Topic: Application Design

Thoughts on multi-screen, multi-context app development

Posted February 9, 2010 6:00 pm
Filed under: AIR, Application Design, Articles by Paul, Contextual design, Frameworks, Multi-screen, Opinions, Presentations, User-centered design, iPhone

Around 8 months ago I was asked to start thinking about the now emerging (particularly from a Flash Platform perspective) world of multi-screen application development. What are issues to consider? What guidance should we offer?
It turns out that my thinking on that topic isn’t going to become anything in the Adobe documentation. So I’ve sort […]

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New project: AIR SQLite utilities

Posted February 3, 2010 1:44 pm
Filed under: AIR, AS3, ActionScript, Application Design, Articles by Paul, Projects, SQL, local SQL database

I’m excited to announce that I’m “officially” releasing a new open-source project that I’ve been using on personal and work projects for over a year.
For lack of a better name, I call it my “AIR SQLite utility library”
The code currently contains one major piece of functionality (well, two different variations on one bit of functionality), […]

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“Adobe AIR data privacy and security” - slides, notes, links

Posted June 9, 2009 10:03 am
Filed under: AIR, Application Design, Flex, Presentations, Privacy/security, SQL, local SQL database

On May 20, 2009 at the 360|Flex conference in Indianapolis I gave a presentation titled “Adobe AIR data privacy and security.” As I always do (and after a bit of a delay), here are the slides from my presentation. I’ve added fairly lengthy notes to the slides (I had to make the font smaller so […]

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A useful tool, the joy of shipping code, and a great developer

Posted March 12, 2009 11:23 am
Filed under: AIR, Application Design, Coding, Projects, local SQL database

If you use David Deraedt’s great AIR SQLite administration tool Lita, you probably already saw that he just pushed an update (v. 1.2) a few days ago. Aside from my general happiness from seeing that this release fixes some bugs and adds new features that were important to me, this release has personal significance for […]

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If you’re like me and you’ve been heads-down in work or just getting through the pre/post-Christmas season, you may have missed the article “Creating more secure SWF web applications” by Peleus Uhley, that was posted on the Adobe Developer Center on Dec. 20.

In spite of the bad timing, it’s a nice, thorough article that gives a good view of things that we can do to make our apps more secure, in addition to security updates that Adobe continues to make to Flash Player.

(via email from Jeff Swartz)

Last week I posted some of my thoughts on the future of Flex application frameworks, which were my take-aways from the October Silicon valley Flex user’s group (a.k.a. “SilvaFUG”) users group meeting. In that post I strongly recommended watching the recordings of the presentations. The recordings are available now, so once again I highly recommend watching them (now that you actually can watch them =)

Here are the direct links:

Grant Straker on Moving ZoomFlex from a homegrown framework to Cairngorm
Ali Mills and Luke Bayes on Flex application frameworks (A great overview of the strengths and weaknesses of various frameworks like Cairngorm etc., from two really smart developers.)

Enjoy!

(via email from SilvaFUG)

The future of Flex application frameworks-my thoughts

Posted October 12, 2007 9:55 am
Filed under: Application Design, Articles by Paul, Flex, Frameworks, Opinions

This post started out as my notes from the Oct. 11, 2007 SilvaFUG user’s group meeting, which included two talks on Flex application frameworks, but by the end I realized it was more of a restatement of (filtered through my opinion) some of the important forward-looking ideas that came out of the audience discussions and […]

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Simplified Chaos has an insightful article about deciding when to use AIR and when to stick to browser-based Flash/Flex. His recommendation is to use the browser by default, and only move to AIR if you really need that desktop functionality. His reasoning, which I can agree with, is that people are much less likely to try out a desktop app that they have to install (and probably uninstall later) than to just look at something in a browser. I definitely agree — I hadn’t really realized it until reading this, but I’ve noticed that when I hear about a new AIR app then I always hope the web site has some screenshots or videos of the app in action, so that I don’t have to install it to try it out.

Keith Peters wrote a similar post on the same topic, which I also recommend.

(via Jesse Warden)

Dan Thomas (“Danny-T”) has written up a nice concise intro to database concepts, geared toward working with databases in AIR (more…)

Problem (and solution): Any AIR app can read any other app’s databases

Posted June 21, 2007 11:06 am
Filed under: AIR, Application Design, Articles by Paul, Tutorials, local SQL database

In a side note on a recent post about the AIR functionality for working with local SQL databases, Tim Anderson raised some concerns about the security model for AIR local SQL databases, that I thought would be valuable to discuss more.
Tim also raises other concerns which aren’t so much issues to keep in mind when […]

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