Davey's Webtech Blog

“Adobe Meeting in a Flash”

Literally, this meeting was called with only a few days notice, but as many of our developers in Montreal, a meeting related to Flash / Flash Builder and related Adobe tools is sigh of relief since it has been over a year since we had a meeting.

Lord Alex Leon gave his presentation on an introduction Live Cycle Collaboration Services (LCCS). (He will be presenting this in NY for the Flash and the City conference. So this was a treat.) LCCS enables Flash Builder Developers to create RIA for collaboration. For example, if you are familiar with Adobe Connect, then you can pretty much develop your own Adobe Connect application. Developers can develop multi-user video chats, screen sharing applications, live e-learning applications, multi-player games, etc. He gave a quick demo to create a chat application in only a few lines.

Martin Arvisais gave a quick overview of the new features of Flash Builder 4.5. He recommended this link from the 360 Flex presentation: “What’s new in Flash Builder 4.5″ by Deepa Subramaniam. He also gave a quick demo on Flash Catalyst to Flash Builder skinning. One interesting note that Flash Catalyst is ideal for Web site development. It does not have an interface for mobile development. Unless someone out there in internet land has a tutorial, it would be interesting to see how Catalyst is used for mobile development. Martin also showed off his Flash-enabled gadgets.

Lord Alex has mentioned that we will try to have 5 à 7 (Happy Hour) Flash meetings where we can just casually get together once a month to talk about what’s going on in the Flash / Flex SDK community.

Cheers,

David

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JSON is the acronym “JavaScript Object Notation”. Having perused through a few sites, I have come across this topic many times and have no idea what this was. So here are some links to get started:

Matthew Batchelder gives the case to use JSON above XML. Obviously, JSON is more readable compared to XML. (Going through a large XML file is kind of a headache.) Using JSON avoids parsing XML since it is already recognized as a data structure. Thus avoiding the XML process would give the benefit of speed.

The JSON site includes some Actionscript libraries (in AS1, AS2, and AS3) to implement it in your code.

DJ

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From time to time, I cannot sit in front of a monitor, but like to get to a coffee shop, sip a cup of vanilla-nut flavoured coffee and read the latest in Flash trends and developments through magazine articles. Here is a list that I have come across so far. While I live in Montreal, the UK-based magazines usually arrive on newsstands about a few months after they are published. Hence, subscribing to it is a much better deal, and it arrives within the month of delivery.  (A warning: UK based magazines are twice the price in North America so the price range might be heavy for some. As I come to think of it, the cost of living in Europe is higher proportionally in many areas (e.g. London) to North America. With that and the cost of overseas delivery, I believe the cost to be justified.)

Web designer (UK) This is currently my favourite mag. Maybe it is the most colourful in comparison to the other magazines that I take a look at. It covers Adobe related software in the Web Premium suite, along with some Silverlight, and other web-related technologies. (e.g. WordPress, etc.)

.Net (UK) Not to be confused with Microsoft’s development software (Gosh, I don’t know what to really call it, they got so many flavours of .Net like ASP.Net, C#, VB.Net, etc…) It’s sister magazine Computer Arts is one the avant-garde art design magazines in the market.

Layers (US) This magazine covers everything related to the Adobe Design community. They also have an excellent video tutorial resource site. I picked one magazine covering Lee Brimelow’s tutorial of the image displacement map filter in Flash to imitate water ripples in a canal somewhere in Europe. Pretty neat.

Flex and Flash Developer (EU) A European-based mag published quarterly throughout the year. These articles are geared towards more of the developer than the designer. The complexity also ranges from beginner to advanced programmers.

Flex Authority (Electronic-based) covers Flash development using the Flex Framework. You can find a review of the magazine at Tariq Ahmed’s blog.

Cheers,

DJ

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Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo

I should try to interview my kids and ask what they think about Star Wars. Come to think of it, my wife might say the same thing.

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