The next release of Flex SDK is code-named Hero. It has three main goals:

• Multi-Screen Development: Allow developers to build applications that target the web, desktop or mobile devices using a single unified framework.
• Spark Maturation: Polish and grow the Spark architecture by adding new Spark components and capabilities.
• Large-Application Development: Support developers building large applications by improving fundamental Flex infrastructure pieces.

Previously, Flex for mobile was a separate branch code-named Slider. The rapid increases in performance on smartphone and the optimized performance of Adobe runtimes on these devices, now make it feasible to support Flex framework directly on mobile devices.

You can find out more reading this article on the official Flex team blog.

Last two week I seen two great applications that make use of multi-screen experience capabilities of Flash Platform.

1. Androideroids by Grant Skinner
2. Desktop MP3 Music Player by Mihai Corlan

The first is a prototype multiplayer asteroids game in which each player uses an Android phone as their game controller. The player connects to the game and on the main screen he can see 3rd person view of the whole game while in the same time he can see the 1st person view on their Android phones.

The second one is a mp3 player that can be controlled by any numbers of Android phones. Mihai did the application using AIR and Flex Framework. The communication between the remote controls (AIR apps running on Android phones) and desktop player is done using the peer to peer features of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1.

Demos of the running application can be found on each of the application pages. So take a look at them.

These two applications show the power of the Flash Platform for all types of devices: Computers, TVs, Phones, etc.

Enjoy!

Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe released the 3rd issue of Flasher Magazine and you can watch it on his blog.

Just want to let you know a great quote by Ralph Huawert before letting you see the movie:

Flash is still all about the people who build the content

Enjoy it!

Table of contents

1. FX4 Tour – Flex Camp at Bucharest on 15th of April 2010
2. FX4 Tour – Flex Camp at Bucharest – Registration & Agenda
3. FX4 Tour – Flex Camp Bucharest is Over

The FX4 Tour – Flex Camp Bucharest is over now. It has been a great success: there has been around 60 participants from which 65-70 percent were Flex developers. This is great! The Flex community is growing bigger and stronger.

Three interesting things:

• seen TransformGestureEvent in action
• Slider – Flex Mobile Framework is expected to be available in 2010
• Cairngorm is discontinued although version 3 beta is out since last winter

We had taken a few pictures…

Alexandru Chiculita

Attendance

Corlan speaking...

Dragos Georgita

Our attendance

Problems discussed...

Winner of FB4 license

 

Wednesday, 27th of January, in Bucharest, Mark Anders, the creator of Flash Catalyst will tell us how Flash Catalyst appeared and how it got done. For anyone who doesn’t know about him, Mark Anders is a major contributor for the whole Adobe Flex platform.

The meeting starts at 6 PM but we will start gather and 5:30 PM and it will be mostly an opened discussion. Mark will tell us what’s behind the scenes not only for Flash Catalyst but also for other Flex related products.

For registration go on MyAdobe, http://myadobe.ro/2010/01/21/how-its-made-versiunea-adobe/ (Romanian only).

Hope to see you all there.

In this article from Google Webmaster Tools is presented the way Google manages Rich Media Files and Formats.

Some important points:

• Google can index text in any flash content
• sIFR is indexed as text by Google
• Google is continually working to improve our indexing of Flash files
• Google still have problems accessing the content of other rich media formats such as Silverlight
• Google cannot crawl video files
• iFrames may not be indexed

After reading the article the main idea taken is that Flash has a big advantage against other rich media platforms. That why Flash vs Silverlight is 1-0… or should it be a bigger score?. Silverlight is a direct competitor of Flash platform but as seen in the article at this moment it has a big drawback: it’s content is not indexed.

Google is doing a good job and as far as I remember Google is helped by Adobe in indexing Flash content (Ichabod headless flash player). So Flash platform has everything to gain.

Related content regarding Adobe’s Ichabod:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_ichabod_flash_ajax.php
http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/update-adobes-ichabod-boosts-flash-search-544

If you’ve been following Serge Jesper son Twitter, you may have seen his tweets about a secret project called Quindici. Well… the project now is finalized and public… and is a widget created especially for Adobe MAX Conference.

You can see it bellow or on MAX Conference site.

You can find some interesting facts about Adobe MAX Conference which you can tweet further, you can see video testimonials and record yourself a testimony and post it to Quindici.

The widget is built with Flex Builder 3 using Flex 3 SDK, ColdFusion, Flash Media Server and Photoshop.

Related resources:
http://max.adobe.com/widget/
http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/08/21/project-quindici-maxwidget/
http://corlan.org/2009/08/21/project-quindici-finally-revealed/

Mihai Corlan, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, finalized a “book like” article for PHP developers. I mentioned the “book like” words because the article is long, very long.

The purpose of Mihai’s article is…

I want to share with you some of the things that are specific to Flex in relation to PHP. At the same time I want to introduce Flex by comparing it with PHP whenever this comparison makes sense.

This is what it contains…

1. What is Flex?
   1. Flex: two languages, one framework to bind them
   2. Why you should care about Flex
   3. From thin client to smart/rich client
2. Introduction to the MXML language
   1. Mixing MXML with ActionScript 3
   2. CSS styles
   3. Modifying MXML code at runtime
3. Introduction to the ActionScript 3 language
   1. Separating statements
   2. Data types, variables, constants
   3. Functions and Anonymous functions (closures)
   4. OOP: classes and interfaces
   5. Variable scope
   6. Arrays
   7. Namespaces
   8. Working with XML
   9. Dynamic ActionScript
4. Flex is asynchronous
5. Data binding, metadata tags, and reflection
6. Where are my data, bring it on!
7. User authentication in Flex and PHP projects
8. Working on Flex and PHP projects
   1. Flex SDK
   2. Flex Builder / Flash Builder
   3. Debugging Flex applications
9. What is Adobe AIR?
10. What’s next?
11. Where to go from here

We wish you good reading and patience.

Yesterday, Matt Chotin was writing on the Flex Team blog (see here) that flex developers are needed to take part in research studies.

Adobe is interested how the professionals are using their tools, and especially about the work flow of flex developers. So you need to be a flex developer to qualify for this research study.

Please read the article and take the survey if you are a flex developer.

This is a good thing for us, developers. We will have the possibility to access this good resource free and easy. To quote their press release:

Since September 2009 FFD Magazine becomes online magazine. What is important – it will be also FREE of ANY charges. The only thing you need to do is to sign up to our Newsletter
http://www.ffdmag.com/prt/view/subscribe-to-newslet.html.

If you’re not sure if you like the idea – try out the magazine – 4 back issues to download: http://www.ffdmag.com/prt/view/back-issues.html. Check this out! Let’s build the biggest Flash and Flex Developer’s Community!

This is really good news… Hope to see more of this!