Yesterday, 11th of April, Adobe announced Creative Suite 5.5.

Besides all new features and improvements introduced in the new CS5.5, part of them presented in the previous video and some listed bellow, another new thing introduced with Creative Suite 5.5 is the “Pay as you go” subscription. Besides buying the whole product now the products can be rented for shorter periods of times. This helps a lot development teams that work on short term projects. Read more about it here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/cssubscription.html?promoid=INPKB

Now lets get back to what is new in the products…

Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK

• Multiscreen development with Flex 4.5 SDK
• New Spark components in Flex 4.5 SDK
  • Spark DataGrid
  • Spark Form
  • Spark Image and BitmapImage enhancements
• Spark Formatters
• Video and text enhancements in Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK
• Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK compiler improvements

There are too many new features and improvements to list them here. If you need to know more please read: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/introducing-flex45sdk.html

Adobe Flash Builder 4.5

• Developing mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Blackberry Tablet OS
• Accelerated coding for Flex and ActionScript projects
• Improved designer/developer workflow
• Updated platform support
• Improved Performance
• Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP

There are many great changes but the most important I think is the workflow for developing mobile applications. See a video about it bellow:

Please read more about Flash Builder 4.5 here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/introducing-flex45sdk.html

Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5.5

• Resizable applications and components
• Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder workflow (see Understanding new Flash Catalyst CS5.5 and Flash Builder 4.5 workflows)
• Prototyping and wireframing enhancements

I just mentioned a few of them and didn’t go deep into each feature or improvement, but you can read more here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashcatalyst/articles/introducing-flashcatalyst-cs55.html

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5

• CSS3 and HTML5 authoring
• jQuery Mobile integration
• Native mobile apps (for iOS and Android) with PhoneGap

Read more about new features and improvements in Dreamweaver CS5.5 here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/whats-new-dwcs55.html

Other products that are included in Creative Suite got lots of new features and improvements and to see more keep an eye on adobe.com.

Adobe has announced new technologies on Flex Framework. These are:

• Adobe Flash Builder “Burrito”
• Adobe Flash Catalyst “Panini”
• Adobe Flex SDK “Hero”
• Mobile Application Development with Flex and Flash Builder

Each of them have new features, improvements and integration work-flows added and you can test all these new technologies on Adobe Lab. If you like to see some samples go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flexsdk_hero/samples/.

As you already know Adobe MAX is on course and new stuff will be presented to everybody.

Read more about “Burrito” in the Andrew Shorten’s article on Adobe Developer Connection.

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.

Yesterday, Adobe has released AIR 2.0 runtime and can be downloaded at get.adobe.com/air/.

The new things in AIR 2.0 are:

• New Webkit with additional HTML5 and CSS3 support
• Multitouch and gestures
• Enhanced drag-and-drop support
• Enhanced socket support
• Enhanced printer interaction
• DNS resolution
• Local microphone API
• Native document handlers to open document
• Native process APIs
• Native installer
• Socket servers and peer-to-peer networking
• TLS/SSL sockets
• UDP networking support
• Global error handler
• IPv6 network support

I named just a few changes but there are a lot more, so please read the release notes.

If you to know even more read the Adobe AIR Team Blog article about the new AIR 2.0 at http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2010/06/introducing_air_2.html

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

 

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

As you know on 15th of April 2010 a new Flex Camp will take place in Bucharest. Now we have the registration and some agenda modification. Most important change is that it will start around 4:30 PM.

• 16:30 – 17:00 – Registration
• 17:00 – 17:45 – Keynote – Mihai Corlan
• 17:45 – 18:30 – 10 things you didn’t know about Flash Builder 4 – Mihai Corlan
• 18:30 – 19:15 – Flex 4: tips and tricks – Mihai Corlan
• 19:15 – 20:00 – Designer/Developer workflow with Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder – Dragos Dascalita
• 20:00 – Pizza, beer and time to chat

Register using the widget bellow or by going to http://flashbuilder4.eventbrite.com/.

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

On 15th of April 2010 we will have a Flex Camp, related to the recent launch of Flash Builder 4 which will take place at Adobe Systems Romania Offices (Anchor Plaza, Bdul. Timisoara, nr. 26Z, Bucharest). We will start around 5:30 PM and we will end somewhere before the last bus. There will be food and drinks on the house as usual .

The agenda is this:

• Keynote – Mihai Corlan
• 10 things you didn’t know about Flash Builder 4 – Mihai Corlan
• Flex 4 Tips & Tricks – Mihai Corlan
• Designer/Developer workflow with Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder – Dragos Dascalita

There may be more but we will try not to go over the midnight. In a short time we will open the registration so keep an eye on the post.

See you there!

Intelligent Software Solutions developed a touch table for the White House Situation Room.

The application is really a mash-up of technologies including the ISS-developed Web Enabled Temporal Analysis System framework for data access and aggregation combined with a custom touch interface developed by ISS, utilizing the Adobe® Flex® framework, finally sending results to Google™ Earth.

With this we can see that Flex Framework is getting more and more mature.

To find out more read this press release.

Together with the release of Adobe AIR 2.0 beta 2 Adobe has released Flex SDK 3.5a. The big fix is this bug (SDK-24766) – ApplicationUpdaterUI not working on Flex SDK 3.5.

From the announcement on the Official Flex Team Blog we read….

The refreshed build, SDK 3.5a, has only a few files modified in order to fix this issue and this change does not affect the signing and caching of the SDK 3.5 RSLs originally released in December.

We encourage all developers using SDK 3.5 to upgrade their build to SDK 3.5a to continue their development.

The 3.5a Flex SDK can be downloaded from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3.

A new Flex Camp is going to take place in Iasi on 31st October. This is in the north-eastern part of Romania. It will be an interesting conference because I’m sure the Adobe Evangelists will come with lots of new stuff from MAX.

Magda from Adobe Romania has already posted a call for papers. If you want to be a speaker just go ahead and send your topic to Adobe (romania-at-adobe.com). For more details see Magda’s post on myadobe.ro (it is in Romanian).

Registration can be done on http://flexcampiasi.eventbrite.com/ or on http://myadobe.ro/2009/09/24/am-deschis-inscrierile-pentru-flex-camp-iasi/.