How I built the mobileMAX App…

Join me tomorrow online with the Hawaii Flash User’s Group to learn about developing the mobile Adobe MAX conference app. http://groups.adobe.com/posts/e9f2391409

BarCamp San Diego, Jan 16 & 17th

When: January 16th and 17th

Where: Intuit, Santa Fe Campus in Carmel Valley

How: Eventbrite Registration Page for BarCamp San Diego 6.

More info: http://www.barcampsd.org

Mate Framework Animation

If you have ever wondered how the Mate Frameworks, but have not had the time…. this 35 second animation will solve that!

http://www.designovermatter.com/post.cfm/mate-framework-animation

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 & Flash CS5

Adobe has release Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 debug version of the flash player as a developer prerelease. You can download it from Adobe Labs: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html. This version is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. This is a great news because we’ve been waiting for a debug version of FP 10.1 since it has been made available as prerelease.

No Flash CS5 Public Beta

A public beta of Flash CS5 was announced at Adobe MAX 2009, but Adrian Ludwig (Group Manager, Flash Platform Product Marketing at Adobe Systems) announced on the Flash Platform Blog that unfortunately there won’t be time for a beta. Bummer.

Flash Player Internals 10.1 Recap

My good friend James Polanco from DevelopmentArc, has just posted a four part recap covering the internal workings of the Flash Player. If you use the Flash Player (and I assume you do since you probably are since you are reading this), you need to carefully read this recap. e

RIA Radio, Live at Adobe MAX – Day 1 Keynote

I was honored to be a guest on RIA Radio during the recent Adobe MAX show. I joined the hosts, Garth Braithwaite, Leif Wells and  Zach Stepek, along with fellow guest Kevin Schmidt. We discussed the announcements from the Day 1 keynote (Flash for the iPhone, Flash 10.1 on mobile, TVs, and netbooks.)  Throughout the entire show, they sat down with a lot of cool folks, so take a listen.

Listen to this podcast ( mp3). You can also subscribe to the RIA Radio Podcast in iTunes.

Kevin Schmidt to discuss the big MAX announcements and give our take on what they mean. Topics covered include: Flash for the iPhone, Flash 10.1 on mobile, TVs, and netbooks.

Experts: Leif Wells and  Zach Stepek

Listen to this week’s podcast ( mp3). You can also subscribe to the RIA Radio Podcast in iTunes.

Read more from Garth Braithwaite.

Creating a comboBox in Flash Catalyst Beta 2 posted

My latest article on Flash Catalyst has been posted over on O’Reilly’s InsideRIA. This article explores how you can recreate a comboBox component (since one is currently not included in the default component set). I hope you find it helpful.

mobileMAX: Your MAX, Your Schedule, Your Mobile

After many late nights of coding, I am pleased to release my mobileMAX application. This mobile app will allow you to quickly view the conference schedule for not only the official Adobe sessions but all four of the unConferences. Additionally, you will be able to view the schedule of your chosen sessions (assuming you got the MAX scheduler to behave).

Home Screen for the Flash Lite version

iPhone Session Listing

There are four versions available; a Flash Lite 3.1 version (using the Adobe Mobile Packager), a Windows Mobile version (also using AMP), a Flash Lite 2.1 version, and yes an iPhone web version.

To get started, go to http://nuclearpathways.org/clients/max/ (I work on several sites related to the history of the Atomic Age and decided to just use one of those servers for the project). Once you have made an account, log back in to the Adobe MAX scheduler and copy the webcal URL for your schedule. Paste that into the web application and let it process your schedule. Once that is done you can download the mobileMAX app for your device. You don’t need do this, but the app becomes more useful if you do.

For the iPhone version, I created a custom web app. After opening the URL in Safari, click the “Add to Homescreen” button to create a shortcut.

It has been a blast building this and I hope the community finds it helpful. See you at MAX!

Adobe and Zend Announce Collaboration

Today Adobe and Zend entered into a collaboration to bring together the flexibility, productivity and enterprise reliability of PHP and Zend Platform with the user experience benefits of the open source Flex framework. This collaboration will deliver technologies, content and services to make it easy for enterprise developers to build web applications using Flex on the client and PHP on the server.

This is great news for many in the PHP community. I know some probably wanted another PHP framework as Adobe’s first choice, but they have to start somewhere. Hopefully Adobe will be able to work more formally with the other PHP frameworks, to offer a broader choice in solutions.

(Full disclosure: My brother-in-law is the Vice President, Finance & Operations for Zend)

Flash Mobile News

Mark Doherty introduced Flash Lite 4 at FTIC Mobile 2009. Flash Lite 4.0 will support ActionScript 3 and will be a browser plugin – not a standalone player – dedicated for slower, less powerful and memory-constraint devices.

Flash Player 10 will be as well a browser plugin but dedicated for more powerful devices, possibly with hardware graphics acceleration.

Mark also shown Device Central 3 which will support some hardware emulations such as accelerometer and geolocation.

Forum Nokia posted a set of Flash Lite Compontents 2.0.

“This updated resource file includes ten Flash Lite components; Button component, Calendar component, Checkbox component, Contacts component, List component, Media data component, Messaging component, Pop-up component, Radiobutton component, and Scrollbar component. Calendar, Checkbox, Messaging, and Radiobutton components are new in Flash Lite Components v2.0. The components can be used to develop applications to devices supporting Flash Lite 2.0 (and above). The developing environment requirements are Adobe Flash CS3 or CS4. The resource is closely related to Guide to Flash Lite Components. Please give feedback on the components through the Flash Lite Discussion Board.”