Oct 9 2008

Detroit Presentation (Adobe AIR)

Posted by Adobe - AIR in AIR
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Detroit Presentation (Adobe AIR)

October 9, 2008 – 10:57 am by Joey

The presentation on Adobe AIR in Detroit (technically in Canton, MI) went very well. Thanks to Deborah for helping to organize the event for Refresh Detroit and for bringing together her group and the Detroit Area Adobe User Group for the event. For those in attendance I’ve just posted the files for the demo application. You can download them from http://www.themorphicgroup.com/presentations/2008/airflex/download.zip. The code is not commented since I just threw it together and since it is quite simple. It does use standard patterns, and it should be fairly simple to figure out. However, if you have questions you may post them here as comments. Please note that since I’m traveling it might take a little while before I can address your questions. Also, comments on our blog are moderated, and your comments won’t show up until one of the administrators can approve your comment (sometimes takes a while since we have to sift through the rest of the fake comments that get posted.)

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Oct 9 2008

Desired Book: BitmapData, Pixel Bender Toolkit, etc.

Posted by Adobe-ActionScript in ActionScript
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Desired Book: BitmapData, Pixel Bender Toolkit, etc.

Thursday, October 9, 2008 

I would pay a good amount of hard earned cash on the spot if I ever came across a single tome sporting topics on BitmapData, Pixel Bender Toolkit filter authoring, and generally Bitmap manipulation in FP10. It wouldn’t even need to be a single book, but it could be a volume or two. I wouldn’t care. It would save a lot of time with experimentations, googling, etc.

I am swimming through the thick waters of pixel data as of late, and gleaning tips, tricks, methods, libraries, etc. would be most helpful if compiled in an easy to locate and indexed source.

BitmapData has been around for a while now, but with the introduction of .pbj files and many finds about Bitmaps and BitmapData, it might be a nice thing to have come out for those focusing like a laser on doing cool things with the technology.

I often find myself playing with magic numbers in Matrix’s and hope it holds up when dynamic, etc. NOT a good thing.

I’m just sayin’.

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TAGS: ActionScript, actionscript software, adobe actionscript, Adobe Software

Oct 9 2008

Can an AIR application restart itself?

Posted by Adobe - AIR in AIR
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Can an AIR application restart itself?

Short answer: maybe.

Buzzword has an “Unrecoverable error” dialog that we put up if an internal error occurs and we don’t think it’s safe for the app to continue running. We give the user a chance to submit an error report to our servers, and then we let them click a button to restart. In the browser version, this reloads the browser page, which works fine.

In the AIR version, we’re doing it a different way. We make a call to launchApplication() in AIR.swf, followed immediately by a NativeApplication.nativeApplication.exit(). (For more information about how to use AIR.swf, see the AIR 1.1 online documentation.)

There are two serious problems with this approach. The first is that it introduces a race condition between the application exiting and the launchApplication() code looking to see if the app is already running. NativeApplication.exit() is much faster than launchApplication(), so it may be next to impossible to reproduce the race condition, but if your users can make it happen, they will. So occasionally a user will press “Restart,” and the app will quit but not restart.

The second problem is that AIR.swf can only be loaded while your app is online. So if the app crashes during a session in which it has never been online, this approach can’t work.

Neither of these problems is serious enough to avoid using the approach entirely, since the unrecoverable error dialog doesn’t show up that often anyway, and in the worst case scenario, the user will have to restart the application manually — not the end of the world.

Sample code follows. And although it says this on literally every page of my web site, I’ll remind you yet again that all source code appearing on this site is provided “as-is,” and is not warranted by any party for any purpose.

&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding=&quot;utf-8&quot;?&gt;
&lt;mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx=&quot;http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml&quot; layout=&quot;absolute&quot;&gt;
    &lt;mx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
             private function loaded(e:Event) : void
            {
                var airSWF:Object = (e.target as LoaderInfo).content;
                airSWF.launchApplication(&quot;Your AppID here&quot;, &quot;your PubID here&quot;);
                NativeApplication.nativeApplication.exit();
            }
 
            private function onClick(e:MouseEvent) : void
            {
                var ldr:Loader = new Loader;
                var urlReq:URLRequest = new URLRequest(&quot;http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/browserapi/air.swf&quot;);
                ldr.load(urlReq);
                ldr.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loaded);
            }
        ]]>
    </mx:Script&gt;
    <mx:Button label=&quot;Restart&quot; click="{onClick(event)}"/>
</mx:WindowedApplication>

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TAGS: adobe air, Adobe Software, AIR software

Oct 8 2008

Fireworks CS4 - How Tos

Posted by Adobe-fireworks in Fireworks
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Fireworks CS4 How Tos

With the next release of Fireworks CS4, books are starting to be released. Read my review of Jim Babbage’s book: Fireworks CS4 - How Tos.

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fireworkszone.com%2F%3Fp%3D218′;
addthis_title = ‘Fireworks+CS4+-+How+Tos’;
addthis_pub = ”;

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TAGS: adobe fireworks, Adobe Software, Fireworks, fireworks software

Oct 8 2008

Developing Mash Up applications with Adobe AIR and Flex:slides from my Flash on the Beach 08 session

Posted by Adobe - AIR in AIR
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Here are the slides from my presentation that I gave today at Flash on the Beach. The presentation covers the following topics:

Mash up teminologies and data formats
Using some of the AS 3 OS libraries
Creating mash up widgets with AIR
Architecturing a mash up app
Working with AIR APIs
Saving Flicr photos locally
Playing YouTube videos
Storing Twitter timeline messages locally

Developing Mash up applications with Adobe AIR

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fotb fotb08)

Since there was no any feedback survey at FOTB for any session,  I’d love to hear what you thought about my session. It will be useful for my  next presentation.
I’m interesting in knowing whether my speech should have been more technical, showing only the code instead of the theory behind mashup development.
Feel free to send me an email.

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TAGS: adobe air, Adobe Software, AIR software

Oct 8 2008

Protoshare for Collaborative Interactive Wireframes

Posted by Adobe-fireworks in Fireworks
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I’m constantly in conversations with people concerning the perfect tools for different stages during a project. One stage that seems to come up in everyone’s process is creating wireframes. I’ve heard of people using Apple’s Numbers, Fireworks or Balsamiq, which all have there pros and cons.

Tracey Varnell, a fellow Experience Architect at EffectiveUI, pitched me a link to Protoshare, a site for rapidly creating wireframes and collaborating on them with others. Even better, is that there’s interactivity, so people can see various interactions, rather than trying to describe them in text or over the phone. They have a tour on the site covering some of the features.

Other Options

There’s also Axure for wireframes, prototypes and spec creation. The bummer is that it’s PC only, however, there is a prebuilt library of design patterns you can use instead of having rethink the wheel. If someone tries this out, I’d love to hear their thoughts. Check out the tour.

iRise looks like it does a lot of the same stuff and is also a desktop application. There’s a bunch of different editions you can get depending on your needs. Check out the tour.

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on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under design, euicommunity, tools, user experience, workflow.
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TAGS: adobe fireworks, Adobe Software, Fireworks, fireworks software

Oct 8 2008

Konductor goes Beta

Posted by Adobe - AIR in AIR
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« InsideRIA |

Main

October 08, 2008

Konductor goes Beta

One of the things we are working on over at Teknision right now, is an AIR application for the Konductor Platform - we call it Konductor. Chances are, you might just see it at MAX in November…

Beta seats just opened up - 500 people will be allowed to test drive this application and the CMS platform - so hurry over to the Konductor Blog and come and see what we’re so excited about at Teknision.

Posted by bitch at October 8, 2008 04:42 PM

Comments

very interesting ,looking forward to see it soon
good work.

Posted by: business cards at October 8, 2008 05:44 PM

Geolocation API for Adobe AIR?

Posted by Adobe - AIR in AIR
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Mozilla recently announced a new project called Geode - which allows web sites to request your location using JavaScript. I assume this will be built into a future release of Firefox someday, but for now it’s a Plugin.

Geode allows Firefox to support the Geolocation API Specification which is a JavaScript API for getting location information from a hosting device or web browser.

Here’s a Code example:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos) {
  alert( pos.latitude + ", " + pos.longitude );
})

Geode will ask for permission before giving the web site access to your location, here’s a screen shot:

Screen shot of geode firefox plugin for location data

This is all pretty awesome, does Adobe plan on adding Geolocation API support to the Adobe AIR Platform?

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TAGS: adobe air, Adobe Software, AIR software

Oct 8 2008

Can I access Stage from an AS3 Class with no DisplayObject?

Posted by Adobe-ActionScript in ActionScript
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Can I access Stage from an AS3 Class with no DisplayObject?

October 8, 2008

I’m working on a project that requires creating and adding a Movie Clip to the Stage from a class file. Seemed like an easy task, however, referring to the Stage from my class turned out to be trickier than I thought.

I know that, although you can’t refer to Stage directly, it is a property of every DisplayObject named ’stage’ (lower case ’s’). For example, if my class extends Sprite, I can get the Stage width by referring to “stage.width”.

The problem arises when a class does not extend a DisplayObject and a DisplayObject is not passed to your class. The project I’m working on fell into this category. The purpose of my class is simply to create and manage instances of another class. The problem I ran into was that I could not refer to the Stage because my class had no reference to a DisplayObject.

I ended up working around the problem by passing a DisplayObject instance, but out of curiosity, I’d like to know if there is any way around this issue. Is there a way to refer to the Stage from a class file that has no DisplayObject instance?

-rG

Category Posted in as3, flash

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TAGS: ActionScript, actionscript software, adobe actionscript, Adobe Software

Oct 7 2008

Five Steps to an Animated GIF with Fireworks

Posted by Adobe-fireworks in Fireworks
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Five Steps to an Animated GIF with Fireworks

By: Kim Cavanaugh on Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Reader Level:

In my day-to-day job I frequently turn to Fireworks to perform all sorts of graphical editing tasks. When it comes to screen graphics of any kind Fireworks is my tool of choice. So even though I find myself frequently needing images for use in PowerPoint presentations, Flash animations, mockups and wiring diagrams, for use inside content management systems and even titles for video presentations, my tool of choice is always Fireworks.

Such was the case recently when I happened to need an animated GIF for a presentation I was preparing. I wanted something simple but glaringly annoying to be on screen during the duration of my talk to that particular slide, so I needed something that would jump out at the viewers. And while I could have created a custom animation in PowerPoint, why not just crank out a quick animated GIF, especially, as it turns out, you can do it in only 5 steps! Really! I counted.

In this article you’ll learn how to take any object that you draw on the screen and create a custom animated GIF. Think you can’t do it? Follow along and we’ll see.

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TAGS: adobe fireworks, Adobe Software, Fireworks, fireworks software

Detroit Presentation (Adobe AIR)

Detroit Presentation (Adobe AIR)

Desired Book: BitmapData, Pixel Bender Toolkit, etc.

Can an AIR application restart itself?

Can an AIR application restart itself?

Fireworks CS4 - How Tos

Developing Mash Up applications with Adobe AIR and Flex:slides from my Flash on the Beach 08 session