I love 3D in Flash, but till now I’d never been very happy with the quality of text rendering in my Papervision3D projects. Papervision is a bitmap based 3D engine and because of that not very good at rendering text.

Yesterday, I found VectorVision, which is an extension of Paperviosn3D that enables rendering vectors inside of Papervision3D. The authors Mark Barcinski & Adrien Jeanjean, have ported some of the work Mathieu Badimon did for his vector based 3D engine, Five3D, to enable vector fonts inside of Papervision. And to top that they added support for rendering any SVG in Papervision .. super cool !!

Here’s a quick example I cooked up, notice the crisp font ..
 

• View Example
• View Source of Example
• Check out VectorVision

Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does FlexBuilder generate css styles as “styleName” but suggests auto completions as “style-name” ?

Generated Style

 

Auto-Complete

 

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UPDATE: If you find this behaviour annoying, please vote on this Flash Builder bug
 

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Raghu has announced on his blog that Adobe will give out free Flex Builder licenses to everyone who attends their upcoming Flex Developer event in Bangalore. The dates of the event are still being decided, so if you want to stay informed signup on Raghu’s little flex app … he promises not to spam but trust him at your own risk

I’ve been very vocal in the past about the problems Adobe needs to address to help the Flex community grow in India and one of my biggest concerns has been the problems relating to buying Flex Builder in India. Although, those problems still stand, I appreciate Adobe’s efforts to tackle them in whatever way they can. I hope they’ll enable an online store in India soon, but until then I appreciate Adobe for trying to provide new developers all the means that they need to get started with Flex development.

A special thanks to the Adobe Evangelism team in India, who I know have worked really hard towards making all this possible.

See you all at the event.

This is slightly off topic, but I just couldn’t help but express my disappointment.

Let me start with a quote from an email I just received from [email protected]

Thank you for registering for your Apple iPhone 3GTM with us.
We are delighted to announce that the iPhone 3G will be available in India from August 22, 2008
It will be available in 8GB & 16GB models, priced at Rs 31,000 and Rs 36,100 respectively.

According to today’s rupee-dollar exchange rate that’s $715 for 8GB and $832 for the 16GB model. The email is not very clear if there is a contract involved or not .. contracts are not very common in India so I’m guessing not.

This is not entirely new news since the guys at tech2 had leaked the pricing a few days ago and they were bang on … but it is very disappointing. The iPhone is priced at $199 with an AT&T contract in US …
 

 
I’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone ever since it was first introduced, it is a brilliant piece of technology and I might actually still buy it even at that price, but not many will.

What’s disappointing is that Apple, Vodafone (and maybe Airtel) have missed to notice this extremely exciting opportunity that had the potential of totally changing the Internet usage landscape in India. Just yesterday Tim ‘O Reilly tweeted a link to this excellent writeup on the state of the Indian mobile space .. the article states ..
 

India had only 3.4 million PC broadband subscribers in early 2008, and less than 60 million people are using the stationary internet – that’s 5% of the population. But 300 million people in India have a cell phone. Since April 2008, there are more cell phone users in India than in the United States.

The whole country is making mobile a natural priority. Wherever I went, it was obvious, all the way to overcrowded and old Indian trains. My 14 hour overnight train did not have a restaurant car or a bathroom as we know it. But it did have power plugs built in at each air-conditioned seat, with a metal plate next to it. It didn’t say computer power plug or shaving power plug (which would have been appropriate for these slow-moving overnight trains), but simply and only: mobile charging points.

How can Apple, Vodafone not see the potential here? At the right price and given the ease of using the web on the iPhone, it had the potential of becoming the de facto Internet device for the masses in India.

The US price of $199 (I know it comes with a contract) or Rs. 8634 is an extremely good price for a phone in India .. I mean I’ve seen vegetable vendors and auto-rickshaw drives with more expensive phones than that. If Apple, Vodafone had priced the phone at that price (or a little over it) .. iPhone could totally have become the uber device of the masses in India .. we have a lot of masses you see, so imagine the volume of business for Apple, Vodafone, Airtel, application developers, e-commerce based service providers and many others.

Maybe I’m taking this too hard, maybe they plan to fix this by December when 3G networks arrive, what do you think?

Thomas Jung over at SAP Developer Network has posted the details of a workshop he will be leading along with Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann at the SDN Community Day in Las Vagas.

The workshop is aimed at educating developers about the new UI features in the new version of Web Dynpro (SAP’s UI development technology) available in Netweaver 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1, Thomas also posted the below video that shows a preview of these new features that they will be discussing in the workshop.

All the new enhancements are exiting, but what really got me charged up was the feature called Flash Islands (mentioned around the 6th minute of the video), In summary, Web Dynpro now allows you to embed Flash/Flex components within Web Dynpro Interfaces and there is seamless integration, Web dynpro elements can communicate with Flash and Flash elements can communicate back with Web dynpro … this has 2 very exciting implications …

• Web Dynpro is a closed framework and till now could not have customized controls, now it can have any kind of UI components you can think of with Flex
• More importantly, this can totally change the face of enterprise interfaces, imagine highly interactive engaging UIs, innovative data visualizations, video etc. etc.

So dare I call this Enterprise UI 2.0 .. yeah I know 2.0 is such a cliche these days .. but this stuff is exciting.