takeaway from MAX: iPhone & Mobile development from Flex and Flash

There were lots of news and sneaks at the Adobe MAX conference this week, and fortunately a lot of it is available in a couple places:
a) Adobe MAX Online Site
b) most of the sessions are now available on Adobe TV

Some items of very specific interest to mobile developers:

-Flash Player 10.1 was announced, which has been greatly optimized for running on mobile devices – no more flash lite, we are talking about the full flash player on mobile phones, and quite a few of the leading mobile phone manufacturers have joined the Open Screen initiative as well as announced phones that are being released with Flash Player 10.1
-Flash CS5 was announced with compiling direct to iPhone native applications. Flash CS5 will be available for public beta later this year on Adobe Labs
-several games are already on iTunes store that were developed with Flash CS5, including these free ones:

  • Little Red Riding Hood, a Post Apocalyptic Adventure (iTunes link), by Difference Games. This is a ‘find what’s different between the two pictures’ game.
  • That Roach Game (iTunes link) by Break Design
  • Adobe Live Cycle Workspace Mobile

    • -Shibuya try and buy service was announced, which, to me, seems like a big, big potential competitor to Apple’s iTunes store, and from all the complaining we’ve heard from the iPhone developer crowd, it seems a LOT more developer friendly than the iTunes model

  • and here’s more on the iPhone development thing from Adobe Labs

    • -this talk goes into depth on using the newly announced Flex mobile framework to develop mobile applications with Flex (yes, for iPhone, too):

    Whew…iPhone development with Adobe Flex…something we have been asking for, dreaming about, and eagerly wishing for (all the while thinking the only way to get native apps on the iPhone would be to code in Objective C)…now it looks like it is a reality. There is a ton more that could be said on this topic, and definitely on Adobe MAX ‘09 in general, but you can dive into the above links for plenty of that first hand. One last thing…the Max ‘09 Flickr group

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    Fuad Kamal, October 8th 2009 | Posted in ActionScript, Adobe, Adobe MAX, Design, Flash, Flash Lite, Flex, RIA, UXD, iPhone, mobile

    Making the transition to Flex 4: The Package Explorer

    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…

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    Fuad Kamal, March 19th 2009 | Posted in Adobe, Adobe MAX, Dreamweaver, Flash, Flex, RIA

    Adobe MAX ‘08 SF Pics

    …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.

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    Fuad Kamal, January 5th 2009 | Posted in Adobe, Adobe MAX

    Adobe MAX ‘08 Sneak Peaks on Flickr

    Adobe MAX '08 Sneak Peeks 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.

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    Fuad Kamal, December 6th 2008 | Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in AIR, Adobe, Adobe MAX, Flash, LightRoom, Photography, Post Production, RIA, Software Architecture

    Best Adobe MAX Sessions

    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!

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    Sean Glasheen, December 1st 2008 | Posted in AIR, ActionScript, Adobe MAX, Flex

    Adobe MAX Awards on Flickr

    MAX AwardsI 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.

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    Fuad Kamal, November 28th 2008 | Posted in AIR, ActionScript, Adobe, Adobe MAX, Flash, Flash Lite, Flex, LightRoom, Photography, Photoshop, Post Production, mobile

    Macromedia Man

    A week since Adobe MAX NA ‘08 closed with its last sessions, and yet I am nowhere near caught up with work, email, leads, etc. I was just doing the post on my pics from the MAX Awards / Sneak Peeks session when, like one of those darkroom scenes in an old detective movie, guess who popped up in the foreground a couple of rows in front of me? Macromedia ManIt was Macromedia Man! I saw this guy from the back everywhere at MAX – across the lunch room, in my sessions, in the hall, at the party…and now in Adobe Lightroom. Who are you, Macromedia Man? Catchy shirt.

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    Fuad Kamal, November 26th 2008 | Posted in Adobe, Adobe MAX, LightRoom, Photography, Post Production

    Pictures of Adobe MAX ‘08 Customer Appreciation Event

    Here’s the slideshow, done in LR2

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    Fuad Kamal, November 20th 2008 | Posted in Adobe, Adobe MAX, LightRoom, Photography

    Unconference Schedules @ MAX

    It would have been nice if we had more information about the unconferences ahead of time, so we could have planned what to attend around our sessions and labs. Nowhere that I know of were the schedules posted except at the unconferences themselves. They should have been online and updated online somewhere where the 5,000 plus MAX attendees could have easily checked them. Anyway here are the schedules (I photographed them yesterday)
    unconference 360 Flex schedule
    unconference SODA schedule

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    Fuad Kamal, November 19th 2008 | Posted in AIR, ActionScript, Adobe, Adobe MAX, Flash, Flex, RIA, Software Architecture

    Durango

    Durango is drag and drop of live widgets from one AIR application to another. A swf doesn’t have to be Durango enabled to enable a mashup. The components autoconnect. Also allows you to edit properties of an application while its running. To Durango enable an AIR application takes only a few lines of code. You can save your drag and dropped mashup as a flex application and then edit it that way. There is a technical session on Durango tomorrow morning at 9:30. It went live on Labs 20 minutes ago.

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    Fuad Kamal, November 18th 2008 | Posted in AIR, ActionScript, Adobe, Adobe MAX, Flex, RIA
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