Flash for Flex Developers I – Importing artwork from Flash CS3 into Flex

CSS support in Flex is something that lets you tidy up your vanilla UI in a very easy manner…. In Flex2, you could do this with the Flex Style Explorer. When Flex3 happened, we decided to add this into FlexBuilder using the new CSS Design View feature. This lets you do a whole lot of stuff, but what if you want a button that looks like this:

With Flash CS3 we have a method of exporting any artwork, which can then be used in your Flex application. Here are the steps to achieve this

Bangalore FUG Meeting Survey

I just saw a twitter from Mrinal (Bangalore FUG Manager) announcing a survey on surveymonkey that is aimed at making the FUG meetings better & more interesting…

Go ahead and fill it up and help us improve 🙂

While on the topic, Mrinal has arranged for some Microsoft guys to come at the next BFUG meeting and talk about Silverlight. Be there, it is going to be interesting.

Register for the event here

RADVIEW’s Load Testing Add-On for Flex

RADVIEW released a WebLOAD Flex Add-On that extends the reach of their WebLOAD Professional product to the Flex Environment. It enables users to record, edit, parameterize and load test rich internet applications authored in Flex.

With the Add-On you can plan and execute tests simulating the true nature of Flex Applications including the effects of real user load on application services running within the Flex environment.

 Check out the details here…

Here is a view of how this is achieved (the pic is loaded from the radview site, click on it to see a clearer view)

Devices of the Gen Nxt

I am at my home town in Trivandrum now, having a good time with my parents & grandma after so long. A break from the fast paced RIA world to stop me from burning out 🙂 Yesterday, my cousin came to visit us from a small village near Kottayam in Kerala. Though he is computer literate like most young indians, he still looks at a  computer as a necessary evil, nothing more.  As he came in, I was listening to music  on my laptop and doing some work.

I offered him to play with my T61 and showed him some stuff on my system. He observed with a clam but nervous demeanor and I felt like he wanted me to stop. I offered him my laptop to play with and left him with the PC and went out of the room to get a drink.

I come back and I see that the PC was shut down, and he was happily playing with my mobile. A moderate Sony K750I at that. He wanted me to show him how to take pics, listen to music and even browse internet. He advised me to go for one with 3G support. He was immersed in it, long into the eveining until… He saw my iPod. He was instantly drawn to the iPod and handled it with poise as if he was born to play with it. He wanted to chat up on the new ipod Touch and its features.

I was left wondering. What is the device of the Gen NXT. A PC is defenitely not going to be on the top of the list for sure. A mobile? An ipod/iphone like devices? The best answer i could come up was that the Gen NXT devices will be all personal and compact. One that allows people to engage with it all the time uninterruptedly and not just in the confines of the office or home.

Product companies should take notice of this (I think they already are). Times of thrusting things down people’s throats is over. The current generation wants things on-demand, lightning fast, to work across devices and to be engaged in it always…

Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008

It’s summit time again folks ! You might recollect the RIA Leadership Summit that happened when Shantanu was in Bangalore, which saw industry leaders from various IT Companies from across India attended the talk about Adobe’s vision and plans for the Rich Internet Application space.

Since then, the India RIA scene has been more dynamic than ever and there has been an increasing demand for insights into architecture & design principles around RIAs. As an acknowledgment to this Adobe brings “The RIA Architect Summit“.

What is in it for me?:

• Hear Naresh Gupta (MD, Adobe India), David Wadhwani (VP, Platform BU, Adobe) share the exciting future of RIAs using Flex & AIR
• Meet and learn from acclaimed evangelists James Ward & Ben Forta
• Hear about the success stories of leading IT Enterprises who have adopted Flex & AIR.
• Experience RIAs built on Adobe platforms and hear from the teams that built them

Who should attend ? :

Architects, Technical Managers and Strategic Decision Makers

When & Where? :

Date : 03 April ’08

Venue : The Chancery Pavillion, Bangalore

How do I get in?:

Register ASAP at http://adoberiarch.eventbrite.com/

Hurry! Registrations on a First Come First Serve basis…

How do you estimate the number of Flex developers in India?

This is a question that has been troubling me for quite a while.  Yakov & Mrinal have tried to come up with some ways of getting to this, but I was wondering if there are any other ways of doing this?

Shoot your ideas, I am listening…

Comparing Apples to Oranges – The AIR & Silverlight story

With AIR 1.0 out of the door, I have been trying to follow the reactions on the Internet and I have to say that its very exciting to see the response that AIR has received. But, there has also been a lot of confusion among people about what AIR can do and what it cannot. A lot of this is fueled by people like Mozilla & Microsoft sending out confusing signals about AIR. Before I get into the subject of what AIR is and what it is not, I want to say one thing to all who are out there…

Compare Apples to Apples & not to Oranges. AIR and Silverlight are NOT in the same space at all. Silverlight, on the other hand is a product that is trying to do something that Flash has already delivered for the last 10 years.

The best definition that clarifies this was found on the Wikipedia in true Web2.0 style… about AIR, Wiki says:

AIR: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), is a cross-operating system runtime environment for building rich Internet applications, using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application.

The keywords in the above definition are “runtime” & “desktop“. In contrast to this, for Silverlight, wiki says:

Silverlight: Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin that allows web applications to be developed with features like animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback – features that characterize a rich internet application.

Again the definition is built around the keyword “browser plugin“. I hope this contributes to clearing some of the confusion that seems to be reigning in the web space about AIR along with posts like this.  I also sincerely hope that the various foundations, corporations &  individuals would stop comparing AIR with Silverlight.

Flex 2 to Flex 3 Migration…

As Flex 3 is out of the door, a lot of people have been looking out for this particular topic… Here are some links that will let you tackle some of the finer points of migration.

• The “Flex Migration” series by Joan
• An article by Matt Horn from the Adobe Flex Doc team

I will add to this as an when i find info…

index.template.html and its significance in Flex Project Development

I had posted a couple of posts earlier (the contextMenu based fullscreen & the fullScreenVideo) where it required you to edit the html wrapper in which the Flex App SWF is embedded. A lot of people came back to me saying that they still were getting the following error whenever they re-ran the app, even though they had edited the html source …

SecurityError: Error #2152: Full screen mode is not allowed.
at flash.display::Stage/set displayState()

So, I wanted to discuss here, why this error is occurring and also discuss a couple of things about html generation in FlexBuilder.

In FlexBuilder3, if you look at the project tree you will see a folder called “html-template“. This folder contains the following files..

• AC_OETags.js – A JavaScript source file used by client to detect and embed the Flash Player
• playerProductInstall.swf – This implements the Flash Player Express Install mechanism which comes into play if the client does not have the required player
• index.template.html -HTML template that is used by the FlexBuilder to generate the wrapper html for all the application files in your project.

The error discussed in the beginning is caused by the last mentioned file. Whenever FlexBuilder compiles an app, it verifies the signature of the wrapper html to the index.template.html. if there are any variations, it recreates/overwites the html file to match the template.

So, any changes that you might have made on the html is lost whenever you run the application and hence the error. There are various ways of solving this.

1. The easiest way out is to create your own wrapper html and use that instead of the default wrapper generated. You can copy the code and then extend it with your additions on it…
2. The above way is recommended if your project has a lot of applications inside it. But, if your project hosts only one application and other files supporting it, it would be better for you to go ahead and edit your index.template.html itself, which would then reflect in your wrapper file without any hassles.

You can also read this post by Mike Morearty on “ Changing the filenames in Flex Builder html templates” which will provide some more insight into the html-template…