Announcing public beta of Flash Builder 4 & Flash Catalyst

Here is the day you have all been waiting for. Flex Builder has got a redesign and power packed with new features and titled Flash Builder 4 and one of the most awaited software from the Adobe stable Flash Catalyst is finally available for the public…

Go ahead and check it out… Here are some links to get you started:

• Flash Builder 4 page on Adobe Labs
• Flash Catalyst on Adobe Labs
• Flash Builder 4 & Flash Catalyst demo Videos
• What’s new in Flex 4 SDK an article by Matt
• Differences in Flex 3 SDK & Flex 4 SDK, an article by Joan

And watch this space for more videos, tutorials, and sneek peaks into Flash Builder 4 & all the new additions to the Flash Platform. From now on, I will tag all those posts as “Flash Platform”…

Announcing Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview – 3rd June 2009

I am sure you have all been hearing about the new and exciting tools that we at Adobe have been building. We will preview many of these new innovations – Adobe Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Catalyst, upcoming versions of LiveCycle and BlazeDS at the “Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview” to be held on 3rd June 2009 at Taj Residency in Bangalore. You can read more about the event by visiting our website.

Entry to this event is by invitation only. If you would like to join us for this event (it is an evening event with dinner:) drop me an email with your name, company, designation and contact number to  rrao (at) adobe (dot) com and I will send you an invite. Seats availabe on a FCFS basis. SOLD OUT! See you on June 3rd

Detecting your Flash Player Version

The Capabilities Class in the flash.system package is perhaps a class that most people do not use. It is a very useful class that contains several useful properties and functions that can provide a world of information. I use the class regularly for finding the screen-resolution for my AIR apps using the screenResolutionX and screenResolutionY properties.

Here’s a small app using the class that detects the Flash Player Version and the player type – Debug or Release. This can be used as a FlashPlayer Version Checker.

Application | Source

Adobe nominated for Developer Awards @ GIDS – Vote

GIDS (Great Indian Developer Summit) is an annual event that happens in India (where else) featuring sessions and workshops by top companies… Me, Harish, Sujit, Anirudh and Ramesh are going to be there along with CF wiz-guys Rakshith & Hemanth for the event. We have several sessions and a workshop lined up from Adobe.

GIDS also has a Developer Awards along with it under many categories… Adobe has several products under various categories… vote for it and let Adobe outshine everyone at the awards.

• Development Environments – Flex Builder
• Web Development – Flash Platform & ColdFusion
• Mobile Development – Device Central
• Frameworks – Flex
• Collaboration Solution – Acrobat Connect
• Security – LiveCycle Rights Management ES

Trivia: CF won the best Web Development Platform last year and this time we have 7 nominations

Vote Here

Adobe riathon – registrations open…

If you are a Flex/ Flash /  AIR developer in India and think you can be the one behind the coolest of all  RIAs, you cannot afford to miss this event! Put on your RIA development shoes, build the coolest app that you can imagine and send it to us on or before 26^th November 2008. If your application catches our attention, you will be invited to a very special event on the 29^th of November at Grand Ashok, Bangalore where the top applications will go on stage for a demo showdown! This is your chance to Flash your design skills, Flex your coding muscles and AIR your demos in front of an elite judge panel & the Adobe community.

The Grand winner / winning team will walk away with a groovy Apple IPhone.

The runners up will take home with them a Sony home theater system.

What’s more, there are loads of IPod Nano’s, shuffles and Adobe branded goodies to be won.

This event also brings to you  an exclusive preview on the new developments in the Adobe Flash Platform. Experience the Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo), Gumbo(code name for the upcoming version of Flex) ,FXG and Flash Player 10.

Register today at http://adoberiathon.eventbrite.com

For more information and contest rules & regulations, please visit http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

riathon – An RIA Hackathon by Adobe India. Coming soon!

<riathon>:: hack . play . win – the Adobe way.

The Flash & Flex community in India are a set of passionate individuals who really love the platform. Adobe is bringing a RIA Hackathon for designers and developers on the Adobe Technology Platform (i.e. Flash, Flex & AIR)

Come join us for a day of fun, take a crack at creating amazing RIAs with your favorite Adobe platform and win fabulous prizes.

If you are interested, leave your details here and we’ll get back to you…

Flash Local Content Updater

[This is an FYI post and is a copy paste from the Adobe Flash Player Downloads page :)]

The Local Content Updater (LCU) is a free command-line utility that can add, remove, or check for local-with-networking privileges, operating on one or many SWFs. This tool allows you to change the security sandbox that the SWF file operates in when it is played as a local file in Flash Player 8 and above. <!–For more information, see the article Security Changes in Flash Player 8. –>

• Download the Macromedia Flash Local Content Updater for Windows (ZIP, 65K)
• Download the Macromedia Flash Local Content Updater for Macintosh (TGZ, 59K)
• Download the Macromedia Flash Local Content Updater for Linux (TGZ, 36K)

C++ source code for the Local Content Updater is also available. Download the source code if you wish to see how the Local Content Updater works, port it to another platform, investigate bugs, integrate it into scripts, etc.

• Download the Macromedia Flash Local Content Updater source for Windows (ZIP, 15K)
• Download the Macromedia Flash Local Content Updater source for Macintosh/Unix (TGZ, 11K)

Checkout the FlashPlayer Security Sandbox details here [http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/05B_Security_04.html#124443]

Silverlight app uses Flash to work :)

I installed google chrome some time back. I would reserve my comments about the browser for a different post, but the my favorite feature is the task manager. Today, someone forwarded me the Windows Ads campaigns page, primarily for the I am a PC campaign (which uses Flash video 🙂 ).

I went to see the Bill Gates-Seinfeld campaign. You probably wont be able to see it as you don’t Silverlight or it is not supported for your browser/OS. Don’t bother installing, it is much easier to catch the videos on youTube (Shoe Circus | New Family).

Anyway, I was on the page and i see this…

Hmm.. Flash Player in a Silverlight page? I went on a right click spree and couldnt find it. Then i check out the embed tag on the video-bar and here’s what i get…

Is MS loading a SWF within Silverlight and conning people?? I decided to check it out. I embed the code into an html and ran it and i get this…

I still don’t know if my initial hypothesis was right, though the pre-loading suggests that the soapbox player is done in Flex. Next step was to check out the DOM to see where Flash was on the page. Thanks to Firebug, this was easy work. Here’s what I found (click the image to see a bigger version)

There is a div in the page called clipboardPlaceHolder. This contains a faceless swf that is used to access the system clipboard to copy the embed code into the system clipboard. I did some googling and found that Silverlight does a sloppy job with Clipboard access. There’s something in Silverlight that can access clipboard, but it only works on IE ;). Here’s the thread from the Silverlight forum.

Yes. This script doesn’t work in non-IE browsers.

Please read the following links if you wonder why it doesn’t work. .

* http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/securityprefs.html
* IE Clipboard Stealing

The best solution that I have so far is “Using Flash clipboard”. If you want to implement this in your Silverlight, you can get the swf file…

So much for the multi-browser claim. It seems to me that they are trying to show as if Silverlight has capabilities that it actually does not… What next?

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

MovieStar released to the public…

Adobe today announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 9 Update 3, previously code named Moviestar. Adobe Flash Player 9 includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities.

The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers. The combination of Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash Media Server 3 (also announced today) enables the delivery of HD quality video to the broadest online audience

• Click here to view the features of Flash Player 9, including an interactive Demo
• Download the player from Adobe Flash Player Download Center (for Win, Mac & Linux)
• Also released today is the beta version of Flash Player 9 Update for Solaris. Get it here