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.

We are currently working on an iPhone app that supports version 3.1 to 4.0.1. With the introduction of iOS4 and the iPhone 4 Retina display, we can take advantage of the function UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions to create higher resolution snap shots.

To check if the function is available at runtime, you can compare it to NULL instead of having to lookup what version of the OS the user is running.

if (UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions != NULL)
{
    UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(size, NO, 0.0);
else
{
    UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(size);
}

For more information check out this article http://iphonedevelopertips.com/xcode/base-sdk-and-iphone-os-deployment-target-developing-apps-with-the-4-x-sdk-deploying-to-3-x-devices.html and Apple’s iOS Application Programming Guide has more information on Supporting High-Resolution Screens.

Apple iPhone 4 Ad featuring Facetime from Simon Barber on Vimeo.

“FaceTime works right out of the box — no need to set up a special account or screen name. And using FaceTime is as easy as it gets. Let’s say you want to start a video call with your best friend. Just find her entry in your Contacts and tap the FaceTime button. Or maybe you’re already on a voice call with her and you want to switch to video. Just tap the FaceTime button on the Phone screen. Either way, an invitation pops up on her iPhone 4 screen asking if she wants to join you. When she accepts, the video call begins. It’s all perfectly seamless. And it works in both portrait and landscape modes.”

To learn more about Facetime click here.

Apple iPad TV Ad on Vimeo.

We (ThoughtFaqtory) have been lucky enough to get our hands on a few of these slick iPads, even though we reside in Cape Town, South Africa. The obviously needed them for development purposes, to test our software products on the device. It turns out that running our application on the simulator is a far different experience than on an actual device.

Here is something to keep you excited while waiting patiently for them to arrive in your country.

ThoughtFaqtory originally offered development services on Adobe Flex and AIR platforms. We have created many great experiences for small to large corporations in the USA, Europe and South Africa.

At the end of last year, we decided to embark on offering services in the mobile space. The type of platforms we currently develop for are iPhone, iPad, Android and Adobe Flash Platform for mobile devices. We actually have a few iPad’s floating around the office. Another technology we are looking forward to this year is AIR for Android, Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices and Flex Mobile Framework (codenamed Slider). This is very exciting, because it allows our company to leverage existing ActionScript 3 skills and apply them to mobile devices.

We forsee that from 2010, there is going to be large demand for development of custom software solutions on mobile devices. A number of our team members are currently working on iPhone and iPad solutions for products that already have a web presence. Many companies are creating mobile experiences from existing products that are already available to the public. Then there are the products exclusive to mobile devices such as Foursquare and Gowalla, these types of products require location-based services function correctly.

ThoughtFaqtory is looking forward to this year as the mobile development space heats up.

See you at Net Prophet 2010 event on the 13th May 2010, Mutual Park, Pinelands, Cape Town.

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).

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.

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