Devoxx Talk Posted on Parleys.com: 'The Future of Rich Internet Applications'

The Parleys.com site has just posted the talk that I did at Devoxx in December with Matt Chotin (Flex SDK Product Manager) and James Ward (Flex Evangelist).

Go check out the presentation on the parleys site itself. Parleys is a fantastic Flex application, from the player that you watch the videos in to the publisher that they use to actually create these video/slide/demo-rich presentations. Nice work by Stephan Janssen (founder of Devoxx and Parleys.com) and Benjamin Dobler (developer of the Flex viewer and publisher).

Enjoy...

Video: Smarter Effects in Gumbo

Here's another video from Adobe TV. In this one, I'm showing a couple of applications that demonstrate some of the intelligence that we're building into the new effects in Gumbo (the codename for the next release of Flex). Specifically, these demos show some of the new automatic behavior of the Fade effect and the new "autoReverse" capability of transitions.

As with any Gumbo demos, you should not get too locked into the specific APIs, since we're still very much mid-development. For example, all of the effects currently have an "Fx" prefix in the classnames which should be going away soon. But the point of the applications is to show the functionality and behavior of the effects, which is here to stay.

I should/will post the code and applications soon, but my workspace is a bit torn up at the moment, since I'm in the middle of more cool-o effects features. As soon as that's cleared up, I'll update this post to have the code available. Meanwhile, grab the popcorn, sit back, and enjoy all 6 minutes and 8 seconds of:

AS34J1

JavaWorld has just published Part 1 of a two part article entitled ActionScript for Java Developers (though I prefer the more unparsable name AS34J). It's based on a presentation that James Ward and I did at the Devoxx conference in December, walking through various aspects of similarity and differences between Java and AS3. The point is not to promote one language or platform over the other, but rather to take a closer look at AS3 with Java-tinted glasses. Enjoy...

Really Live Cycle Data Services

I don't usually go in for PR announcements here; I figure that kind of stuff is covered pretty well in other places. But I had to mention this one that I just saw:

Amgen Tour of California Leverages Adobe Flash Platform

Apparently, the race will be streamed live over the web using Flash.

Pretty excellent, but my favorite part is the product name of the Adobe server software that's helping to enable it: "Live Cycle Data Services"

Perfect.

It's like Flash being used for photography, or Flex for applications in the rubber industry, or AIR applications for atmospheric monitoring. I'll be on the lookout for more product name-appropriate partnerships. Brand reinforcement is so critical.

Video: Gumbo Effects

Adobe TV has posted a video where I talk about some of the new effects capabilities in the next release of Flex, codenamed 'Gumbo'.

For example, the effects can now animate arbitrary objects and types (not just UIComponents and Numbers), which enables things like the new FxAnimateColor effect. Also, there is a new 'easing function' interface that makes the built-in easing functions more flexible and also 'easier' for custom implementations. And there's new repetition behavior that makes reversing and looping animations simple.

Work is still ongoing: we're adding more functionality to the effects system constantly. In fact, I'd better get back to that now. Meanwhile, check out the video for a preview of where we're headed:

Video: MAX Presentation on Filthy Rich Flex Clients

Adobe TV has just posted my session Filthy Rich Flex Clients, which was recorded at MAX 2008. It's a screencast with audio, so you get the dual benefits of seeing the slides/demos and not having to watch me deliver them.

It's a pretty dense presentation, in which I cover some Flash platform graphics fundamentals, how effects work in Flex3, how they will work in Gumbo, and (now that I built up the rest of that material) how to do some particular 'Filthy Rich Client' effects in Flex.

Check it out at Adobe TV in larger resolution, or watch it from the comfort of this handy blog post:

In case the text in the video is hard to read, here's the presentation in PDF format for your amusement.

Video: What a Drag

I think I must be living backwards in time, because the second part of a video I shot in December just became available on Adobe TV (before the first part was released). Perhaps they're just trying to build suspense, but in a Jeopardy way, like telling you the answer and then having you wonder what the fascinating question was.

Actually, the video does stand on its own; it is about 'Dynamic Drag and Drop' behavior in Flex, and is not dependent on the previous part. But it does use an application called Reflexion, which is about creating reflections for Flex display objects, and that's the part that you'll hav eto wait for a while to see. (Ooooh, I can feel the tension building...).

Anyway,please enjoy the video. It's another in a series of demos I've been writing around the general topic of giving the user good visual feedback to enable better user experiences. I hope it's not too much of a drag...

By the way, I have not (you may have noticed) posted the source for this yet. I may wait until the first part of the video, which shows the reflection technique, goes live. Or maybe that's just my petty rationalization for not doing it right now because I'm a tad busy working on Flex beta features. But it will show up here eventually.

Update: the first part of this demo is now available; see this later blog entry for that video. Also, I finally got around to posting the source code and the demo; they're also in that later blog entry. So what are you still reading this for? Go!