Flex Camp Iasi

The end of this week will find me in Iasi, Romania. I was invited by professor Sabin Buraga to talk to his students about the Web. My friend, Cosmin Varlan, has seized this opportunity and put together a Flex Camp on Saturday morning.

If you can pull yourself out of the bed early enough on Saturday :D we are waiting for you at the one and only one Flash Camp Iasi:

Where: Facultatea de Informatica a Universitatii “Al. I. Cuza” / Sala C309
When: 27th November / 10:00AM
Agenda:
- Keynote (Mihai Corlan) – What’s new at Adobe
- From virtual reality to augmented reality (Sabin Buraga)
- Developing Android Applications with AIR, Flex, and Flash Builder (Mihai Corlan)
- ActionScript Outside the Box (Alexandru Perieteanu)

You can register for the event here. See you there!

Later Update: You can download my slides from here.

November 24, 2010 | Filed Under Conferences | Leave a Comment

Flash Camp Bucharest

December 7, 2010

Flash Camp Bucharest

When: December 7th / 5:00PM

Where: Adobe Bucharest Office – Anchor Plaza 9th floor (near Plaza Romania Mall)

November 24, 2010 | Filed Under Events | Leave a Comment

OSMF Marketplace is live

Though it hasn’t been that long since we launched OSMF (Open Source Media Framework – a framework that helps people create video players) many people and companies are already using it. So we thought it deserved to have its own home in the form of OSMF Marketplace.

This should be your one stop for finding OSMF related materials, including tutorials, code samples, skins, and plug-ins. So what are you waiting for? Go to the OSMF Marketplace and earn some “good karma” by becoming a publisher or learn something new!

November 24, 2010 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

Flash Camp Bucharest 2010

On December 7th, in the Adobe Bucharest office we will host a Flash Camp. And believe me this is one event you don’t want to miss.

This time we chose to have more speakers and at the same time to have sessions that go beyond the basics. Here is the schedule so far (I might add another session):

Keynote – Mihai Corlan / Developer Evangelist / Adobe
Building Android Apps with AIR, Flash Builder, and Flex SDK – Mihai Corlan / Developer Evangelist / Adobe
All about live video streaming – Dragos Dascalita / Computer Scientist / Adobe
Playing with Robotlegs & Swiz – Marius Remus Mate / Computer Scientist / Adobe
Hardware acceleration in Flash Player & Adobe AIR – Alex Chiculita / Computer Scientist / Adobe
Smart systems and the Flash Platform – Miti Pricope / Entrepreneur

You can “meet” some of the speakers if you watch this video (please note it is in Romanian because the event will be in Romanian too):

The event will start at 5 PM and you can register here.

November 23, 2010 | Filed Under Conferences | 2 Comments

Politehnica Event

November 29, 2010

November 16, 2010 | Filed Under Events | Leave a Comment

Flash Camp Iasi and University Event

November 26, 2010

November 27, 2010

I’ll be in Iasi speaking at University and doing a Flash Camp Saturday morning.

November 16, 2010 | Filed Under Events | Leave a Comment

Resolving empty list of devices on MacOS – Android and AIR

My fellow evangelist Tom Krcha wrote a blog post about how to make sure that your Android device is found on Windows when using Flash Builder Burrito in order to deploy your AIR application to the device. So I thought it would be worth sharing another solution I found when working with Burrito and Android devices this time on Mac OS.

What I’m experiencing from time to time on my machine is that Flash Builder doesn’t find my Nexus One although it is hooked to my machine via a USB cable and all the settings are set (USB debugging enabled).

So my solution to this issue is to open a Terminal window and run this command: adb devices. After this I can safely use Burrito to deploy my app on my phone. Of course you need to download the Android SDK in order to have the adb (Android Debug Bridge) tool. But this seems to solve the problem every single time.

November 16, 2010 | Filed Under AIR, Android | Leave a Comment

Adobe AIR beyond RIA

When most people think about Adobe AIR, they think about Rich Internet Applications outside of the browser. And of course they are correct.

In this post I want to highlight another use case I’ve been seeing lately: utility apps built using AIR. I’ll give you just two examples:

Adobe AIR Launchpad. This AIR app helps you to create the project structure of an AIR application for Flash Builder. It provides a nice UI for setting the various options you’d otherwise edit manually in the application XML file. I don’t know how you feel about XML, but I really don’t like to read and write manually XML files.
Package Assistant Pro. This AIR application helps you to create native installers for your AIR app (it supports APK/Android too).

It is pretty safe to include here all the AIR apps that acts as documentation tools, including Tour de Flex or dojoToolbox. I’m aware of other examples, unfortunately they are used behind closed doors and I can’t talk about them.

So, why people are using AIR for this type of application and why should you consider this option too? Here are my arguments:

AIR offers one of the easiest way of building a sophisticated user interface for a desktop application
You can create an application that runs on Windows/Mac/Linux with the same base code (or almost the same; see the fourth argument)
The built-in Update Framework is easy to use and powerful. You can deploy new versions throughout your company quite easily
Starting with AIR 2 you can interact with native processes, so you have a way to expose Java programs through an AIR UI for example. When you use native processes you have to package your app as a native installer, but still you can easily target different OSes with the almost the same code
AIR offers a comprehensive set of APIs to interact with the hosting OS. There are a lot of ActionScript libraries for all sorts of image, docs, video, and sound manipulation. So you don’t have to reinvent the wheel
If you are a web developer and you don’t want to start doing desktop development for a living than AIR is by far your best option. I consider myself a web developer. I did two years of Java desktop development and I can tell you first hand that it is not at all like doing web development. I’m not saying one is better than another, I’m just saying they are different and as a result you need time to acclimate to the new one when transitioning from the other.

Have you ever used AIR for building helper apps or have you at least considered this option?

November 11, 2010 | Filed Under AIR | 3 Comments

Adobe, WebKit, and Digital Publishing

Last week, during the opening session of Adobe MAX 2010, Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch demoed something rather cool and, I believe, totally unexpected: adaptive layouts and higher fidelity with HTML and JavaScript plus a “secret” ingredient. Check this video out! It’s really cool.

So how was all of this put together? Basically we took the WebKit (the engine behind Safari and Chrome) and we extended it by adding new CSS properties (yes you heard that right) to enable these cool features. Why is it so important to have features like this implemented at the browser level? Obviously it’s all about performance. I think you can do anything (or almost anything) you want with JavaScript, but as you start doing complex dynamic layouts on devices like tablets/smartphones you will hit a roadblock by going soley with JavaScript.

You may wonder what’s next. Well the sky is the limit as the old saying goes. Because we really want to work with the WebKit Open Source project and W3C to contribute our work back.

PS 1 I’m extremely proud of this project not only because it helps to improve the web but because the engineers behind this work are friends of mine on the Romanian AIR team. It was inspiring and fun to watch their progress on a daily basis and seeing how well they coped with all the pressure. Not everyone gets his work presented by the Adobe CTO at the biggest Adobe conference in a keynote. Well done my friends :)

PS 2 If you want to see the application in action live, all you have to do is to meet me :D I have it running on my Nexus One.

November 2, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 3 Comments