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!

Together with our friend, Mihai Corlan (Adobe Evangelist) we released FxGallery, a Drupal Image Module. Mihai came with the challenge to build an image gallery module for Drupal and we liked it and got involved into the FxGallery project.

FxGallery has 3 main view: Gallery View, Cover Flow View and Single View. The image module can manage 3 kinds of image galleries: Flickr, Picasa and Local Gallery that is saved directly in the Drupal. In Single View there is also the possibility to add comments for the local gallery.

The project is kind of complex but not complex enough to use some Flex frameworks like Cairngorm. In the project we used the following libraries:

• XMLRPCFlash – for communication between the Flex client and the Drupal back end
• ActionScript 3 Flickr Library – for connecting to Flickr
• Picasa ActionScript 3 Library – for connecting to Picasa
• GreenSock Tweening Library – for some animations
• as3corelib – a utility library for ActionScript 3
• DisplayShelf Flex component – for the cover flow view

It was great to work with Mihai and Magda on this project and we hope that we will be able to develop it even further. The things we could do next are:

• Port it to Flex 4
• Add comment feature to Flickr and Picasa type of albums
• Implement deep linking
• Integration with Photoshop.com and other social web applications
• Mouse gestures using Flash Player 10.1

You can view a webinar held by Mihai and you can download the module and the sources from Mihai’s blog. Also a working example can be seen here: http://fxgallery.corlan.org.

I know you’ll want to know more so follow the following links:
http://myadobe.ro/2010/03/11/building-an-image-module-for-drupal/
http://corlan.org/creating-drupal-modules-with-flex/fx-gallery-drupal-module/
http://corlan.org/creating-drupal-modules-with-flex/
http://fxgallery.corlan.org

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.

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/

A few day ago Adobe launched Wave – a desktop notification system for your favorite websites. To understand it better think about it like an aggregator that keeps together all your favorite social networks and websites.

The application is built using Adobe AIR and connects to different services and alerts you when changes are made or new content is available.

Adobe Wave partners are a few but this is just the beginning. As RJ Owen said on his article on InsideRIA content publishers can incorporate Adobe Wave in their products.

Additionally, content publishers can incorporate Adobe Wave into their products by creating a publisher account. Unfortunately this process seems to be only available to providers of corporate content – getting a publisher account requires a company, website, e-mail address with matching domain, and personal verification by an Adobe employee.

Developers and publisher can go here to learn more and create a publisher account.

To end my article Adobe Wave is an aggregating system and a notification system.

Please take a look at the images from within Adobe Wave and follow the links bellow.

Add you websites

Notification example

Signup

 

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wave/
http://www.insideria.com/2009/07/adobe-launches-wave.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wave/developers/
http://corlan.org/2009/07/23/adobe-wave-is-available-on-labs/
http://corlan.org/2008/12/16/adobe-wave-and-you-developers/

Yesterday (21st Jan 2009) Sumo Paint version 1.0 was released. In my opinion this is the best online Photoshop. And it is FREE!

Just some of its features:

1. Layers with blending mode
2. Layer effects
3. Shape tools
4. Brushes
5. Clone stamp
6. Filters
7. Symetry tool
8. Gravity

More about features: http://sumopaint.com/web/#/features/

A new video with Sumo Paint in action can be viewed bellow:

You can access the application here: http://www.sumopaint.com/app
Sumo Paint website: http://www.sumopaint.com/web/

In a previous article I presented Pixlr Image Editor. Now I found SumoPaint and is much better than Pixlr. Is faster, has more tools and the interface is much nicer.

Please enjoy it because is FREE. You can create an account if you want to save your work on the Sumo server but SumoPaint can be used without an account, just being Guest. You can save you work as JPG file to you machine, it has layers, filters, adjusments, brushes, etc… almost everything Photoshop has.

It was launched on 18.06.2008, had 6 updates and at this moment, the last version is 0.40.

Click here to enter directly in the editor or go here on the official web site.

Flower

Opening from server

Saving on Sumo server

 

For Pixlr I said “WOW! Amazing”… for this I say it twice.

HTML Editor in Flex? Can we say that squarespace has managed to do that? Although isn’t a complex one it is a start. What is next? We can think that in the future Dreamweaver may become a web RIA. Or some other HTML Editors will be created using Flex and AIR.

For some developers this sounds a little bit disturbing when we think that some may loose their jobs and businesses, but for the hundreds of millions of people this is awesome because they will be able to create their websites on the spot without worrying about HTML 4, XHTML, FTP and all other technologies involved there.

Squarespace can be tried out free for 14 days if the video clip is not enough for you.

Today I found this three sites filled with flex resources:
- DeGraFa (Declarative Graphics Framework)
- ScaleNine
- Flexgeek

DeGraFa is a framework made to do a much easier job when working with shapes, events, skinning, etc. ScaleNine is a collection of themes to use in flex applications and FlexGeek is a blog with very useful examples of how to use flex components. This kind of resources are very helpful when building RIAs.

If you have more resources like the ones here we encourage you to share with us this way helping building a better flex community.

Big RIAs need good interaction with the user. In big applications (like Buzzword, etc) with intensive text processing is a must to have implemented a spell checker.

A very good spell checker that is built in Actionscript 3 is Spelling Plus Library (SPL) by gSkinner – the license is here and can be bought from here.

It can be used with both Flex and Flash but needs Actionscript 3 as it is written in AS3.

Buzzword implements this spell checker and it does the job very well – here is an article about the SPL implemented in Buzzword.

If you used this library in your projects please let us know how the implementation was.