SmartLogic Solutions Blog

When we first started developing Flex applications for clients when the time would come to send the SWF over, I would build the application in Flex Builder and send off the generated SWF. This got the job done, but it imposed a few limitations since I was the only Flex developer in our office:

• I was the only one that knew how to compile the application
• If someone else wanted to try to compile the application, they’d have to install Flex Builder

After reading a blog post by Marc Hughes I realized it was time we put in place a more versatile environment for building Flex applications.

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Today Adobe announced the new Acrobat.com which is merging many of the beta services we’ve been playing with for the past months, including Buzzword, Share, and Brio.

“Brio” was the codename for the next generation of Connect and it is now renamed ConnectNow.

Create PDF will allow users to convert any file to a PDF document.

Reader 9 was also announced today which now allows SWF content to be rendered directly within a PDF!

Go signup at Acrobat.com to start playing with these new services.

Found an interesting article in the help section of Google Analytics that describes how to track interactions in Flash.

Registration has opened for Adobe MAX 2008. Check out the registration information page to learn more.

Justin Everett-Church, a member of the Flash Player team, has posted Peer-to-Peer FAQ on his blog. Peer-to-Peer in Flash Player 10 will be achieved through utilizing a future Adobe server technology. I haven’t seen any details of this server technology, but it looks like Adobe has a lot of cool backend services in th works like whatever will power RTMFP, CoCoMo, and Share.

If you want to learn the syntax and usages of the APIs in Flash Player 10 (”Astro”) they can be downloaded from labs.

You can check out the Flash Player 10 page on Adobe Labs to learn how to compile content to target Flash 10 or check out my previous post.

Yesterday Adobe announced a prerelease version of Flasy Player 10 which is code-named “Astro”. Users may install it and ensure their existing Flash content continues to function in Flash Player 10. Some demos of Flash Player 10 content are available as well to see the new features in action.

Some of the exciting new features include:

1. the ability to render filters and effects made using the PixelBender toolkit
2. dynamically manipulating sounds at the ByteArray level
3. new Vector class for strongly-typed, more efficient arrays
4. and plenty others

For users that wish to start compiling their content into Flash Player 10 and taking advantage of things like the new Drawing API, they may compile Flash Player 10 content using a nightly build of the Flex 3 SDK.

Also, Aaron West posted a great collection of links to articles and blogs related to the release.

Since Adobe has opensourced the Flex SDK, the planning stages of Flex 4 (codenamed “Gumbo”) are being publicly documented. I’ve been watching this page since it went up on Adobe’s Open Source site and just noticed a change last night.

A working document has been added to describe the states syntax changes that are currently being drafted. The syntax changes document contains a few examples of how the code would differ from using states in Flex 2/3 and in Flex 4. Some of the new MXML-G tags can be seen in the examples.

OpenFlux is an MVC (Model-view-controller) framework for developing Flex components.

Ben Stucki created the project after being inspired by a presentation Ely Greenfield gave at MAX Barcelona.

Videos of the Flex Roadmap session (courtesy of João Fernandes) are well worth the watch.

If you’re interested in playing with (or just learning more about) OpenFlux head on over and check out the source. I just added a wiki page explaining how to compile OpenFlux into a SWC if you need help getting started.

Happy Fluxing!

If this is the first time you’re reading this then you’ve been reading the wrong blogs, but today Adobe released their first public alpha for AIR on Linux. Additionally, Flex Builder alpha 3 was released today as well. Now I may finally move to Linux as my primary OS!