During the AIR Europe Tour event in Brussels, Belgium I was approached by an attendee with a technical question. He wanted to drag and drop video content from the desktop (or presumably other source), and drop it into his application. After the drop operation, he wanted to size the native window to fit the specific content size. This might initially sound pretty easy, but it requires accounting for the OS-specific chrome. There are also some usability questions to consider. (more…)
Many of my Adobe AIR demonstrations show the concept of “script briding” between JavaScript and Flash libraries (i.e. SWC files). Using this feature, JavaScript developers can leverage existing work done by Flash developers in areas that were previously not feasible in the browser. It’s important to recognize however, that the Flash Player itself ships with extensive built in functionality that may be useful as well. I wanted to explore this concept a little further, so I put together a little example that leverages PlotKit and Flash Media Server. (more…)
En route between Madrid, Spain and Paris, France, Lee Brimelow and I got into a somewhat philosophical conversation around why the HTML features are important to Flash developers. The obvious standout is in being able to render HTML content in all its glory. Is there anything beyond that though? What about the script-bridge feature? Being able to reach into the HTML DOM and manipulate it from JavaScript? What we came up with was a visually interesting, if not entirely useful example. (more…)
As I was hanging out in Madrid, getting acclimated for the AIR Europe Tour, I started thinking about what I was going to present - specifically around script bridging. In the United States, I just talked about how Flash and HTML are separate, but can be integrated. I though it would be good to actually show how separate they are in the browser, and contrast that with how integrated they are in Adobe AIR. Several hours spent exploring ideas, and a new demonstration was born. (more…)
Among my favorite features of Adobe AIR is the ability to directly invoke ActionScript 3 classes from JavaScript. The out-of-the-box examples of this are the network detection classes which for JavaScript developers comes in the form of a Flash SWF file. I recently completed a Flex-based project that used David Chang’s Zip utility in the form of a SWC library. It seemed like an intriguing example for the JavaScript side of the house, so I picked up jQuery and set to work. (more…)
ColdFusion 8 introduced a number of new and impressive Ajax features. The most notable of which is probably the complete Ajax-based forms generation, which uses Ext 1.1. There are a couple drawbacks to the ColdFusion 8 implementation however, most notably that it is Ext 1.1 when the current release is Ext 2.0, and that you have to have ColdFusion 8. Dan Vega has come to the rescue though with a project he calls cfExt. During a pre-release tour user group stop in Cleveland, OH, I had the chance to connect with Dan and get his thoughts on the project, its origins and its direction. (more…)
As I was preparing for the pre-release user group tour, I was surprised at just how much content around the new Flex 3 features was already available. The Flex engineering teams have been working diligently to be more transparent for the benefit of our customers - and it shows. The main problem I encountered while browsing all these samples, was that they seemed to be put together by different engineers, which meant that each had it’s own style and formatting. I’ve pulled many of these samples together as it relates the AdvancedDataGrid and new charting features, and made them available for viewing and download. (more…)
We put the wraps on the Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 pre-release user group tour last week. I had the privilege of visiting eight different user groups over two weeks. There’s a lot of new stories to tell, not the least of which is the snow storm that slammed into Milwaukee, WI and Lansing, MI. The real story to developers however is the code, so here’s a walkthrough of the presentation to include a few snippets. (more…)
The Flex framework is amazingly capable. Between renderers, editors, skins, styles and containers, you can produce amazing applications. Sometimes however developers get stuck in the framework; they think they need to use the framework for everything. I used to see this a lot with list-based controls, but of late the target for getting stuck seems to be the DateChooser. Guess what though, the results are in, and you don’t have to use the DateChooser to produce a calendar. (more…)
Two very quiet, yet very important announcements came last week for developers using Adobe AIR. The first is a new “Introspector” for AIR developers using Ajax - think Firebug, but for AIR. The second is an update to Aptana Studio (1.1 required) which provides support for AIR Beta 3. Here’s a quick look at both these updates which should prove very beneficial to those with an HTML workflow. (more…)
