Summary

New job. New city. New house. Moving tomorrow. Offline for a week or two. Don’t say anything important while I’m gone. (Sorry FATC, especially Reflex: no breaking announcements or innovation allowed. =)

1. Job

I am now no longer working for Adobe. I have started a new job with Dedo Interactive, Inc., as a Flash/Flex/ActionScript/AIR developer and also as an active collaborator with the UX design group. As Danny and Jonathan have already described, this is an exciting opportunity with a group that’s pushing the boundaries of hardware and software solutions. It’s also exciting for me to be a “regular developer” like everyone I hang out with and pretend to fit in with at conferences. Of course that’s where my roots are — in being a Macromedia/Adobe customer first before being an Adobe employee — so I’m just going back to the place that I’ve tried my best not to leave anyway.

2. Location

Since Dedo is located in Plano (N. Dallas) Texas, naturally it seems that I need to be located there too. Danny has been really great about letting me start as a remote employee. Nevertheless, I am typing this while mostly surrounded by cardboard boxes, as well as a few too many things that I should have already packed into cardboard boxes. In approximately 32 hours a moving truck will pull up to my house and load everything up. Then I’ll pack my family into a minivan and drive for many hours and days until we get to our new house. (Just signed the mortgage papers today — ack!)

3. Family

Fortunately, my family has agreed to accompany me on this crazy journey. I feel sad for my three young children. They’re obviously not happy to leave their friends and school and the life that they’ve known for the last three years. (My youngest doesn’t remember anything before California, and my middle child barely remembers anything else, in spite of the fact that they were both born in Indiana.) I’m grateful to have a wonderful wife and special children who make the hard times worth it, and who make the good times good.

4. Blog, Twitter, open source projects, conferences, etc.

Frankly, I have no plans to change what I’ve been doing with any of those. I’ve never been the most regular blogger or twitterer, and my projects don’t get updated as often as I’d like. That probably isn’t going to change with a new job and a new city. But the vast majority of my work on them has been on my own time anyway, so the fact that I’m no longer an Adobe employee shouldn’t make that situation any worse. In fact, the owners of Dedo said that they’re pleased with my community involvement, and want it to continue. I’m definitely still using AIR, ActionScript, and SQLite in my work, so I keep finding new things and ways to improve my projects.

5. Blah blah sentimental stuff

Adobe is a great employer, and a great company. In spite of all the negativity and mud-slinging that’s happening right now, I can say that I never felt bad or guilty about working for Adobe. On the contrary, I am proud to have worked for Adobe. I feel like Adobe is a good, ethical company that tries to make business decisions that lead to mutual benefit for partners and customers. (Don’t bother sharing your experiences to the contrary. I’m sure I could tell you plenty too. In spite of that, this is my opinion of the company and employees overall.)

In addition to my great employer, living and working and associating with the community in the San Francisco bay area has been a tremendous experience, and I consider myself very fortunate for it. I’m definitely sorry to leave, especially because of the great opportunities (being near Adobe HQ), the great community (I’m looking at you SilvaFUG), and the great weather =)

To all of you who I’ve met and become friends with over the last 3 years, farewell, and I look forward to seeing you online and at conferences of the future. I only regret that I didn’t get to come to one last meeting and tell you goodbye in person.

Meanwhile, I’ve been amazed to learn how many talented and community-oriented developers call the Dallas-Fort Worth area home. I’ve already attended one users’ group meeting and plan to attend many more. I look forward to getting to know you better.

As I’ve been preparing to move, I’ve been trying to go through my many boxes that I haven’t touched since the last time I moved across the country. I was a little astounded to find so many of my college (and even a few high school) notes, papers, textbooks, etc. among my possessions. I’m getting older and more cynical now, plus we have to pay the movers by the pound, so I tried to get rid of as much as I could bear. I was amazed at how much I’ve forgotten from what I once knew. (Some of my academic papers were quite impressive to me — and it was astounding to find my 2nd year Hebrew notebook and later my calculus notes, and consider the fact that I wrote all the scribblings in there. =) I also couldn’t help but think over the many people I’ve met and known and worked with in Houston (where I grew up), Salt Lake City (where I did my undergraduate), Bloomington Indiana (grad school and my first “real” job), and of course most recently the bay area. It’s quite astounding to consider the path that life has led me on, and how I’ve ended up where I am today.

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.

As you may have heard among all the news that’s coming out from MAX right now, Adobe AIR 1.5 has just been released. Most of the features of AIR 1.5 are features that were introduced with Flash Player 10. However, one new feature in AIR 1.5 that helps address the easy-to-read database issue is AIR 1.5’s new support for AES encrypted databases.

I’ve had the interesting and at times complex job of writing the documentation for this new feature. The bulk of the new documentation is in a new section “Using encryption with SQL databases” in the SQL database chapter of the manual “Developing Adobe AIR Applications”.

It’s pretty straightforward to use an encrypted database. You have to create the database as an encrypted db. To create or open it, you call the SQLConnection class’s open() or openAsync() methods, just as you normally do, and there’s a new parameter where you provide a 16-byte ByteArray encryption key for the database. That’s all there is to it.

The SQLConnection class also has a new reencrypt() method, that you use to change the encryption key of an already encrypted database.

If you want to see some code examples, check out the documentation listed above, or see these quick start articles on the Adobe developer center:

• Working with the encrypted local SQLite database (Flex)
• Working with the encrypted local SQLite database (Flash)
• Working with the encrypted local SQLite database (HTML/JavaScript)

There are a couple of parts of the new documentation that I think are particularly interesting (although I’m obviously biased since I wrote it all):

• Considerations for using encryption with a database talks about some of the various reasons you may want to use an encrypted database, and some of the differences in how you might architect your application to account for the desired level of security and privacy.

• Example: Generating and using an encryption key goes into great depth into one technique for creating an encryption key for your database. You have to provide a ByteArray encryption key to encrypt your database. How you come up with that encryption key can have a big impact on the actual security of your app data.

  This was definitely the most involved example I’ve written for the documentation. the techniques it uses were specified to me by security engineers at Adobe. The documentation goes into lots of detail describing how these techniques are used and why. Both the code and the text went through a series of reviews by engineers and security experts.

  I ended up writing the example as a simple UI, plus a class that anyone can just pull into their own app (rather than having to pull apart the example and turn it into something you can use. I’m also excited to share that Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell decided that this “encryption key generator” class is useful enough that it’s now included in the open-source ActionScript 3.0 core library (as3corelib) project.

Now that AIR 1.5 is out the door, I’ve updated my AIR database admin tool to support encrypted databases (when you try to open an encrypted database it prompts you for an encryption key, which you enter as a Base-64 string). I already mentioned that I wrote the encryption key generator class that’s now in as3corelib. I’ve also got at least one more new encrypted database-related open-source project that I’m about to release…but I’ll wait until the MAX “firehose” dies down a bit before I write more about that one. =)

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.