Kevin Hoyt

Monitoring Long-Running Transactions with Flex

Kevin Hoyt — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:22:21 +0000

Ryan Stewart and I are crazy about GPS and geospatial information. We both actually carry a Trackstick device wherever we travel which records our adventures. The data file can be accessed via USB as any number of formats, but it is usually XML-oriented. Of course we’re both building applications that use this data, which is when I ran into the problem of waiting for a server to process several megabytes of XML data. Using Flex I was able to monitor the long-running transaction without unnecessarily delaying the responsiveness of the user interface.
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Ethan Malasky on Security in Adobe AIR

Kevin Hoyt — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:36:03 +0000

Ethan Malasky, from the Adobe AIR engineering team, joined on AIR Tour Europe crew for the first week of the second leg to present on security in Adobe AIR. As an engineer on the AIR team, Ethan can talk about the security model in a way few others can, often giving insight as to why specific decisions were made. Ethan also has access to the source code, and can do fun things like create custom builds with security turned off, and show you the danger of a world without the security model.
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Flex, Masks and Collaboration

Kevin Hoyt — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:02:19 +0000

It is pretty common these days that Flex developers come from traditional programming backgrounds. This means that more and more, many developers leveraging the Flash Player, have never worked with Flash CS3. It also then means that many Flex developers aren’t always familiar with common Flash authoring techniques. Here’s a quick introduction on masking for Flex developers, with some collaboration thrown in for good measure.
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Brightkite Blog Sidebar Widget

Kevin Hoyt — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:38:58 +0000

I’ve been using Twitter for a while, and while I can appreciate the ability to see what my friends are doing, I was never really compelled to use the service. Something just seemed missing. Then I was introduced to Brightkite. What Brightkite adds to Twitter is geographical/geospatial data, and I’m hooked! Within my first week of using the service, I was making new connections with people that were simply in my vicinity. While the Brightkite FAQ says that a blog sidebar is coming, I enjoy the service so much that I just couldn’t wait.
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Data Push with CFTHREAD and LiveCycle DS

Kevin Hoyt — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:11:55 +0000

There’s an old demonstration we used to show for Flex Data Services, now LiveCycle DS, that pushed data from the server to the client to be charted. More modern incarnations of this can still be found as samples included with LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS (Trader Desktop). The original incarnation was great fun to show, but I never really liked the workflow of getting the data feed started and stopped. Old habits die hard, and I used that dislike as an excuse to explore the new CFTHREAD feature of ColdFusion 8 in conjunction with the included LiveCycle DS instance for data push.
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Fitting Native Windows to Content

Kevin Hoyt — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:49:52 +0000

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.
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PlotKit and Flash Media Interactive Server?

Kevin Hoyt — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:26:46 +0000

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.
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JavaScript for Tabular Data with Flash CS3 and AIR

Kevin Hoyt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:26:12 +0000

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.
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Compare and Constrast: Interface Versus Integrated

Kevin Hoyt — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:55:47 +0000

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.
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Simple Zip Viewer with JavaScript and AIR

Kevin Hoyt — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:47:42 +0000

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.
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