It seems lately that there are a lot of UI changes in new Adobe products. The other day I was trying to give someone quick Flash tips, I happened to be using CS4 for the first time and found I had a hard time figuring out how to do something that used to be routine. Same thing happened with Dreamweaver – I used to use it a lot and even have a DW cert (old), but using CS4 for the first time, again I couldn’t find some familiar controls to do something that I would consider simple.

Recently I started working on a project using Flex 4 Gumbo, the Adobe MAX preview version. One of the first things I noticed was that in Flex 4 there is now an option to create either a ‘new folder’ or a ‘new package’, whereas in Flex 3 the only option was to create a ‘new folder’. In both versions there is a little symbol consisting of a square with crosshairs through it. In Flex 3 that used to appear in the corner of some folders while in Flex 4 that is the symbol used to represent some packages and symbols (I’m still not clear on the usage of this symbol).

So what’s the difference between a package and a folder in Gumbo? Flex 3 never made such a distinction, although it seems the option was there in Eclipse. They seem like the same thing to me but there are distinct menu options for it now. No one I’ve asked so far really seems to know. I read in the Gumbo migration doc about the Flex File Browser being replaced with the Flex Package Explorer, and the new option for hierarchical display vs. logical flat view, but still don’t see the significance of a package vs. a folder besides terminology…

The short version: Juan & Andy rock, Addison Wesley SUCKS.

Sometime after MAX ‘08 I decided to get Juan Sanchez’s flex book, Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0. Juan’s background is in User Experience Design (UXD), so it was refreshing to get a flex book with some UXD perspective for a change – so many of the flex community are ex-Java guys, and no offense guys (some of our best Flex developers came from the Java world), but the Java perspective can get a bit, ahem, dry after a while. As far as the content of the book goes, Appendix A, Skinning and Styling Diagrams, by itself is valuable enough to make this book a must-have reference on any flex developer’s bookshelf. Juan mentioned somewhere (his blog?) that a lot of folks were requesting posters to be made of these diagrams and that he was in fact planning to make these available. (What I want to know is, can I get mine framed?)

The level and approach of this book is the epitome of what a lot of us wish the Flex docs from Adobe would be closer to. Having this book about thirty projects ago would really have made our lives easier in quite a few places. Then again, when has there ever been a comprehensive resource for an alpha product? That’s where we found ourselves when we made the transition from developing RIA’s in Flash to developing them in Flex. According to the team handling the Adobe documentation for Flex, they have been short-handed, and understandably so as flex developers are still in incredible demand yet very short supply. At least, that’s what they told me in ‘07; I have to wonder what the status of the situation is after the massive layoffs by Adobe in between MAX events. Regardless, even after having to learn a lot of these things the hard way in Flex, there was still quite a lot of good information in this book even for advanced developers. Animation, easing, skinning – just a few of the topics that are covered in depth.

Juan and Andy also took care to include lots of colorful images in their book, which they make heavy reference and use of. Ahem. The book is printed in BLACK AND WHITE. Not a drop of color anwhere, except for some sickening purple tint on the front cover. Almost every chapter, I found myself grimacing as the authors write, for example, “…in this case, red projects a negative relation…”. Red? Where? It seemed like they had no clue from the publisher that their book was going to be published in B&W, and, after asking Juan about it over Twitter, that was indeed confirmed – they only found out at the last minute. Oh, sure, they offer a free TRIAL subscription to the book on Safari when you buy the hard copy, and supposedly in the e-version on Safari the images are in color. If I wanted to read it online, I wouldn’t have bought the hard copy! I’ve done the Safari trial run before when I got a year subscription for purchasing Komodo for my perl development needs. Honestly the model of paying continuous rent for my books, especially in this case where I’ve already paid for the book in full, just doesn’t jive with me.

At the end of the day, the content of the book makes it a worthwhile buy, despite my feelings of being ripped off by the publisher. But this kind of experience definitely gives good argument for self publishing. I bought the book because of who the authors were – I would have still bought it, at the same price or even more, had they self-published….
With all the media coverage on the downfall of the newspaper industry, and the publishing industry in general, I feel companies like Blurb are well positioned while companies like Addison Wesley are doomed to failure as long as their only concern seems to be maximizing their profit margin whilst ignoring the needs of their consumers.

update: According to sources at Adobe, they’ve been having issues with the MXNA feed aggregator not automatically updating feeds. This update is a test to see if updating the blog entry is enough to force an update to MXNA using the ping URL mechanism…
And, apparently using the ping URL works.

I saw this tweet by crashmedia and was totally blown away by this video demo showing an implementation of FlarToolKit:

The demo is by Robert Cooper, creative director of some company (couldn’t quite make out the name from the video, guys that would have been a great plug for your company even though you had nothing to do with creating it) and the technology is the ‘GE Plugin for Smartgrid.com’ according to him. I wanted to play with this for myself so I went to SmartGrid.com but didn’t find anything about a 3D plugin or the demo, so after a bit of googling around I finally found it here.

(updated to force aggregation on MXNA)

You print out a piece of paper according to the instructions, hold it up to your web cam, and on your screen it becomes an impressive interactive 3D model you can manipulate with the paper in your hand. Very, very cool. Kudos to the team behind this, whoever you are. Apparently they created it with the FlarToolKit. FlarToolKit is an AS3 library based on ARToolKit / NyARToolKit I wish GE would have credited the agency who designed and implemented this, or even let us know if it was an internal team. I don’t think it takes away from their brand identity, rather it would strengthen it by showing they care about the team(s) behind their presence.

A colleague recently sent me a link for a wireframing web application called iPlotz. It appears to be a flex application in beta, and if I’m not mistaken perhaps using a variation of the Edding Black or Flekscribble themes featured on ScaleNine. Only started playing around with it, but it looks like it has potential as an online collaboration tool. Check it out for yourself at iplotz.com.

’twas the Saturday before MAX…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abunur/sets/72157610806462060/show/with/3172400753/

…added the pics of the Customer Appreciation Event at De Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences to the MAX flickr set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abunur/sets/72157610806462060/show/with/3173176162/
Also added pics from our hike up Muir Woods to the set. Parking was not to be had at Muir Woods…had to park on the side of the road several miles away.

Lee Brimelow released the first issue of Flasher Magazine, a video magazine focused on the Flash Platform. Interviews include Ryan Stewart on Flash Catalyst and a ‘making of’ with tips on making your on video tutorials at the end. Check it out online or download it to your iPhone for your commute…

I just posted my photos of the Sneak Peeks session from San Francisco to Flickr from Lightroom 2 using Jeffrey Friedl’s plug-in again (how useful it is!). The sneak peeks (and other general sessions) opened with a video DJ performance by Mike Relm. While the news of the massive layoffs at Adobe after MAX Milan may seem on the surface as bad news, the fact is that the RIA market and the potential for the Flash platform is stronger than ever. I am sure that most of the folks leaving Adobe will have exciting ventures to move on to, while Adobe itself will be leaner, meaner, and more primed to deliver some of the most exciting technology to the world.

I attended my first Adobe MAX in San Francisco last month. As a former Java programmer and current Flex RIA and component developer, these are the sessions I found most useful, in no particular order:

Creating New Components in Flex 3 and Beyond with Deepa Subramaniam: I was afraid I’d be bored in this session, because I thought I had component development pretty much figured out. I was wrong. In the first half of the session, Deepa covered a lot of things I didn’t know about developing components in Flex 3. There was so much new info for me in the first half, I almost wasn’t ready to absorb the second half, which was about developing components in Flex 4. If anything, the material in this session could have been spread across two full sessions with no time wasted.

Understanding the Flash Player Security Model with Deneb Meketa: This one had lots of good info about why the Flash Player permits or restricts various security-sensitive operations.

Building High-Performance Applications with Adobe AIR with Oliver Goldman and Optimizing Adobe AIR for Code Execution, Memory, and Rendering with Sean Christmann: These were back-to-back sessions on Wednesday afternoon and they complemented each other well. The first session dealt more with the process of optimizing an app, and the second session focused more on the code-level details of speeding an app up. Both sessions also had good info for anyone who does good old Flex without AIR, too.

What’s New in Flash Player 10 with Emmy Huang: Lots of Flash Player 10 features were introduced in the conference’s general sessions, but this late Wednesday session gave us a chance to see them again, and in more detail, and ask questions.

Testing Your Flex Applications with Michael Labriola: This session gave a great overview of the different types of testing (unit vs. functional vs. integration) and the tools out there for each type.

Introduction to BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES with Christophe Conraets: This session gave a good overview and helped me clear up a few misconceptions I had about these technologies.

Of course, I only attended a small fraction of the sessions and labs available at MAX – there were so many choices for each time slot. If I had to do it over, though, these were the sessions I wouldn’t dare miss. YMMV!

I used Jeffrey Friedl’s plugin for Adobe Lightroom 2 to export my photos of the MAX Awards to Flickr rather than outputting yet another Lightroom web gallery. While the metadata is included in the images, I don’t have time to link and/or comment each image to the appropriate descriptions which I am sure lots of folks have already written. So hopefully by using flickr not only will they be searchable but also perhaps folks can annotate them. In case anyone is curious these were shot with a Canon 5D with a EF35mm f/1.4 fixed length lens. I should be posting the photos from the Sneak Peeks presentation shortly.