• First thing first: if you haven’t seen the MythHackers video about Flash on the iPhone, you must go watch it. I laughed so hard my eyes were watering.
• Aditya Bansod’s ADC article “Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash,” from the Product Manager who’s in charge of the Flash Platform development for iPhone effort. Includes some technicial details on how it actually works and how you build the apps.
• Adobe Labs: Apps for iPhone: Video demo and list of apps that are already in the app store today
• Adobe Labs developer FAQ: this has the most information about what this really means for developers
• Mike Chambers is, as always, a great resource for information on this topic. He has a nice summary blog post, plus I know he’s collecting questions to answer in his MAX session (on Wednesday, I believe).
• Arno Gourdol, engineering manager for Adobe AIR (and huge iPhone fan and former Apple employee) talks briefly about the underlying technology, with a focus on MAX sessions where you can learn more.
• Never one to hold back his enthusiasm, Ted Patrick has posted the source code for three different Flash Platform iPhone apps he wrote, that can be seen on the demo phones in the Adobe booth at MAX. (He says it’s four apps in the blog title, but he explains that two of them are the same app with and without hardware acceleration.)

That’s all for now. I’ll keep updating the list as I find more resources.

We’re mainly looking for developers who have Flex experience but little or no experience developing for Adobe AIR. There aren’t many other restrictions — We’ll conduct the study on the phone and online using Adobe Connect.

Admittedly, I realize that if you read what I write here then there’s a good chance that you’ve already got too much AIR development experience. Even so, we’d appreciate it if you can spread the word to other developers you know who might be qualified.

If you’re interested or want to get more details, check out the official post on my team’s blog:

Need participants for studies about AIR and Flex

On a related note, we’re also conducting some (very brief) surveys about your experience developing AIR applications (Flex or HTML/JS). I can’t remember all the places where you might encounter them, but if you browse around the documentation or the developer center for a while there’s a chance you’ll be offered the survey. If you’ve done some AIR development and get a chance to take the survey, we’d like to hear about your experiences.

…and another update Sept. 22, 2009

…and still another update Sept. 25, 2009

If you were following Twitter during the San Francisco Flash Camp on May 29, you might have seen that Arno Gourdol, Engineering manager for AIR, announced/showed a few features that are going to be in the next major version of AIR code name “Athena”.

Today I found the link to the video of Arno’s presentation “Flash Camp Update on Adobe AIR,” so even if you couldn’t attend you can learn about those features yourself. The video’s fairly long and the new stuff is near the middle/end, so here are the highlights for you to watch for (sadly the video doesn’t have time markers so I can’t give exact times):

• He starts the demo a little past the half-way point of the presentation.

• He shows an app that detects when a drive is mounted/unmounted by listening for the new StorageVolumeChangeEvent.STORAGE_VOLUME_MOUNT and STORAGE_VOLUME_UNMOUNT events. He plugs a USB thumb drive into his computer and, sure enough, the new drive appears in the FileSystemDataGrid in his app.

  

• Next he shows a change to the AIR installation process that’s coming in the “Squirter” release, which is a dot release coming out “probably late this summer” according to the video. The change is specifically to the warning dialog that’s displayed when a user installs an AIR app that’s signed by a trusted security certificate.

  Here’s the new version that he showed:

  

  For reference, here’s an example of the current warning dialog. The highlighted items are the parts that are removed in the new dialog. It also looks like the “Install” and “Cancel” buttons have switched places for some reason, and some white space has been tightened up. Other than that the new dialog is the same (as far as I can tell):

  

Update Sept. 18, 2009

A couple of other new features have been mentioned publicly since I posted this:

• In an AIR forum post, product manager Rob Christensen mentioned that the next major version of AIR will “provide an API to allow you to open documents” in their default applications. (The examples discussed in the post are opening Word or Excel files in their respective applications.) The code for this feature actually appears in the sample Arno showed at Flash Camp — he just didn’t point it out (look right above his head):

  

• AIR principal scientist Oliver Goldman mentioned in a blog post that in his MAX 2009 talk he will be talking about “the new deployment options that will be available in Adobe AIR 2, including the native installer support required to use some of the advanced new AIR 2 APIs.”
• And of course, Oliver’s quote also makes it explicit that the next major release of AIR is called “AIR 2.” In case that wasn’t so likely as to be obvious.

Update Sept. 22, 2009

Another update: In his Flash on the Beach 2009 presentation “Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR” Mike Chambers described the following feature (on page 20 of his slides):

NativeProcess API

• New API in AIR 2.0
• Can call and communicate with external applications
• Requires application be distributed as native installer (no AIR files)
• Cannot execute applications within application directory
• Must add “extendedDesktop” to support profiles

Update Sept. 25, 2009

At a Flash users’ group meeting in Paris, Mike Chambers announced and demoed “the new raw microphone access feature coming in AIR 2.0.” Source and video: Lee Brimelow

• FlexUnit 4. Wow. Big update. Very nice new features. Time to get (back) into it. (presentation by Michael Labriola)
• Renaun Erickson’s Structured Log Testing framework. Another great, unexpected surprise. I didn’t really have plans to go to this session except that Renaun’s such a smart, friendly guy. And frankly, I’ve never really had enough interest to take a look at his work on this project so far. Boy am I glad I changed my mind. This is definitely a testing approach I can get into — much less overhead than other approaches I’ve seen. Getting going with it is only barely more work than adding trace() calls. And the result is certainly infinitely more valuable.

Considering I didn’t come to Indianapolis with any real interest in hearing more about testing…I’m surprised to find myself so excited by what I saw today. Today is a great day for Flex testing, that’s for sure.

I also got to hear some interesting ideas and future plans from Jacob Wright and Tyler Wright. (They made me a bit jealous — I wish I had a Flex programmer brother that I could see at conferences.) If you’re in Indianapolis, I recommend checking out their “write-in” session on the Flight Framework at 10am Tuesday in the Illinois East room.

Other less code-centric, but interesting, tidbits:

• Joe Berkovitz is an avid mountain biker.
• Ben Stucki has a sweet five-year-old daughter who likes deep-fried calamari and pasta, although she wasn’t able to finish her macaroni and cheese at Buca di Beppo, where apparently even the child meals are sized to feed 3-4 people.

(No, he’s not paying me for all these things I say about him. He’s just nice enough to let me hang around in his source code sometimes =)

I just watched the demo video of his Lupo Flex Localization Studio. If you think you might ever want to build a Flex app in more than one language, you should watch it too. If you don’t think you’ll ever need to…think again. One thing I’ve definitely had drilled into my head as I’ve been working on documentation at Adobe is the importance and impact that localization can have on a project. As a French- and English-speaking Flex developer and participant in many localization projects, David has a lot of expertise in this area, which shows in the tools he’s made.

Lupo includes two tools:

• “Lupo Manager” is a tool for developers. It scans your source code, identifying strings that might need to be localized. You use a simple form to create key values (often the default is sufficient) and it rewrites the source code for you. You can then edit the resource bundle values and preview the properties file which you can hand off to localizers. Once your strings are localized, Lupo Manager also generates the compiler arguments and sample source code to help you get started with actually integrating the language switching into your app.
• “Lupo Translator” Just in case a developer tool isn’t enough, Lupo also includes a computer-aided translation tool that localizers can use to easily translate the strings in the resource bundle.

Something else that I think is definitely worth noting is that Lupo is intended as a commercial AIR application. Adobe AIR isn’t meant to just be about free apps, and it’s exciting to see another entry into the commercial AIR app space.

Once again, amazing work by David. I can’t wait to see the released version — I’ve got some projects that I think are going to need a little Lupo love =)

One thing I’ve been wishing for the last week or so is undo/redo functionality as I’m editing query text. Coincidentally, I just found out that my 360|Flex friend Jac Wright has written a library for undo and redo in Flash Player (ActionScript) text fields. The previous link is to the Google Code project; here’s his introductory blog post about the “undo textfields” library. (via Tyler Wright via Gilles Guillemin/Twitter)

Admittedly I haven’t tried this yet, and I’ve asked whether it’s been tested in AIR so I don’t know whether it will actually be feasible as-is. But I’ve got my fingers crossed! =)

As with previous versions, if you’ve been using the app you’ll need to uninstall it before installing the new version. Someday I’ll add updating support, but I’m not going to promise anything real soon.

Along with this release, I’ve also made a change to how I describe the tool, and to my future intentions for it. I’ve always had it in my mind to make this a full-fledged database admin tool, similar to the tools that come with SQL Server or other enterprise databases. However, time has obviously not allowed me to do that, and in the mean time other tools have been released by other developers. I’ve found one, David Deraedt’s “Lita” SQLite admin tool that is sufficiently mature that I use it in my day-to-day work now and it definitely beats doing things by hand! There are still improvements to be made and features to be added, but when I’ve reported bugs and feature requests he’s been quick to respond and release updates.

So while I’m sure nobody’s been holding their breath waiting for me to finish the “admin tool” portion of my app, I just wanted to clarify the new direction I’m taking it — or rather, the fact that I’m not planning to take it in as many new directions! (Hence the change in title for the project from “AIR SQL admin tool” to “AIR SQL query testing tool.”)

That doesn’t mean I’m done developing this tool by any means. In past jobs where I did heavy database development, and in a project I’m currently working on that involves heavy database development, I find it very useful to have two different kinds of database tools — one for creating and managing database objects and structure, and another for testing queries. While Lita does in fact have a tab for testing queries, I personally find Doppler to be a bit (not a lot, but a bit =) more developed in that specific area. On the other hand, Lita certainly does a lot in the db management space that Doppler doesn’t do. So I find the tools very complementary in terms of my actual development work.

As always, I welcome feedback, questions, thoughts, etc. And thanks to everyone who’s already reported bugs and offered suggestions!

Also, I learned that David Deraedt has released another AIR SQLite admin tool called “Lita” that looks promising. You can read about Lita or download Lita from David’s site.

And, for the sake of archives and history and what-not, I did go back and update my original post containing the slides and links for the presentation, with new links to the video and to information about Lita.

Like so many people, my work goes in cycles (from “busy” to “crazy” to “desperate crunch”). If you’re someone who follows this site (if in fact there is anybody who does), you may have figured out that any time I go for a long time without posting, it means I’m near the end of a project (and consequently, that new documentation is coming soon).

Well, that time has arrived. With the public announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, we’re doing something different in terms of the schedule for releasing documentation. This time the documentation has been released ahead of time, before the product actually ships. (Primarily for the sake of search engine indexing — but hey, let’s not complain.)

Of course, a draft version of the Flash Player 10 language reference has been around for a while now, but if you haven’t had a chance to take a look (or if you want to know how things turned out in their final form), you can now view the final Flash CS4 (including ActionScript for Flash Player 10) documentation. Also, this includes several significant additions to the content in Programming ActionScript 3.0, so if you prefer to learn by reading about a topic rather than by piecing things together from the reference, then you’ll find this content useful.

Here are a few top-level links to get you started:

• Programming ActionScript 3.0
• ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components reference
• Using Flash (including what’s new in Flash CS4)

Just for fun, here is the new content that I wrote:

• Vector class (strongly-typed arrays):

  • Vector class in Programming ActionScript 3.0 (new content is interspersed with the previous content on the Array class)
  • Vector class reference

• Pixel Bender (“custom filters” — although it’s a lot more than filters)

  • Working with Pixel Bender shaders (in Programming ActionScript 3.0) - plus other sections that are linked to from there, about using a shader as a drawing fill, a filter, a blend mode, etc.
  • Shader class reference
  • ShaderJob class reference
  • ShaderParameter and ShaderInput class references
  • ShaderFilter class
  • plus new content in the DisplayObject class, the BlendMode class, the Graphics class, etc.

And here are some of the other new topics that I think are the most interesting:

• Working in three dimensions (3D) in Programming ActionScript 3.0
• Inverse Kinematics (IK) in Programming ActionScript 3.0
• Using the new drawing api (aka “drawing api 2”) in Programming ActionScript 3.0

So, what’s next for me? (Thanks for asking!) Since finishing the final versions of the Flash CS4 documentation, I’ve been working on some “quick start” articles around the new features. Those articles will appear in the Flash developer center soon — probably when Flash CS4 actually ships. (I’ve done one on the Vector class and one on the new FileReference functionality for accessing local files without a server round trip. Other colleagues have done cool things with dynamically generating audio and Pixel Bender — so I think it’ll definitely be worth a look.) Along with that, I’m working on new features for the next version of Adobe AIR. I also have a few side projects that I’ve been trying to make progress on as I can sneak in a minute here and there.

This is definitely an amazing, thought-provoking look at leading a rich and fulfilling life, from someone who knew he didn’t have long to live and yet still showed more energy and excitement for life than just about anyone:

Dr. Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon CS professor, Dead at 47 (TechCrunch)

Okay, so I did know that they interviewed me (although in my memory it didn’t happen at Starbucks), and those are in fact my answers to their questions. (I actually wish they had reformatted them a bit. I think they are a bit tough to understand as they appear in the post but I didn’t realize the context in which the answers would be presented.) In any case it’s quite a silly read, and the other speaker interviews they’ve posted are even funnier. Poor Tom sure puts up with a lot of heckling from John.

Although I’ve never been to 360 Flex before, I’ve always wanted to go. I was fortunate enough to get chosen as a speaker — hopefully my presentation will turn out well enough that they’ll let me come back again =). And I definitely meant it when I said that there are so many presentations I’m looking forward to, that there was no way I could limit my list to just two!

Oh, and I suppose I should make two small corrections. One, i haven’t actually started working on my slides/presentation content for 360 Flex yet (oops!). Two, as of now I’m not planning to include any stick figures in my presentation. That’s not to say I never have, however =)

P.S. I know the issue of identity theft is a real one, and a very serious one. In fact a couple of weeks ago I thought I might had been a victim of identity theft (expected bills and checks were missing from my mail) and it was very disturbing. So please don’t take my joke about someone impersonating me as a sign that I don’t think identity theft is a real, serious issue!

On a personal note, the screenshot that Lee posted for the Vector class documentation was written by me. So that was fun to see =)

My conclusion (not original by any means) was that unit testing is an important tool for ActionScript developers. I’ve tried a couple of ActionScript unit testing frameworks (ASUnit and FlexUnit). And finally getting to the point of this post, I was interested to learn today that the crew at Digital Primates is releasing an open source unit testing framework for Flex, known as “dpunit”.

(via Jesse Warden via Twitter)

And what nice details they are!

Here are a few highlights that stood out to me:

Flex applications however have gained a reputation for looking too similar to each other, as many developers choose to use the Flex default look and feel (known as Halo)…we have found that it remains too challenging to create a truly custom experience. It is therefore a priority for Gumbo to make easy customization of Flex application experiences the norm instead of the exception.

Major features…component and skinning architecture…make it easier to describe experience-oriented features such as states and transitions

Perhaps the most revealing part for existing Flex devs is the aptly named “Caveats and Reassurances” section:

Gumbo will remain compatible with Flex 3…Over multiple releases post-Gumbo we expect to deprecate the Halo model…Halo and new Gumbo components can co-exist…new MXML features may require some changes to your existing markup. However, you can make these decisions on a file-by-file basis

But my favorite line of all is in the “Related Work” section:

Provide a tool in which design-oriented users can easily customize the look of individual components or entire applications. Yes, this is Thermo. We’re not discussing it here.

Of course, this is all fairly in line with what’s been talked about previously, such as Thermo, MXML-G, Ely’s presentation about a new component structure with separation of model and view, etc. But it’s nice to see more information…and what’s not there but is hinted at is even more tantalizing.

I’ll definitely be watching that page for more information about “Design in Mind” and the other Flex 4 themes.

(via email from Matt Chotin — also see the announcement on the Flex team blog)

I found a couple of posts that were very interesting from a different perspective than just the “hey free web hosting” angle, that I wanted to save/share:

• Alec Saunders discusses Google App Engine as an example of the competition between Microsoft and Google, and why Google “gets it” but Microsoft doesn’t.
• Jacob Brunson thinks this is an example of Google “changing the world” — an innovative idea coming from inside Google rather than being bought by them.

And one more link that is a coding-focused one, but I wanted to save it anyway. =)

• Ronald Schouten has a great list of resources for learning Python and Django (Python being the language you must use with Google Apps Engine, and Django being one of the most popular Python frameworks for web apps).