Davey's Webtech Blog http://blog.geminilearning.com David Jumeau's take on Web-related technologies, the Flash Platform, E-learning, and other cool stuff Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:16:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Changed My Blog Name http://blog.geminilearning.com/2012/01/26/changed-my-blog-name/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2012/01/26/changed-my-blog-name/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:40:20 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=626 Due to the ever-changing culture of the web, it is no long realistic to just focus on the Adobe Flash Platform. At this stage of my professional career, it is important to know the nuances of differing web technologies particularly related to HTML5. Last year, I have seen this paradigm shift of web development emerge from several events:

  • The conferences I attend to no longer just focus on the Flash Platform; it is a migration of web technologies to javascript libraries and HTML5
  • The market increasingly demands in mobile app development and in compliance for HTML5 type of browsers

Although I love working with the Flash Platform, it is important for a developer to know the pros and cons of using any sort of technology and to know which tool is best for the job.

This year, I plan to get my feet wet in certain JavaScript technologies (jQuery, node.js, impact.js [for game development]). Regardless, the Flash Platform is still a viable platform for development particularly in the gaming industry and in 3D application development taking advantage of the Stage3D features of Flash Player 11. Away3D is also another Actionscript library to look forward to since I had attended last year’s Flash in the City conference seeing how the .awd file format renders 3D objects at a phenomenal rate.

In e-learning, I’ve had the chance to create simulation-based courseware, and I am pariticularly happy how things worked out. I hope I can get the time more into widget development. But I expect the CS6 suites to come out in the spring time, so I might have to wait it out.

There is so much to learn, but it is definitely an exciting time to be a developer.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2012/01/26/changed-my-blog-name/feed/ 0 Attending RIA Unleashed Boston http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/10/25/attending-ria-unleashed-boston/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/10/25/attending-ria-unleashed-boston/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:00:36 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=621 I will be attending RIA Unleashed in Boston this Thursday Oct. 27th and Friday Oct 28th. I am considering whether I should go to the Habs / Bruins game with my Habs jersey. If I do, I don’t know whether my wife would see me again.

Anyway, looking forward to attending the sessions on HTML5 gaming with Jesse Freeman. (If I wanted to learn how to program in HTML5, why not in gaming?) as well as building mobile apps with the latest Flex 4.6 SDK with Christophe Coenraets and Holly Schinsky.

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/10/25/attending-ria-unleashed-boston/feed/ 1 Post 2011 Adobe Max: Fireworks CS5 Notes http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/10/08/fireworks-resources/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/10/08/fireworks-resources/#comments Sun, 09 Oct 2011 01:33:17 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=613 Fireworks Product BoxI always had this love for Fireworks since it’s inception along with Dreamweaver back in the Macromedia days. A lot of designers that I have met have a vague idea about its use in web development. To me, I think using Photoshop for web design is plain overkill or bloated software that’s useful generally for print based production. (Of course, this is a false assumption. I find it very interesting in video and 3D development. I happen to also use onOne Software’s Perfect Mask 4 software for background image replacement.) Fireworks has its place particularly for web design, wireframing, Flex skin development, and much more…

Anyway, Fireworks CS5 has been garnering a bit of attention lately from 2011 Adobe Max last week. I recently viewed David Hogue’s “I did not know that you can do that in Fireworks” presentation on Adobe TV. Through his presentation, he gave us a wealth of tips and information on extensions and commands that you can download.

I took note of two sites dedicated for extensions and commands:

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/10/08/fireworks-resources/feed/ 0 Away3D Cookbook Review http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/08/11/away3d-cookbook-review/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/08/11/away3d-cookbook-review/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:20:33 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=606 Away3D 3.6 Cookbook I had the opportunity to get a sneak peak of Michael Ivanov’s book on Away3D 3.6 Cookbook graciously provided to me from Packt publishing. So I thought I would have a go at it to give a sneak peak on what’s covered.

Just a heads up, it is recommended to first go through the basics of using Away3D. A good introduction would be Packt’s Essential Away3D 3.6. Flash magazine’s tutorial series on Away3D is another good reference online to get things started.

Michael goes through several techniques in Away3D development. What is great about his recipes are that he addresses topics that you are not likely to see from basic courses, but the cool stuff, or the things that might be potentially requested by a client. It is a great reference to pick things up right away.

Some of the interesting things that are covered in this book:

  • Away3D materials to view video on demand (VOD) streaming, and usage of the Pixel Bender toolkit.
  • 3D interactivity
  • Special effects (using the Camera, bitmap manipulation)
  • Solutions to depth-sorting, and optimization
  • Tips in using software to improve your workflow (Prefab3D, and importing/loading 3D assets of major 3D software tools [3DsMax, Maya, Blender])
  • Away3D Lite development. This optimized version quadruples the performance compared to the standard engine (with the trade-off of a limited feature set, but ideal for simple projects)

There is much more. But I also like to mention about the appendix on FlashPlayer 11 and the Stage3D API (aka Molehill). Adobe labs just released the beta of Air 3 and for FlashPlayer 11. This would be a good opportunity to test it out.

Now, the question is that should I wait for the next Flash player to come out before tinkering with Away3D? I asked Richard Olsson, the co-developer on the Away3D team at the Flash and the City conference last June and he says that there would be no problem to migrate over to Away3D 4 once you grasp the concepts of 3D development with Away 3D 3.6. So it is a good time to start learning 3D development.

I hope this review was useful. These are exciting times in Flash development, particularly in the area of 3D.

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/08/11/away3d-cookbook-review/feed/ 1 July 6th, 2011 – Montreal Adobe Flash Usergroup / SWFMontreal get together http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/07/07/july-6th-2011-montreal-adobe-flash-usergroup-swfmontreal-get-together/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/07/07/july-6th-2011-montreal-adobe-flash-usergroup-swfmontreal-get-together/#comments Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:06:42 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=604 Just to mention that I had a good time with some Flash / Flex devs at our first 5 @ 7. (Thanks Adobe & LordAlexWorks for the drinks and snacks.) We talked about Flash Catalyst, and heard conversations about micro-architectures (Parsley, Robotlegs) and what we want to do for our next general meeting targeted for the end of August. Our next 5 @ 7 would be held at the beginning of August. To get free tickets, it is best to follow LordAlex‘s Tweets.

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/07/07/july-6th-2011-montreal-adobe-flash-usergroup-swfmontreal-get-together/feed/ 0 SWFMontreal June 1st, 2011 Meeting http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/06/03/swfmontreal-june-2nd-2011-meeting/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/06/03/swfmontreal-june-2nd-2011-meeting/#comments Fri, 03 Jun 2011 05:05:57 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=599 “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

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2011/06/03/swfmontreal-june-2nd-2011-meeting/feed/ 0 Custom AS3 Events – Personal Notes http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/10/20/custom-as3-events-personal-notes/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/10/20/custom-as3-events-personal-notes/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:03:46 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=538 Every time when I consider using custom events I have to scour the web for it. So I am writing my personal notes for it.

Here is a good link about forming your custom event:

http://www.charglerode.com/blog/?p=51

Robert Penner also posts his observations on event handling from the Flash community.

One important aspect is the requirement of overriding the clone method (via Keith Peters.) Ben Clinkinbeard quotes on Robert’s post : “clone() is only called if an event is manually re-dispatched by passing it to dispatchEvent() again. So if a parent catches it and then does dispatchEvent( childEvent ), clone() will be used and required. Bubbling alone does not call clone(), but overriding it is good practice.”

My observation is that I have been getting errors in Flash Builder regarding to the order of parameters. So by adding new arguments after all the default arguments would give me errors. This was resolved when I added my new arguments after the “type” argument. So here is a code snippet.

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package myFilePathToEventClass
{
 
  import flash.events.Event;
 
  public class MyCustomEvent extends Event
  {
    //Add Custom Event ids here
    static const SOMEEVENT:String = "someEvent";
   
    //Add public properties here (whatever data type) ... will be available in the event handler
    public param1:String;
    public param2:Object;
   
    public function MyCustomEvent(type:String,
                param1:String,
                param2:Object,
                bubbles:Boolean = false,
                cancelable:Boolean = true )
    {
      super(type, bubbles, cancelable);
      this.param1 = param1;
      this.param2 = param2;    
    }
   
    override public function clone():Event {
      return new MyCustomEvent(type, param1, param2, bubbles, cancelable);
    }
   
    override public toString():String {
      return formatToString("MyCustomEvent", "type", "param1", "param2", "bubbles", "cancelable");
    }
   
  }
 
}
]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/10/20/custom-as3-events-personal-notes/feed/ 3 360 Flex – Washington DC http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/10/05/360-flex-washington-dc/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/10/05/360-flex-washington-dc/#comments Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:01:25 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=496 On September 19-22nd, I attended 360 Flex, courtesy of InsideRIA and 360 Flex organizers John and Nicole Wilker. (BTW, thanks for providing the ticket :) !) This was the first time attending a Flex-centric conference. Of course, not all of it was Flex centric for there were quite a few people who came from a Flash/AS background. The main take-back from this conference was the awareness of using IOC-based frameworks. Although there are quite a few notably: Mate, Swiz, Parsley, and etc. (Cairngorm was dissed. It was suggested to not even go that way.) Robotlegs seems to stand out for me because of the flexibility to use the framework under the Flash CS5 IDE. Of course, I also have a copy of Flash Builder 4 (I even purchased the Sourcemate extension for Flash Builder), but knowing that I am free to use whatever IDE to implement an IOC-based framework looks very appealing.

Another feeling I got from the speakers and attendees is that Flash Builder is not up to par (e.g. Jesse Warden’s rant) to comparable IDE’s for Java development or MS Visual Studio. However, Flash Builder 4 is taking a step in the right direction about changing the framework to separate visual graphical assets (Spark) from the code. The Hero build is expected to be released around Adobe MAX for Flex Mobile development.

All the sessions are now posted by the conference organizers online.

Here is a rundown of all the sessions I attended:

 

Sunday, Sept. 19

PushButton Engine (Ben Garney): This was a rundown of the PushButton Engine API. It takes care of the hassle of creating games and helps you to focus on the coding the game itself. I spoke to Nate Beck who also contributes to the framework. It was very kind of him to give me an overall view on how it worked. If there was something I would love to do is to create a simple mini-game hands on, but that would require a whole day to do instead of the 4 hours allocated to the session.

 

Monday, Sept. 20

Adobe Keynote (Christian Cantrell): Obviously, mobile is the focus this year. It was a good general overview of what Adobe is doing for mobile development. Of course, it seemed like propaganda to attend Adobe MAX of which, I would be unable (or can’t afford) to do.

Tangents (Doug McCune): Doug McCune is very much alive. (This is an inside joke in the Flex dev community.) Doug’s creative inspiration on what he does when he goes off on a tangent while creating his projects.

Advanced FTE and tiny-TLF (Paul Taylor): This just blew me away. Okay, well text doesn’t really impress people visually. However, as a developer and incorporating dynamic text for my courseware, this presentation was a godsend. One of the main criticisms of Flash involves the lack of support of the flexibility of text rendering. This was resolved with the advent of the Flash 10 player with the “Flash Text Engine” framework, a low level text API. With the release of CS5 Adobe incorporated the Text Layout Framework (TLF) for designers and developers to ease development with the FTE. Of course, after a while, one is bound to encounter some limitations. Paul Taylor created tinyTLF is an alternative TLF to write advanced text layout controls. Please check out his blog.

What’s Getting Under Your Skin (Jeff Tapper): A general overview of using Spark for graphics integration in Flash Builder 4.

IOC Concepts with examples (Jeff Roberts): My favorite session because he introduces the concept of IOC, and Dependency Injection (DI). He could relate to the concept by showing some old BASIC code. It was a trip down memory lane. :)

The Art of Computer Science (Ben Stucki): Ben brought out some reflections during his computing career.

 

Tuesday, Sept. 21

The Invaluable Freelance Flasher (David Ortinau): David’s presentation wasn’t just applicable to being a freelance developer. His talk is very relevant in a company or working for a client. Networking, and NOT BAILING OUT is so ever important.

Re-architecting the Designer-Developer Workflow (Richard Lord): It was impressive to see his use of IOC to create smart components which eased development for other projects. This helped out the designers to know pick out exactly which component was needed for their projects and developers could move on to other more interesting creative projects.

SWFAddress and Google Analytics (Dan Florio): Dan is famous (or infamous?) for working on runpee.com: a site which tells you when it is ideal to leave in the middle of a movie to do your <i>urgent business</i>. He incorporated SWF Address for deeplinking and Google Analytics to monitor his visitors.

Framework Debate – General Session: This was a a presentation which introduced Mate, Swiz, and Robotlegs. No one would say that one framework would be better. (There is no such thing is a perfect framework anyway.)

 

Wednesday, Sept 22nd

Enterprise Actionscript: Writing Clean Code Fast with Swiz 1.0 (Ben Clinkinbeard): By this time, I think I was too tired to grasp the concepts here.

Decrapping Your Flex App (Garth Braithwaite): This wasn’t a best-practices on Flex coding. It was a best-practices on UX session.

Okay, got to go. I will post images and videos of my experience later.

My next and final conference for 2010: RIAUnleashed in Boston, MA.

- David

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/10/05/360-flex-washington-dc/feed/ 0 Oh wow! 64 bit Flash Player on Adobe labs. http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/09/15/oh-wow-64-bit-flash-player-on-adobe-labs/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/09/15/oh-wow-64-bit-flash-player-on-adobe-labs/#comments Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:30:09 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=481 Adobe Flash PlayerRecently, Adobe Labs has released a 64bit Flash player codenamed “Square” that would work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Wow! Before, they were working on the 64-bit Linux player. (For at least I remember, people have been clamouring for a Flash Player for 64 bit applications since Windows XP 64bit. That was a looooooonnnnngggggg time ago.) Thankfully, Adobe seems to take this seriously since my last posting related to the CNet article now that the Flash Player for mobile Android has been released. Another interesting feature is enhanced support with IE9 which “leverages the new GPU support to deliver faster and a more responsive user experience.” (Adobe blogs)

I hope this would be finally released by the time MAX comes around. ;)

DJ

]]> http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/09/15/oh-wow-64-bit-flash-player-on-adobe-labs/feed/ 1 Ottawa Mobile Dev Day and Upcoming Flash/Flex conferences http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/09/10/ottawa-mobile-dev-day-and-upcoming-flashflex-conferences/ http://blog.geminilearning.com/2010/09/10/ottawa-mobile-dev-day-and-upcoming-flashflex-conferences/#comments Fri, 10 Sep 2010 13:35:06 +0000 David Jumeau http://blog.geminilearning.com/?p=476 I happen to attend the free session at the Ottawa Mobile Development day. Got to thank Zee Yang who set this up. The Adobe offices in Ottawa were pretty cool. Here is a brief summary of what I learned:

  • Mobile Projects by Paulo Fierro (Jade Hopper) – Interesting overview of the mobile market.
  • Mobile AIR Development by Julian Dolce (QNX/RIM) – Gave an overview of the AIR for Android API
  • Mobile HTML5 by Mohammad Jangda (Vortex Mobile) – Quick introduction of HTML 5.
  • iPhone Development by Tariq Zaid (SelectStart Studios) – Overview of IOS development (Answered my question on distribution. Turns out that we do not need to put all of our apps on the Apple iTunes store. We can also have network distribution targeted for the vertical market.)
  • Windows Phone 7 by Colin Melia (DreamDigital) – What’s coming up on Windows 7 Phone OS (Ideal for Requires Silverlight / .Net / C# dev developers. As coming from a Flash/Actionscript background, I found it very hard to be convinced to develop for this platform.)

Next conferences on my schedule:

Flex 360 in Washington DC Sept 18-22nd. (Thanks to InsideRIA and Flex360 for the free ticket). This will be my first attendance at this kind of conference. I have been leaning towards Flash Builder lately. All my training in Papervision, and Away3D has been through Flash Builder. It would be the ideal conference to learn about best practices and workflows. Looking forward to it.

RIAUnleashed (Boston, MA) Nov. 11-12. This is a two day conference held at Bentley College. The hands-on sessions look pretty sweet.

Actually, for those who would like to attend both conferences, there is a discount available.

- David

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