Flash Player

At this year’s 360|Flex conference in Denver, Mike Labriola and I unveiled a new project we’ve been working on called Mixing Loom. Our presentation was called “Planet of the AOPs” because Mixing Loom lays the foundation for true Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) on the Flash Platform. Mixing Loom provides Flex and ActionScript applications the hooks they need to do bytecode modification either before runtime or at runtime. Through bytecode modification an application can apply a behavior across hierarchies of objects. There are a number of behaviors in a typical Flex application (such as logging, security, application configuration, accessibility, and styling) that could be represented as Aspects. Today these behaviors must either be included in every class that needs them or included way down the object hierarchy (i.e. UIComponent). With Mixing Loom a compiled SWF can be modified (applying necessary behaviors) after it’s been compiled or as it’s starting up.

UPDATE: This video was intended to show how to upgrade Flash to a new / experimental version. If you do not have Flash and want to see the video, first switch YouTube to default to HTML5 video and then watch this video on YouTube.

Adobe has just released a preview of a 64-bit Flash Player for Windows, Mac, and Linux! I created a quick video to show Linux users how to install Flash Player on a 64-bit system. Check it out:

Mobile development with Flash and Flex is a new frontier, full of new adventures and discoveries. Recently I discovered something that might be useful to you. By default the mobile web browser on my Android 2.2 device scales a web page to make more room to display pages typically built for a desktop profile. Here is what a little test mobile Flex app I built looks like:

Strange! The width and height are larger than the screen resolution. You can fix this by adding the following to the HTML page:

I just finished the first version of a new pure JavaScript library for AMF. I’ve wanted to do this for a while but didn’t think it was possible since JavaScript doesn’t have a ByteArray. But then I came across this: “High Performance JavaScript Port of ActionScript’s ByteArray”. That became the basis for amf.js. Before I get into the gory details of how this works, check out some developer eye candy:

http://www.jamesward.com/demos/JSAMF/censusTest.html

Ok, hopefully that worked for you. I’ve tested this in the latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE and they all seem to work. It should also work on your iPad, iPhone, or Android device.

Adobe has just launched the new AIR 2 based Tour de Flex version 2.0 which now contains almost 500 Flex examples! The new version has new AIR 2 examples (only available in the AIR version of Tour de Flex) including:

• File Promises
• Mass Storage Detection
• Native Process
• Open with default app
• Socket Server

Also there are some great examples of the new Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 APIs including:

• Gestures
• Global Error Handler
• Globalization / Internationalization
• Microphone access

Those are some great examples but my favorite is still Doug McCune’s Physics Form followed closely by the real-time Tour de Flex Dashboard. :)

This week at the Google I/O conference Adobe announced that a Flash Player 10.1 beta and an Adobe AIR prerelease are now available for Android devices. This is really exciting news for those of us building apps on the Flash Platform because now we can begin building apps in Flex for these mobile devices (and many others coming soon).

Take a look a some of the quick demos I’ve built with Flex running on Android in Flash Player and AIR:

This past weekend I spent an hour optimizing the Flex 4 scrolling demo that I posted last week. The original demo was intended to show how to hook up touch events to the Flex 4 List / DataGroup controls. This new version adds some optimizations for the touch event handling and adds the kinetic flick behavior. Check it out and let me know what you think:

I’ve posted the code for this second version of the touch scrolling demo. It was pretty trivial to optimize it this far. With a little more work it’ll be as smooth as silk and as fast as Apolo Ohno. :)

UPDATE 1: The first version of this demo was intended to show how to hook up touch events to the Flex 4 List / DataGroup controls. I’ve posted a new version that adds some optimizations for the touch event handling and adds the kinetic flick behavior.

One of the challenges of running existing web content on mobile devices is that user interactions differ between mediums. For instance, on a normal computer with a mouse, scrolling though lists is often done by clicking on scroll bars or mouse wheels. On mobile devices that lack a pointing device this is not the best interaction paradigm. On devices with touch screens the paradigm for scrolling is usually a swipe gesture.

This week at Mobile World Congress Adobe has been showing off Flash Player 10.1 on a variety of mobile devices. Last week I received Google’s Nexus One device with an early version of Flash Player 10.1 on it. Here is a video I shot today showing how Flex applications can run on mobile devices with Flash Player 10.1 and how existing applications can be tweaked for the size constraints of these devices. Let me know what you think.

The combination of Flex and The Cloud is quickly becoming an IT and paradigm changing combination. Here are a number of recently published resources for learning more about this :

• An article I wrote has been published on the online Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine: Flex and The Cloud: Is this really just Client/Server 2.0?
• I’ll be speaking on Thursday, February 18 2010 at the Denver Flex User Group about Flex and The Cloud
• The recording of a webinar I co-hosted on the new Salesforce.com Cloud platform for developers has been posted
• Jeff Douglas has posted a video walk through showing how to use the new Salesforce.com Flash Builder 4 extension for Flex + Cloud apps

Exciting stuff! Let me know what you think!