I was very happy this year to be so heavily involved in MAX sessions. The attendance at the conference and those sessions was amazing. With a few exceptions, I heard a lot of positive remarks about presenters and their content. I’m already looking forward to next year in San Francisco, CA. In the meantime, here’s a recap of the sessions, and their related content.
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A big congratulations to Alexey Gavrilov over at Metalink, who published his first article on DevX. He does a great job of covering Silverlight, AIR and JavaFX as broadly and as fairly as possible. My only complaint is that he chose Flex as the basis for his AIR application. AIR supports both Flash/Flex and HTML workflow’s, and to that end, I’ve stepped up to provide the missing HTML version of the stopwatch example application used in his article.
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Par for the course this year, Adobe MAX 2007 has some pre-event sessions, which includes a number of day-long hands-on sessions. For a while there was only one session for AIR, and that was for the Flex developer. After talking with Ted Patrick and other MAX organizers, I was able to arrange a similar session, but for the HTML and JavaScript developers!
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The second leg of the on AIR Bus Tour came to a conclusion last week in Boston, MA. Once again, we were blown away by the numbers of HTML/JavaScript developers in attendance (an average of 50% of the audience at each event). Imagine my surprise then, when I found out that there has been an astoundingly low number of HTML/JavaScript entries for the AIR Developer Derby!
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The second leg of three for the on AIR Bus Tour is drawing to a close. The crew is in Philadelphia, PA now, with Boston to go at the end of the week. During this leg of the tour I’ve been showing off some new samples, the most popular of which seems to b applying Flash bitmap filters to HTML elements in AIR. In this walkthrough, I’ll cover some of the techniques I use to blur the line between Flash and HTML.
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The first day of the onAIR Bus Tour was nothing short of an amazing experience. There’s nothing quite like spending the better part of twenty hours with some of the best developers I know, while cruising the West Coast on a bus fit for a rock star. I spent a good portion of that time working on my geocoding application, and found some interesting challenges with Yahoo! Maps in an occasionally connected environment (OCC).
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I’ve got a problem - I’m spending the next two weeks on a bus, packed with more electronics than should be legal, touring the country. Why is this a problem? Well, because while the bus is moving, and via GPS, knows exactly where it’s at, my camera doesn’t. I have a fairly old, yet entirely capable Canon 10D that I’ll be taking on the tour, but it doesn’t have one of those fancy new built-in GPS sensors. In need of a way to add GPS coordinates to the EXIF data in my photos, I came up with a project for the onAIR Bus Tour.
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I don’t know what it is about EXIF information in JPEG files that so interests me, but I find the related specifications irresistibly attractive. There’s something about being able to see “secret” information inside what most just view as an image file. In many cases, among those secrets is an actual JPEG thumbnail of the full-size image. For this exercise, I broke out my Drogan’s decoder ring and set out to extract that thumbnail.
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Jack and Brian over at Ext have been hard at work. They just put to bed Ext 1.2 and if that wasn’t enough, they’ve made good progress on Ext 2.0. While mainlining Red Bull, they’ve even opened up an Ext blog, and the first entry shows off Ext 2.0 support for Adobe AIR! Specifically there’s an Ext.air.MainWindow that puts Ext chrome on your AIR application, and an Ext.data.SqlDB which seamlessly integrates with SQLite regardless of AIR or Google Gears.
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JavaScript is loosely-typed. Duh. If you’re developing JavaScript using Aptana however, the intelligence about your code makes it seem like strongly-typed bliss. It instantly picks up every little variable and function, and it knows all about the JavaScript libraries you include. Last night Aptana dropped a new update that now also knows all about Adobe Spry. Not to be outdone by themselves, this afternoon they also dropped an update to their AIR plug-in. Here’s a quick walk through of some of what’s new in Aptana as it relates to Adobe technologies.
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