Martyn Jones

All Aboard the Good Ship Adobe

After a disappointing show from Adobe at Flash on the Beach, it was welcoming to see a run of good news for the future of the Flash platform. The positives ranged from increased business opportunities, and flagging competitors through to promising future tech announcements to get excited about.

September 9th: Apple relax licensing agreement
Apple changed their Developer Agreement, relaxing requirements of 3rd Party Developer Tools. It is once again possible to develop Flash apps for iPhone and iPad using Adobe’s conversion tools.
Adobe shares jump 12%

Oct 2nd: Silverlight no longer aimed at competing with Flash
Microsoft seems to have significantly shifted its strategy regarding Silverlight. Microsoft never looked like they threw their weight behind Silverlight and to date, the only Microsoft web technology that required Silverlight was Bing’s 3D Map Control. Bing Maps, product manager Brian Hendricks commented:

“Because there’s been confusion on this announcement, we want to make clear that this announcement was around the end of life of the 3D Map control. 3D Maps is not based on Silverlight and this announcement has nothing to do with our commitment to Silverlight. We continue to invest in Silverlight functionality, which delivers the richest possible experience for our users – specifically through our map apps that run in the browser on the PC and the Silverlight map control for Windows Phone 7 applications.”

Oct 6th: W3C doesn’t endorse HTML5
Despite support from big vendors like Microsoft, Google and Apple, the W3C stressed that HTML5 is not yet a standard and might not be for a number of years

Oct 7th: Adobe Acquisition Rumours
After rumours that Adobe could become a target for acquisition by Microsoft Corp., Adobe shares jump 17%
This could be great news for Flash developers, as Microsoft could potentially bring their experience of building the .NET productivity suite to bear on Flash tools.

Oct 1-5th: Adobe MAX Announcements
Multi-Screen being realised. Adobe MAX format change – now focus on solutions, not on tech
Adobe’s biggest exclusive was the announcement of project Molehill will will be coming to a future version of the Flash Player. Molehill is a set of low-level GPU-accelerated 3D APIs which will allow the Flash Player to render thousands of z-buffered triangles in HD at around 60Hz. Combined with new peripheral support for gamepads and steering wheels, this is big news for gaming in Flash.
Adobe Project Molehill

Sakamoto Software

Small ActionScript project to visualize a countdown timer.

Adobe Releases Flex 3

One of the first things to note with this new release of Flex is that the changes mainly relate to work-flow and performance and most of your previous Flex 2 should still work. Regarding Flex 2 projects, please refer to:
– Migrating applications from Flex 2 to Flex 3
– Flex 3: Backwards Compatibility and Migration

Following is a summary of what you can expect to find in Flex 3 :

• open source with public bugbase
• memory & performance profilers added to Flex Builder
• data wizards that will generate both client and server code to hook up to existing database tables
• Cold Fusion, Java, PHP and my old love, ASP.NET server-side technologies supported
• web service introspection which generates client side proxy classes from WSDL signatures
• visual CSS editor
• native support for AIR
• enhanced Flex Charting Package

(for a more detailed overview, please refer to Matt Chotin’s article)

Now that Flex has become open-source, developers might be interested to peruse and adopt Adobe’s own coding conventions and best practices for their own use.

System requirements

NOTE: Flex 3 applications will run on any version of Flash Player 9, although size optimization through signed RSLs is only supported on Flash Player 9 (Version: 9,0,60,235) or later. Flex 3 Beta 3 includes the Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 (9.0.115.0) debug players.

Flex Builder 3 for Windows

• Intel® Pentium® 4 processor
• 1GB of RAM recommended
• Microsoft® Windows® XP (with Service Pack 2)
• Microsoft Vista™ Home Premium or higher
• 500MB (Stand alone) and 500 MB (Plug-in) of available hard-disk space to install
• Java™ Virtual Machine: Sun® JRE 1.4.2, Sun JRE 1.5 (included), IBM® JRE 1.5, Sun JRE 1.6
• Eclipse 3.2.2 or higher for Plug-in install (Eclipse 3.3 recommended for Windows Vista)
• New Flex Builder 3 projects create applications that require users to have Flash Player 9 (9.0.30) or higher. You can change this to an earlier version of Player 9 in the Flex Compiler section of your project’s Properties.
• BEA Workshop 10.1
• IBM Rational Software Architect 7.0.0.3 (Eclipse 3.3 plug-in configuration only).

Flex Builder 3 for Mac OS X

• G4 1.25GHz PowerPC or Intel-based Mac
• OS X 10.4.7 through 10.4.10, OS X 10.5.x
• 1GB of RAM recommended
• 500 MB of available hard-disk space to install
• Java Virtual Machine: JRE 1.5 or JRE 1.6 from Apple®
• Eclipse 3.2.2 or higher for Plug-in install
• New Flex Builder 3 projects create applications that require users to have Flash Player 9 (9.0.30) or higher. You can change this to an earlier version of Player 9 in the Flex Compiler section of your project’s Properties.

Useful Links:
Adobe’s Getting Started with Flex
Adobe’s Flex 3 LiveDocs