Adobe Stratus beta launched

Adobe have launched a new communication protocol(RTMFP) and the Adobe Stratus service (beta) to enable the development of applications using the protocol. Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) uses UDP "whose low latency, end-to-end peering capability, security, and scalability make it especially well suited for developing real-time collaboration applications by not only providing superior user experience but also reducing operators' costs". Currently Flash uses Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) which is TCP based. "Stratus is a hosted rendezvous service" that allows Flash applications to sent media "directly between two Flash Player instances without routing through a central relay server".

Links

• Adobe Labs - Stratus
• Stratus service for developing end-to-end applications using RTMFP in Flash Player
• Adobe Stratus - Peer-2-Peer connection service for FP10 & AIR 1.5
  
  

OzFlex May Meeting

The Melbourne based OzFlex User Group will be holding their next meeting on Monday 12th May at the Loop Bar. The night will feature a Adobe AIR presentation and they will be giving away a full copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional. Doors open at 6.30 for a 7 PM start. You can find out more and register at OzFlex.

First AIR Application : hiding the FlexChrome

Yesterday I started work on my first real AIR widget.  I've had a play around with it in the past and enjoyed what I've seen.   But it's not until you have a real project that you start  to really appreciate a new technology.  The widget  I'm building is going to need multiple windows so I spent a fair bit of time getting used to the AIR Window mechanism.  What I learned is that your life is going to be a lot easier if you can use mx:Window to create new AIR windows rather than the NativeWindow.  What I also learned is that getting rid of the Chrome in mx:Window is not as obvious as it first seemed.  The Chrome refers to the framing of the window  (i.e making it look like all the other windows the OS  creates).  It's easy enough to set the SystemChrome to none.  But that just means the window will use the FlexChrome (i.e has the features of the NativeWindow but with styles defined by Adobe).  The FlexChrome is nice but it's not suitable for our design so it has to go.  The problem is that it's not that obvious how you make the FlexChrome go away.  I finally found the answer among the mx:Window styles.  You need to set showFlexChrome to false.  The best way to do this is through CSS.  All of our windows will need custom chrome so I created a style for Window (see below) and the job was done.  It's one of those things that seems obvious now I know but that took me way to long to find.

Window
{
    showFlexChrome:false;
}

AIR PixelPerfect Application Updated

PixelPerfect was one of the first AIR applications that I took a shine to.  It is extremely simple and yet extremely useful.  Essentially it is a rectangle with horizontal and vertical rules.  Adjusting the size of the rectangle allows you to take measurements between objects on your screen.  I used it for ensuring our CSS layouts were as close to the design layouts as humanly possible.  But with the release of the full version of AIR I've been missing PixelPerfect for the last few months.  So it was great news to see the release of an updated version of this handy tool.

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Australian Adobe AIR Camps

Adobe will be running a series of free AIR Camps in Australia and New Zealand from 15 May (Melbourne) until 26th June (Wellington).  These will be all day events focusing developing and deploying AIR applications using Flex, HTML and Javascript.  You can find out more and register at the Adobe Pacific Events site.

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Shu : AIR wrapper divided opinions

Newly released shu allows you to put a wrapper around your AIR applications. Therefore allowing you to interact with the OS in ways that AIR doesn't allow. The idea of a wrapper for the AIR wrapper has stirred up quite a bit of debate among RIA bloggers. The aim of this post is not to add to the debate as to keep track of it. Below is links to posts discussing the pros and cons of shu :

• A wrapper for Adobe's wrapper : Steven Sacks, 03/03/2008
• Thoughts on shu : Eric Dolecki : 03/03/2008
• How AIR should NOT be used : Benjamin Dobler : 03/04/2008
  

Actionscript Reference for RIA Development

Adobe have released the Actionscript Reference for RIA Development.  This free pdf provides an alphabetical reference for all native Actionscipt API's for Flash, AIR and Flex.  The reference is very clearly laid out making it very easy to identify the relevant platform for each API as well as available properties, methods, interfaces and superclass.

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Commonwealth Bank adopts Adobe AIR

The Australian has published an article about an Adobe AIR application that is being developed by the Commonwealth Bank.  The AIR app will allow the Commonwealth Bank's brokers to prepare loan applications offline and then transferring them for approval when a connection is available.  There have been a number of major players overseas who have developed AIR applications (i.e ebay, The New York Times, BBC etc).   But this is the first major Australian company  to announce  this sort of development.  I think it is also very significant that it is for such a security sensitive use.  This will go a long way to quell any client concerns about AIR's reliability and security.

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Australian AIR Camps

Adobe AIR Camps have been announced for Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.  At the moment we only have dates.  But there is a form for registering your interest and the promise of email notification when details are available.  Dates are :

• Thu 27 Mar - Brisbane, Venue To Be Confirmed
• Tue 20 May - Sydney, Venue To Be Confirmed
• Thu 22 May - Melbourne, Venue To Be Confirmed
• Thu 29 May - Auckland, Venue To Be Confirmed

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Melbourne Flex 3/AIR Pre-release event

Added 18/01/08 : Demand for this event has out stripped expectations and the number of registered attendees has exceeded the venues capacity. If you registered prior to this addition then you should receive an invitation confirming you've registration and providing venue details.

Last week I posted regarding the possibility of Danny Dura coming to Melbourne for a Flex 3/AIR Pre-release event. Well it's confirmed now. This will be a great opportunity for the uninitiated to discover what Flex has to offer and for Flex developers to see first hand the many new features of Flex 3. Attendees will go in the draw for a copy of CS3 Web Premium and Flex Builder 3 Professional.

If you'd like to find out more about Danny Dura then take a look at http://www.danieldura.com/.

Event date and details removed; these will be provided in an invitation email.

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Melbourne Flex/AIR Event

There is a good chance that Danny Dura , an Adobe Platform Evangelist from Adobe U.S.A, will be coming to Melbourne for a Flex/AIR presentation on the evening of Tuesday the 29th of January, 2008. This is an excellent opportunity for developers keen to find out more about Flex and AIR and for existing Flex developers to get some pre-release insights into Flex 3. Currently they are requesting expressions of interest to gauge the level of interest for this event. If you are free and interested head on over to TechEvents and register your intent.

Adobe AIR has a new frisbee : I mean logo

Mike Chambers has just released the official Adobe AIR logo on his blog. AIR was originally code named Apollo and that had a logo. Then when the AIR name was released we got a new temporary logo. But here finally is it's official log. Fair enough it's not out of beta yet. Apparently the three bits represent the three technologies that AIR is built on : Flash, HTML, PDF. Despite what the logo seems to suggest putting together those three technologies in AIR doesn't result in a hole. Though perhaps it's not a hole. Perhaps the content is so effective that it becomes invisible. That is surely the goal with RIA's; to make something where the end user is so focussed on the content that they forget about the GUI and the technology.

Beedigital has set up a poll to get the communities initial response to the logo. Cast your vote.

Further speculation on the AIR hole from Alex Bustin over at "The Back Button". He suggests there may be a connection between the hole in the AIR logo and the hole in the new Photoshop logo. Perhaps we should be expecting a new holey Flex logo etc...

Ben Forta is coming to Australia

Just read from Ben Forta's blog that a number of Coldfusion 8 (+ some Flex and AIR stuff) events are planned for Australia in November. Ben Forta is a Coldfusion legend and any opportunity to hear him talk shouldn't be missed. The dates are :

• November 20th: Sydney
• November 21st: Brisbane
• November 22nd: Melbourne
• November 27th: Perth

MAX for Melbourne (& Sydney) : Refresh

Adobe Refresh is kind of like a MAX debrief for us poor suckers who couldn't go. The Melbourne Refresh event will take place at Telstra Dome on 31 October, 1.30 - 5 PM. The Sydney event will be on 30th October at the Sydney Convention Centre, 1.30 - 5 PM.

Over the course of an afternoon, you will hear from the local Adobe team as they present on what’s new and what’s happening in AIR, Flash Professional, Flex, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and ColdFusion.

Register

AIR : User Agent String

While we were checking out the AIR iPhone we got to wondering what the server sees when you browse to a page using mx:HTML. It was simple enough to test by browsing to one of our own websites on the AIR iPhone and then checking out the server log. It was pretty interesting. The user agent string was :

AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3 Apollo/1.0.Beta1

I found it interesting that it referenced both AppleWebKit and Safari. But the most interesting thing is that it still shows Apollo rather than AIR. I tried publishing my own using the Flex Builder 3 Beta and it still shows Apollo. I assume that dark corner got missed in the move from Apollo Alpha to AIR beta. I'll need to go and have a little think about how I want to deal with this in our server log application.

AIR iPhone

Can't help myself but point to this. Joe Johnston from Knoware. Has posted a really neat AIR application that looks like and has some of the functionality of the iPhone. One of the really neat things that AIR makes possible is that the browser will actually browse and search the web. The search field for Google is a bit tricky to select and the search results are impossible to read. But what a great way to demonstrate a gadgets functionality.

Is this part of the future of AIR? In the future will all new gadgets be released with an AIR application to download and try out the gadgets features?

Dreamweaver -> Spry -> AIR

Continuing my CS3 trial I was keen to have a look at how Spry is implimented within Dreamweaver. Further to that I was very interested in the process for creating AIR applications using Dreamweaver. My explorations remain at a very basic level. But it still seems worth a short post.

Firstly, lets look at Dreamweaver and Spry. The most commonly used Spry components now have their own tab on the insert bar. Therefore, to add a new data set you select the "new Spry Data Set" button. In the dialog that appears you paste in the data source and select "get Schema". You then select the node of the schema that contains the data you want to work with. If publishing to the browser the usual security limitations apply. If publishing to AIR they don't. Once a data set is defined you can insert elements from the Bindings panel. They need to go into a region and you'll need to use a repeat if the element repeats. These last two options are on the Spry insert tab. What I found nice was that these components could be added to almost any html element and appeared with code hinting if you start typing "spry".

You can preview this in a browser using F12. But if you install the AIR extension (available from Labs) it can be previewed using AIR (Preview > Preview in Adobe AIR). The AIR preview is so simple it's ridiculous. The publish option for AIR seems hidden by comparison. It's within the Site menu (Site > Package as Adobe AIR Application). For some reason publishing my simple test file to AIR was a real buzz.

Anyway, that's all I have time for. If time allows I hope to do some further tests with Spry and AIR in Dreamweaver.

Apollo : Too Simple

I've just gotten back from webDu and there are too many things to write about. But there is one thing that has been on my mind since day one : Apollo. Oddly enough I feel a bit let down by Apollo. I suppose I imagined myself going to Apollo presentations and having a moment of revelation; as I had with Flex at MXDU, 2005. But I didn't have a moment of revelation at the conference.

Don't get me wrong. Apollo is very exciting. It will have a major impact on how the desktop relates to the web. We will probably need to coin a new buzz word to describe all the Apollo applications that will soon appear. But Apollo doesn't represent a new development paradigm the way Flex did. Apollo changes the world because developing desktop applications just became a whole lot easier, especially when you consider that you will be able to build it once and deploy to Mac, PC and (eventually) Linux.

I guess I feel let down because Apollo is too simple (if you understand Flex). All the interactive potential of Apollo is the interactive potential of Flex. All the web services you can access from Apollo are the web services you can access from Flex. Sure the html component is new (and very exciting). But it is just a new Flex style component as straight forward to use as many of the simpler Flex components. The File class is new. But it is just another Flex style class with a familiar workflow. Of course, Apollo will evolve to include many new features. But they won't be new because we will be familiar with them from existing desktop applications and because using them will be similar to using existing Flex components. Really the hardest part about learning Apollo will be learning Flex. So I feel a bit let down. I was steeling myself for the learning Apollo journey only to find myself in the arrivals lounge collecting my luggage.

Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide

There are posts all over the place about the Apollo Pocket Guide. But I want to offer my perspective now I've had a chance to read the sample chapter. The chapter looks at File operations using Apollo. Specifically it deals with the File and FileStream classes. The book is written in the clear and concise style we have come to expect from the O'Reilly pocket guides. They are straight to the point with clear examples to illustrate the application of the concepts discussed.

What was really exciting was to see some clear examples of how easy it will be to leverage Flex skills into Apollo development. The concepts for File operations were familiar from other languages (in my case PHP) and the methodology was familiar from Flex/AS3. This sample has really whetted my appetite for having a play with the Apollo alpha (which is apparently really close). Bring it on Adobe!