RIA Radio, Live at Adobe MAX – Day 1 KeynoteIwashon

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.

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)

New Book: AdvancED Flash on Devices

Friends of Ed have a new book that is just about to be released entitled, AdvancED Flash on Devices: Mobile Development with Flash Lite and Flash 10. It is written Scott Janousek, Elad Elrom , and Thomas Joos.

More information on the book can be found here. My copy is on order.

Flash Player Multi-Touch: Confirmation from Kevin Lynch

At the Adobe Analyst Summit, Kevin Lynch gave some clarity around Flash on mobile devices which included news that Flash Player for mobile will have support for multi-touch and accelerometer features.

If you’re interested in the Flash Platform and multi-touchDaniel Dura is going to be doing a session at MAX covering some of the advancements in the Flash Platform and multi-touch. It should be an interesting session.

My past two prototypes have been touch-based user interfaces, and would love to have more native support for multi-touch and gestures.

O’Reilly’s InsideRIA Summer of Flash Podcast

Adobe has been busy and this summer we have seen some changes to their Flash Platform and some new tools for working with it. In the new Summer of Flash Podcast the panel (Garth Braithwaite, Stacey Mulcahy,  Zach Stepek, and Leif Wells) will be discussing their experiences with these new tools, and how they will impact RIA developers’ workflow.

In this episode they discussed Flash Catalyst and their experiences working with it. They highlight how it has changed as it came to the public beta and what they are expecting and hoping from the final release.

$10 Thursday

Each Thursday, a selected friends of ED eBook is made available for just $10. The title below can be purchased at the discounted price for a period of 24 hours starting at 12:00am PST—that’s 8:00am in London, England; 1:30pm in Mumbai, India; 7:00pm in Sydney, Australia—wherever you are in the world, be sure to check back every Thursday and see which title is on offer!

Today’s deal is Foundation ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex By Sean McSharry, Steve Webster, Todd Yard. This book covers all the essential techniques from the ground up, allowing you to get up and running quickly and easily. Starting with the fundamentals, you’ll learn about using ActionScript objects, manipulating sound and video, and harnessing the power of regular expressions and XML.

The book concludes with two case studies to consolidate what you’ve learned and to introduce some more advanced techniques. This will give you a good grounding in the new and exciting world of ActionScript 3.0 and show you how it all fits together in larger applications, allowing you to go on and build your own professional sites.

FlashCamp San Francisco Announced

Mike Chambers just posted information on FlashCamp in San Francisco taking place on May 29th. If you are planning on being in the San Francisco area, be sure to register while space is available!…

I am planning on flying up for the event (just need to find my voucher from Virgin America). Hope to see you there!

Migrating to ActionScript 3

As developer who has to switch between developing in ActionScript 2 (for Flash Lite development) and ActionScript 3, I can understand the issues that developers might have in transitioning. To aid in this Adobe has just launched a new section on this issue, including the ActionScript 3 migration cookbook  (beta). Also they tracked down several long-time Adobe Flash users at FITC Amsterdam 2009 to get a real-world perspective on how they approached learning ActionScript 3, what the main challenges were, and whether it was worth it for them to invest the time to learn the language. This and other resources can be found at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/migration.html

PureMVC resources

At last night’s San Diego Flash Users Group meeting, our manager Kyle Tyacke gave a great walk through on PureMVC. 

Here are some additional resources that folks might find helpful.

An introduction to PureMVC for Adobe Flash and Flex in the Adobe Edge newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter you should.

On AdobeTV, there is a short video “Intro to PureMVC“

Hope these are useful.

Adobe Flash Platform ActionScript reference

This ActionScript reference for rich Internet application development provides an alphabetical reference for all native ActionScript APIs for the Adobe Flash platform runtimes: Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR—as well as the Adobe Flex framework APIs. Use this guide both as an API reference and a tool to learn about the ActionScript APIs available within the runtimes. Download the pdf.