AIR, Flex, RIA

While working on a project yesterday I needed to convert several vectors (hundreds of them) into reusable Flex 4 visual elements that I could then use in my skins, so lets say if I have vectors of chess pieces that I would like to use in my Skin as follows …

Since I needed these in several skin files I did not want to deal with clunky Path elements which would’ve looked something like this..

So I created a quick AIR application …. read more

3D, RIA

I gave a talk about Augmenting Reality at Devcamp Bangalore this Saturday. In the talk I did some live coding to show how you can use Saqoosha’s FLARToolkit AS3 library to add 3D objects to a webcam video in real-time … here’s a video recording of the application we created during the session … it adds a cow to reality .. read more

AIR, RIA, Titanium

Adobe AIR is a extraordinary platform and the core idea behind AIR i.e enabling web developers to build desktop apps has been revolutionary. But, there are things about AIR that are very limiting as a developer … many real world applications need much more interaction with the desktop than AIR allows, yes Adobe has valid security related reasons not to allow this but once users allow you to install an application on their desktop they expect features that AIR doesn’t allow you to implement … not being able to do trivial things like .. launch a file in its default application or register a global keyboard shortcut is sometimes frustrating and has led to developers putting together things like The Merapi Project .. which quite frankly is a hack to work around the core problem .. inextensibility of AIR as a platform.

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Flex, RIA

I’ve noticed on several occasions that developers starting out with Flex ignore the underlying player and focus their attention on the high level Flex framework … but I feel that it is extremely important to understand Flash Player and its abilities as well to be successful at writing great Flex applications … remember that the only things that you can do with the Flex framework are things that the core Flash Player API allows you to do and nothing more … the Flex framework is just a library making it easier to use that core functionality that the Player provides.

Peter Elst highlighted this presentation on his blog, but I think its important enough to be highlighted again …

Flash Player Internals,
presented by Jim Corbett and Lee Thomason at Adobe MAX.

Flex, RIA

UPDATE: I gave a talk on the Lifecycle of a Component in Flex 4 first at Bangalore Flex User Group and then at FlexMania conference, check out the video recording, slides and code.

Someone recently asked me how to go about understanding the Flex Component Lifecycle .. my usual answer to this is to go read the documentation, then the source of UIComponent and a few basic components like Label, Button etc. .. I also sometimes point people to the Building A Flex Component [PDF] presentation from Ely Greenfield which I’ve found useful in the past … this time though, I was also reminded of some recent presentations I had seen on the subject and found interesting .. so I thought I’ll share them here as well .. read more