and ensuring that I send my staff next year. We did hit Rock Bottom. . . the Brewery, every night just to clear the cobwebs and hang out! Tom and John must be congratulated for their yeomen feats in presenting an exceptional conference in Indianapolis. Congrats – Great Job!

Leaving Indianapolis and onto New York, we were made African brothers by our Nigerian taxi driver!  A visit to the new Yankee Stadium;  I was never a YANKEE FAN! But now I’m a full convert. Adjectives abound now – well only one. . . a magnificently managed extravaganza was on offer and we grabbed it with both hands, so New York. . . even Paul Simon was there for us on Memorial Weekend. The rest of weekend was spent walking around the city visiting Starbucks, the Apple store 5th Avenue. . . wandering through Central Park, it’s so big – people getting married, picnicking and playing ball. Looking out for the DAKOTA building where John Lennon lived before his untimely death in 1980. Visiting Federal Hall where New York owes so much of its history including the inauguration of George Washington, the first President of the United States. Then, finally a visit to Ground Zero and the Empire State Building. Meeting more interesting people along the way.

Picking up a hire car or truck or SUV or whatever they’ve got. . . and driving on the wrong side of the road to Boston, through Connecticut, Massachusetts, Providence and finally to Boston. Taking in the city, the historic Faneuil Hall Marketplace, the “Gateway to Boston” since 1026, Boston Harbour and surrounds, we bumped into Adam Sandler and he didn’t even recognize we were from South Africa! We managed to take a drive out to Harvard University your private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is also the first and oldest corporation in North America. Harvard University is made up of ten schools and the closest most of us will get to achieving a degree of that status.

Our visit to America has made us realize the extent to which both our countries face in dealing with this global recession. Can we rise to the challenge? Sure we can. . . by working together, learning from one another and supporting each other, we can create solutions using our expertise and the Adobe Flex/AIR software tools at our disposal, to enable leaders and captains of our respective countries, industries and commerce, to more easily and effectively manage our economies and their bottom lines, so that we don’t return to this Economic Nirvana.

I have listed all the tutorials, videos and screencasts below.

Adobe Flash Catalyst

Get Started
Learn about Flash Catalyst

• Video: Introducing Flash Catalyst
  Discover what you can do with this new interaction design tool for creating interactive experiences.
• Video: Wire Framing in Flash Catalyst
  Learn how to quickly wireframe a design concept in Flash Catalyst.
• Notes: Learn about Flash Catalyst
  Refer to these feature notes that detail what you can do with this interaction design tool.

Start Building Your First Flash Catalyst Application

• Video: Create your First Application with Flash Catalyst
  Let Ty Voilter step you through the process of prototyping an interactive application.
• Tutorial: Start Designing in Flash Catalyst
  Learn to create a simple SWF content from a Photoshop design.
• Tutorial: Build a Data-Centric Application Using Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4
  Learn to create a browser-based address book application from an Illustrator design.

Get Better
Explore Flash Catalyst Workflows

• Video: Exporting from Fireworks CS4 to Flash Catalyst
  Presenter: Doug Winnie; Adobe
• Video: Use Native Fireworks CS4 Files in Flash Catalyst
  Presenter: Doug Winnie; Adobe

Work with Flash Catalyst

• Video: Create a Data List in Flash Catalyst
  Presenter: Nate Bishop; Adobe
• Video: Create Animations in Flash Catalyst
  Presenter: Ty Voilter; Adobe
• Video: Distribute Objects to States with Flash Catalyst
  Presenter: Doug Winnie; Adobe
• Video: Sharing Flash Catalyst Libraries
  Presenter: Doug Winnie; Adobe

Learn from the Community

• Video: Flash Catalyst Preview
  Presenter: Mordy Golding; Lynda.com
• Screencast: Using Flash Catalyst and Flex 4 beta 1 – Part 1:  Design a Twitter search app
  Presenter: Lee Brimelow; gotoAndLearn()
• Screencast: Using Flash Catalyst and Flex 4 beta 1 – Part 2: Hook up the app to live data
  Presenter: Lee Brimelow; gotoAndLearn()
• Screencast: Introducing Flash Catalyst – Part 1: Good practices for preparing Illustrator files
  Presenter: Garth Braithwaite; InsideRIA
• Screencast: Introducing Flash Catalyst – Part 2: Import and export artwork and libraries
  Presenter: Garth Braithwaite; InsideRIA
• Tutorial: Adobe Flash Catalyst: A Designer’s Ticket to the Interactive World
  Andrew Faulkner; Peachpit