Posted by brandonthedeveloper at September 25th, 2009
The new Adobe Cookbooks website is now live.
Adobe Cookbooks is an open program to anyone wanting to contribute code recipes and solutions to common coding tasks and problems associated with Adobe technologies. Recipes from the site are also featured in the O’Reilly Cookbook series. Users can also search and request recipes.
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at July 16th, 2008
On July 17th, FDUG will welcome San Francisco based Adobe Platform Evangelist, Lee Brimelow!
Join us in welcoming Lee as he brings us a “Sneak Peak” at Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10 !! Straight from Adobe Headquarters! We will also have some pizza, drinks, and who knows…. Maybe even some software!!!
Lee Brimelow is a Platform Evangelist with Adobe and an award-winning interactive designer. He has worked in the past for companies such as America Online, Netscape, eBay, Stanford University, and frog design and has a passion for developing new and innovative ways of using the Flash Platform to create rich user experiences. He runs the popular technology blog at theFlashBlog.com, produces the free Flash tutorial resource at gotoAndLearn.com, and has a regular column on Flash in Layers Magazine. Lee is also the author of several titles for Lynda.com including Flash Professional 8 Video Integration and After Effects 7 + Flash 8 Integration.
Time: 6 – 8
Place: Artspace/Plant Zero, 7 E. 3rd Street in South Richmond – click for directions
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 5th, 2008
We (Healthcare Communications LLC.) just launched our new site today. Check it out at http://www.healthcommllc.com.
It’s an XHTML/Flash hybrid with an AIR download to tie the whole thing together. My favorite piece (that I did) is our project viewer. It’s a pretty cool way of grouping and viewing content.
Please kick the tires and let me now what you think. I’d also like to say GREAT JOB to all the members of the Healthcomm team!
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at May 24th, 2008
I downloaded the NYT mac reader yesterday morning and I guess the most impressive thing about the experience was that it installed and ran on the first try. For me, the whole point of using a technology like the Flash Player or Silverlight is to engage the user and take advantage of the limitless ’space’ not normally available to most html based apps. If you are going to offer (basically) static content, there are easier roads to follow. If you are looking for an app to quickly scan the NY Times, this is not the app to use.
Some thoughts:
First, it’s not a true SL standalone app. The FAQ states, “Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application, which uses the Safari toolkit and Silverlight to render the pages.”. I’m not saying that’s bad but I don’t think that counts towards a true SL standalone on the mac.
It’s slow loading. Why would you try to load the whole paper at once? Seems like unnecessary bandwidth usage. It would be a lot faster to load in the section ‘home’ pages and then load articles as they are called by the user. Also, I expect to see the front page from the current date when I open the reader. Not the front page from the last day I looked at the reader.
I think its commendable that the Times devs go to such great lengths to preserve the layout of the paper in digital form. However, I think an option for a more *readerish* view would allow for faster scanning of sections/articles. The fact that you can only resize to specified sizes just reinforces my point about having a more *readerish* view.
Section dropdown menus are too narrow and wrap article titles making them harder to read. They also have no rollover effect to show the user their current choice. But, rolling over section dropdown items do fire rollover effects for the page articles underneath even though they are not the current target.
The navigation is different from the online NYT navigation. I don’t see the point in training users to go from a paper mindset to using the web and then changing the navigation on the desktop. Users have an expectation of how to use an app based on prior knowledge. Changing the navigation based on platform seems like a short road to frustration.
I do realize this is beta software and any or all of my usability comments could be in the process of being fixed right now. Nothing like a million users to find flaws you didn’t think were flaws. ;)
I’m not trying to bash SL here (I am curious as to what part of it is eating 140 megs just sitting there). Most of my issues are from a usability stand point. The Times reader for the mac is not what I would call a Silverlight showcase item but at the same time, it does reaffirm the big move in RIA development to the desktop.
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at January 16th, 2008
Just a reminder that the Flash Developer User Group will be meeting tomorrow night in Richmond, Va (6 pm, ArtSpace/Plant Zero www.artworksrichmond.com in South Richmond).
Lou Barber will be talking about Flash video and I’ll be building on my talk from last time about the capabilities of AIR using SQLite.
Hope to see everyone there. :)
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at December 29th, 2007
Sorry It’s taken a while to get these loaded up. :(
The Richmond Flash Developer User Group meeting on 12/13 was great. With only a weeks notice, we had a decent sized crowd show up to see a couple presentations and get up to speed on the happenings in the Adobe community during the last year.
Lou Barber talked about differences between AS2 > AS3 and I did a little presentation on the capabilities of AIR using Flex by creating a ‘Music Finder’ AIR app.
The ‘Music Finder’ allows users to search by artist connecting to an external service (using HTTPService) and returns a result set in the e4x result format. The user could then stream an .mp3 file from the results and download the .mp3 file using URLLoader, File and FileStream objects.
Music Finder project files and the Music Finder AIR app can be found at http://www.brandonellis.org/media/musicfinder.zip.
The project was created using Flexbuilder 3 Beta 3 and requires Adobe AIR Beta 3.
Thanks again to everyone that showed up on such short notice and we’re looking forward to our next meeting on Thursday, January 17, 2008 from 6 – 8 at Plant Zero/Art Space in south Richmond, Va.
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at December 11th, 2007
Hey Everyone in the Richmond, Virginia area – Lou Barber and I will be hosting the rebirth of the local Flash Development User Group.
“We will be holding a meeting Dec. 13 2007 at ArtWorks (www.artworksrichmond.com) from 6:00 pm to 8:00pm.
FDUG will then resume regular monthly meetings starting in Jan. ‘08!! We have a lot to talk about! Flash CS3, AIR, Flex, Flash Video, Flash Player 9, Flash Lite, and the list goes on….”
Come out and support the Flash/Flex community!
See you there. :)
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at November 23rd, 2007
[Update : this is not a Microsoft sponsored event. Tim Heuer's reply below explains that this is being put together by Microsoft Evangelists]
Wow. I gotta say. I got caught on the announcement of the Adobe On Air Bus Tour I mean Microsoft’s Code Trip. My mouth full of hot coffee went everywhere.
Everyone that went to the On Air Events knows that Adobe does not skimp on a good party. Great schwag, great talks, great food, great beer (and those ice cream cookies from S.F.) .. heck, everything was great. If Microsoft is going to copy that idea you would think they would be trying to ‘one up’ Adobe from the start and show that their event would kick On Air Bus Tour Event ass but there are subtle differences already that lead me to believe ‘The Code Trip’ is gonna blow.
I’ve been to Microsoft developer events and they were pretty lame. Schwag consisted of a giant plastic bag or a ‘man purse’ with a cheap VS.net shirt inside. Listen Microsoft, if Adobe can afford to hand out nice Hanes Beefy Tees, so can you. No one likes cheap schwag. The talks usually were centered around VB programmers in panic mode asking embarrassing questions. And bowls of M & Ms and soda do not make a catered event.
Second, The Code Trip site. Seriously. That’s the site to kick things off? Code Trip folks, if you are going to copy the tour, atleast try to copy the On Air Bus Tour site. BTW, the javascript popUps on the learn-more page throw errors in Firefox 2.0.0.9 on OS X 10.4 and IE7 on XP. I won’t mention how typical it is to see no form validation on submissions from the front page. Yeah, form validation is hard work these days. I know you all are in planning stages but the On Air Bus Tour site had way more stuff coming out of the gate.
Last, what’s with the RV? And (not to nitpick), that’s barely an RV. That looks like a big camper. I mean if you really wanted to copy the On Air Bus Tour bus, you would get a double decker bus. And what’s with sticking with only one section of the U.S.? [Again, not an MS event so it makes more since after talking to Tim Heuer that they stick to one section of the country]
Last thing. This bit of copy from the ‘learn more page’ (to me) really encapsulates that Microsoft wants these events to be like the On Air events – “One RV, bunch of geeks, lots o’ code. Hop on the bus!“. Oh man… what is it? An RV or a bus?
Anyone want to place bets on someone at Microsoft claiming they had the tour idea first? Or, saying “It’s not like Adobe invented the touring idea”. No they didn’t but once again, Microsoft did it after someone else. Coming in second has become a bad habit for Microsoft.
Maybe it’s not even a real Microsoft promo. Maybe it’s just a satirical commentary on Microsoft ‘pulling up the rear’ for the last few years.
Scratch that, if you ‘view-source’, that’s definitely an MS site.
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at November 8th, 2007
An AIR app I’m currently working on started having problems with downloading files but only on Leopard.
Here’s what I figured out – AIR applications that download files on Leopard only work if there are no spaces in the file name or the spaces have been ‘URL Encoded’ ( like: file%20name%20with%20spaces.jpg ).
Here’s my test case to see what I mean – DownloadTest.air
In my test case on XP, Vista and Tiger, either file will download as expected. On Leopard, “hungoversanta.jpg” will download successfully, while “hung over santa.jpg” will not. The tricky part is, a file with the name does get saved but it contains no data.
If you click the ‘Encode URLs’ button in the test case, it will do just that, encode the spaces in the url. Now both files will successfully download.
Here’s the quick work around I used – do a regex replace to encode the url strings like this:
var regex:RegExp = / /g;
var urlString:String = “my file with spaces.jpg”;
urlString = urlString.replace(regex,’%20′);
// returns “my%20file%20with%20spaces.jpg”
I hope this saves others from the few hours I spent trying to figure out this problem. If anyone knows of a ‘URL Encode’ utilty method, please let me know. I know that you can encode using the URLVariables class but that seems to be more geared at querystrings and not so much on entire URL Strings.
I’d love to hear if others have had this problem and if my theory/solution works for you.
Thanks! :)
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at August 24th, 2007
We’re looking for a Flash/Flex UI designer to help with the interface and layout on current and future AIR projects. Freelance or full time. Who are we? A small, six-person strategic marketing and software development company based in Richmond, Va. Not in Richmond? That’s okay ‚– telecommuting is fine. So long as you’ve got the skills: experience designing RIA UIs in Flash or Flex with a detailed knowledge of AS 3 components and their implementations. And you’ve got to be innovative, fun and a good team member, even if working remotely. Gotta sign an NDA. Interested? Send contact information and links to viewable work examples to: brandonthedeveloper AT gmail DOT com.
