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!

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

Table of contents

1. Flex 4 Tour – Bucharest PitStop
2. Registration for Adobe User Group Tour 2009 – Flex 4 Tour – Bucharest Pit Stop Now Available
3. Agenda for Flex 4 Tour – Bucharest Pit Stop
4. Bucharest Pit Stop Passed

Yesterday (10.06.2009) at Adobe Systems Romania offices took place the Adobe User Groups Tour – Bucharest Pit Stop event. The event was a success – great things presented. Even all tickets were sold out long time before the event only 40 persons showed up at the event.

The event was about new beta products that were launched by Adobe at the beginning of this month: Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4 SDK. But you already knew this by reading the event’s agenda.

What we learned…

• Flash Catalyst is a product targeting the designers
• Flash Catalyst integrates with Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks and Flash Builder 4
• Flash Catalyst makes use of some Flash Professional concepts and interactions
• Flex 4 SDK has language modifications but the both Halo and Spark components can be used together
• Separation of behavior from appearance
• Some Halo components will not be present in Spark
• New graphical primitives in Flex 4 SDK which are not derived from UIComponent (MXML Graphics Library)
• New FXG format based in MXML understood by Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, After Effects, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder
• New Flash Text Engine
• 2-way binding
• Advanced CSS
• New states
• Flash Builder 4 Plugin for Eclipse can be installed over a Zend Studio this way having debugging in both Actionscript/Flex and PHP
• New tab in Flash Builder 4 – Data Services
• Drag and drop binding to components
• Lots of new wizards to easy and increase the productivity
• Package explorer
• Getter/setter/event handlers generators
• Network monitor
• New FXP file type used by Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4

… and other things not mentioned here.

The Bucharest Pit Stop wasn’t recorded neither transmitted through Adobe Connect so who was present got home with new info about the Flash Platform and some stuff from Adobe and Fx{r}.

Presentations and source files from the event are available at the end. Still have to tell you that some of the presentations are in Romanian but most of them are in English.

Other articles about the event:
http://groups.adobe.com/posts/bdbc2a5190
http://myadobe.ro/2009/06/10/flex-4-tour-bucharest-pit-stop/

Table of contents

1. Flex 4 Tour – Bucharest PitStop
2. Registration for Adobe User Group Tour 2009 – Flex 4 Tour – Bucharest Pit Stop Now Available
3. Agenda for Flex 4 Tour – Bucharest Pit Stop
4. Bucharest Pit Stop Passed

As we said in the previous article about the Adobe User Group Tour 2009 – Flex 4 Tour – Bucharest Pit Stop the registration is now available. It doesn’t cost anything but we need it because the seats are limited. Please see bellow.

The agenda is not done yet but in the next days we will put it together so you’ll know precisely what subjects will be treated – but keep an eye on the blog and/or the group for new posts regarding the agenda.

What you should know is that for sure it will be focused on the new Flex 4.

Yesterday (19th of May) we’ve been attending the Adobe Developer Day in Bucharest. It took place at Intercontinental Hotel in various places because beside the general session there were other bootcamps taking place in the same time. Attendance was ok at least in the morning although more people could attend to the event. Interesting is that all seats were taken for each bootcamp which shows that the interest in practical work is big.

We have met Ben Forta which showed meaning of RIA concept, then Digby Horner told us how Adobe Romania was created. After this two we dived into more technical stuff on different technologies. This is what we noted:

• new FXG format based on MXML and will be supported by Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks
• new versions of Flash Player, Flash Lite and AIR in 2009
• iPhone market for Flash Player is still complex because of Apple who is keeping monopole on every application built for iPhone
• new video player and/or framework for making video players, named Strobe, will be released by Adobe
• new mobile packaging tool – Adobe Mobile Packager
• mobile devices represents more that half of all electronics in the world
• FMS 3.5 which is final have 2 versions: Interactive and Streaming

We’ve been to all Flex Camps in Bucharest and last year attended to Adobe MAX Milano and I can say that the majority of people that attended yesterday was new, excepting the Adobe Romania team. This is good and bad in the same time. You may guess why good and why bad.

Enjoy the pictures bellow.

Another post about Adobe Developer Day Bucharest on Adobe Groups (this is in Romanian): http://groups.adobe.com/posts/e5c1a5cd81

Adobe Tools and Technologies

Advanced LCSD and BlazeDS bootcamp

Ben Forta speaking about RIAs

Bogdan Ionescu @ Adobe Developers Day

Cornel Creanga about FMS

Electronic devices market

Lots of people in the morning

Mihai Pricope speaking about packaging mobile applications

Stelian and professor Radu Marsanu from ASE

 

Adobe Sneaks Peaks… means things Adobe are researching… and maybe developing in the future.

Three categories were presented and their features

1. Client
   • RTMFP application level multi-cast in Flash Player – Media streaming between Flash Players
   • Adobe Nitro Platform – Building widgets on Flash (Serge Jespers)
   • Codename Durango – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/durango/
2. Services
   • Connecting LiveCycle and Creative Suite – Media Orchestrator – Video production workflow
   • Meer Meer – provides a service that lets you test content against a set of different browsers and presents an image of what the page will look like
   • Server-side Action Script – You can have both client and server-side ActionScript in the same file
3. Tools
   • Content Intelligent Toolkit – built in C++ and AIR, speach to text, speach extracted from video and presented as text, semantic search, faces search
   • Next Generation Image Compositing – visual search, forms extracts and blends, realistic shadow compositing
   • Dreamweaver support for Web Widgets – http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Dreamweaver_Widget_Packager
   • Infinte Images – Semantic coherence, way maker, infinite virtual space (Shai Avidan)

The winners were:

• RTMFP application level multi-cast in Flash Player for Client category
• Server-side Action Script for Services category
• Infinite Images for Tools category

Winner of all is Infinite Images.

Remember… there is no guaranty that any of these awesome features and tools will be available in the future for the users. This is just the research Adobe is doing.

Some pictures bellow…

Aplause-o-metter

Client Finalists

Client Finalists

Connecting LC & CS

Connection LC & CS

Dreamweaver & Widgets

Durango

Durango

Image Compositing

Infinite Images

Infinite Images

Intelligent Toolkit

Meer Meer

Nitro (Serge Jespers)

Nitro Platform

RTMFP App Level

RTMFP App Level

Serge Jespers

Server-side Actionscript

Services Category

Sneak Finalists

Sneak Finalists

Sneaks Finalists

Sneaks Peaks

Tools Category

 

For a Better Community, our blog has started a Fx{r} Community!

Group Fx{r} based on the need for communication among web developers, and try to support members as a means of quickly solving various problems or situations that require a technical answer, endorsed or based on experience from other virtual community and more.

This group is a natural continuity of blog flexer.info and proposed to all members online conferences for the formation of relationships between developers and the development of a nucleus that can provide technical support to all those who need it.

You can join us creating an Adobe user, accessing groups.adobe.com and joining us on this link: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/ab29539ab9.

Table of contents

1. First Day @ Adobe MAX 2008 Europe
2. Tuesday @ Adobe MAX 2008 Europe
3. Wednesday @ Adobe MAX 2008 Europe

Our last day at Max was like this. In the text bellow you can find news and interesting things that we considered that worth mentioning them here.

1. Using the Text Layout Framework (Justin Everett-Church)
   • new text engine parallel with the TextField engine
   • text blocks can contain: text, groups that can contain images
   • inline images with events
   • ligatures
   • for flash developers: download am MXP file that will install it in Flash
   • for flex developer: use Gumbo
   • the root of all is TextFlow
   • TextFlow contains more paragraphs
   • TexfFlow is XML
   • set TextFlow and Bounds, give those to TextLineFactory and paragraph lines will result
   • new SelectionManager and EditManager classes available
2. Breathe AIR into Your Brand (Tom Krcha)
   • sign you applications
   • update framework
   • encrypt locally saved data
   • encrypt database (sqlLite)
3. Flash Security: Why and How (Jim Corbett)
   • Five Rules:
     1. Use least privilege
     2. Validate input
     3. Deploy HTTPS consistent
     4. Prototype early
     5. Keep track of security changes
   • Client-side scripting
   • Server-side scripting
   • Local SWFs
   • Recent changes
     • no access to FileReference from JavaScript
     • HTTP “Content-Disposition: attachment” used to allow only download and not directly play
     • for policy files in subdomains a master policy file on the root is needed
4. Looking ahead to the Next Version of Flex – Spark (Matt Chotin)
   • Presentation made by Ely Greenfield
   • Spark, new code name for Flex platform
   • Designer/Developer workflow
     • separation of code and markup/skin
     • many new classes and components
     • new effects
     • new way of using states: first declare the states only and then in each component is explicitly set in which state it should appear
     • new animation classes
     • new MXML 2009 (xmlns=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009″)
     • new <Declarations/> tag
     • everything seen in Spark is in a Group
     • new object ordering mechanism
   • Framework evolution & Productivity
     • 2 way binding <FxTextInput text=”@{data.firstNmae}” />
     • enhanced CSS: id selector, descendent selector, first two combined
     • data-centric development
5. High performance AIR Applications (Mihai Corlan)
   • Sean Christmann from EffectiveUI (http://www.craftymind.com) held the same session at MAX San Francisco
   • optimizing can be done in: images (big image or lots of small images), sound, video, large datasets, 3D, search, retrieving data from server, response to user input
   • need of metrics: quantifiable, consistent, meaningful
   • to measure memory usage use Activity Monitor (Mac) or Process Explorer (Win)
   • if an application response is under 100 miliseconds it will be percepted by the user as a fast application
   • optimization process: measure -> analyze -> modify (repeat until satisfied)
   • code optimizations: vectors instead of arrays, thin constructors, etc
   • Flash Player works with mp3 files at 44khz bit rate thus if in the application we use mp3 with other bit rate the flash player will re-sample it taking processor and memory
6. Structuring your team to get work done (Neil Middleton)
   • tech lead: quality, performance, reusability, maintainability
   • user experience expert: Photoshop, Flash, Expert in UX, Understand Usability, Understand Flex
   • quality control: unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, user testing
   • business analysis: what we are building
   • management: resources, time/speed, materials/tools, efficiency
   • common issues:
     • poor requirements
     • poor project planning and risk planning
   • explaining SCRUM
   • summary:
     • make sure you have the right people for the job
     • break your work in a manageable chunks
     • don’t block yourself into a corner constraining every aspect
7. Maintaining Security with Adobe AIR (Mihai Corlan)
8. Working with Flex Builder and Zend Studio For Eclipse (Miti Pricope)
   • to install Flex Builder and Zend Studio for Eclipse in order to be able to debug both PHP and Flex:
     • Install Zend Studio first
     • Get Flex Builder for Eclipse plugin and save it on computer
     • in Zend Studio got Install extension and browse to the location of the Eclipse plugin
   • Eclipse know file link which is similar to Unix link but is just on the Eclipse level
   • to have code hinting in a project the libraries must be added to include files paths

For some sessions listed above (Flash Security, Spark, etc) dedicated articles will follow so please keep an eye on us. Photos available bellow.

How &#038; when to use it

Inner insights

Jim Corbett

Mihai Corlan

Miti Pricope

New Text Engine

Security table 1

Security table 2

 

Table of contents

1. First Day @ Adobe MAX 2008 Europe
2. Tuesday @ Adobe MAX 2008 Europe
3. Wednesday @ Adobe MAX 2008 Europe

The second day at Adobe MAX was a full one. We attended at the following sessions and labs:

1. Developer best practices with Flex (James Polanco)
   • FXG exported by Fireworks, Illustrator and Flash Catalyst can be used in Flex

   • FXG based on SVG
   • Flex 4 new skinning architecture
   • Spark (is the official name of Gumbo)
   • Catalyst will integrate version control tools
   • Catalyst is build on Eclipsa platform
   • Flex 4 will have templates
2. Design, Develop, Deploy (Ben Forta, Tim Buntel – Senior product manager, Flex Builder)
   • ecotours

   • Flash – bezier motion paths available
   • Flash – bones mechanics
   • Flash – motion editor
   • Flash – export/publish as AIR
   • Photoshop – landscape aware resize
   • Photoshop – depth of field merge filter
   • Photoshop – 3D objects with texture modifiers
   • Flash Catalyst
   • Flex Builder – integration with CF / ColdFusion perspective
   • Flex Builder – network monitor
   • Flex development for Visual Studio with dot net backend integration
   • Dreamweaver – javascript libraries integrated in (jQuery, etc)
   • Dreamweaver – freeze javascript – stop the javascript execution in midpoint being able to see the running javascript code
   • Adobe & Google – SEO – Virtual Flash Player – FPShell
   • Flash Media Server
   • Flash Player 10 can talk directly to Flash Player 10 without server
3. Flex Workflows with Flash CS4 Professional (Serge Jespers)
   • creating libraries in Flash and importing them in Flex
   • creating libraries in Flex and using them in Flash
   • building Flash components importing them in Flex and adding components in them
   • flash components can be extended as Flex components
4. Building Service Clients with Flex and Adobe AIR
5. Adobe MAX Awards (Michelle Turner, Ted Patrick)
   • Design Category
   • Development
   • Envision
6. Sneaks Peaks (Heidy Wiliams)
   • 36 hours for 1300 km by Hamburg developers
   • Client
   • Services
   • Tools

For Adobe MAX 2008 Europe Awards and Sneak Peaks other two articles will follow. So stay in touch with us.

Adobe Max Awards

Adobe Max Sneaks Peaks

Agent Forta, Agent Buntel

All people at Keynote

Appreciation Event

Keynote intro

Magda, Adobe

Mihai Corlan, Adobe

Miti Pricope, Adobe

Multimedia intro

Sneaks Peaks

Sneaks Peaks Finalists

The agency