UPDATE: This event has been canceled! Sorry!
Next week I’ll be presenting in Seattle at my first Force.com Developer Meetup! It starts at 6pm on Wednesday, June 22. My session will be on Flex Mobile Development. Other sessions include Force.com Platform Basics, Native iOS Development using JavaScript, and a Force.com Hands-On Lab. It’s going to be a fun evening, so if you are in the Seattle area, then I hope to see you there!
*** The following is totally unsupported by Adobe ***
*** UPDATE: Adobe has officially added native extensions to AIR. I highly recommend you use that approach instead of mine. ***
Adobe AIR provides a consistent platform for desktop and mobile apps. While consistency is very important there are times when developers need to extend beyond the common APIs. This article will walk you through how to integrate AIR for Android applications with other native APIs and functionality in the Android SDK. It covers three common use cases for native extensibility: System Notifications, Widgets, and Application Licensing.
Flex support for iOS apps is coming in June 2011!!! Here’s a little sneak peak of the Tour de Mobile Flex app running on iOS:
These are exciting times for developers! With Flex we will be able to use one technology and one code base to build apps for iOS, Android, Playbook, Windows, Mac, Linux, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc! Fun times!
Now that Flex 4.5 has officially been announced I wanted to show just how easy it is to start building mobile apps with Flex:
Very fun stuff! Let me know what you think.
In a few weeks I’ll be speaking in Atlanta at DevNexus and at the Atlanta Flex User Group. On March 21, 2011 at DevNexus I have two sessions:
On March 22, 2011 at the Atlanta Flex User Group I will be presenting about Flex 4.5 - The Non-Mobile New Features.
I hope to see you at DevNexus and at the Atlanta Flex User Group!
On February 15, 2011 I’ll be presenting at the Detroit Java User Group about Building Cross-Device Apps with Flex and Spring. If you live in the Detroit area then I hope to see you there! If not, then talk to your local Java User Group leader about having me come and speak.
Here is the abstract for the talk:
Today, users want apps in the browser, on their desktop, phone, tablet, and TV. Reusing code across all of these devices is now crucial for developers. By combining Flex for the UI with Spring and Hibernate for the back-end, developers can build apps that work on a variety of devices including PCs, Android phones / tablets, the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, iPhones, and iPads. This session will walk developers through the steps for creating these cross-device apps with Flex and Java.
Using the open source Flex SDK, developers can easily build desktop, mobile, and tablet applications that use Peer to Peer (P2P) communication. I’ve created a video that walks through demos and code illustrating how to use the P2P APIs in Adobe AIR applications. Check it out:
Grab the code for the demos in the video from github:
Just as the video shows, it’s incredibly easy to use the P2P APIs. Here is a quick walk through. First create a new NetConnection that is connected to “rtmfp:” like so:
Tour de Flex was launched at Adobe MAX two years ago. In that time Tour de Flex has become an essential resource for learning Flex. Now that you can build Flex apps for mobile devices with the Flex Hero prerelease we thought we should build a version of Tour de Flex for mobile devices. Using Flex Hero and AIR for Android we’ve created Tour de Mobile Flex! This is a great way to explore the capabilities of Adobe AIR and Flex on mobile devices. Get it from the Android Market by searching for “Tour de Mobile Flex”!
Just a quick note that tomorrow (October 12, 2010) I’ll be presenting a session at the Rocky Mountain Flash Camp on Mobile Flash & Flex Development. It’s going to be super fun! Hope to see you there.
I have a theory. The majority of people who use enterprise software today use old school Client / Server apps. We’ve been trying to move these apps to the web for more than ten years. The ease of deployment of web apps is a clear motivator. Yet the client capabilities of the plain old web browser have not been sufficient for many apps to make the leap. This is why I love Flex and the Flash Platform. It provides a way to use web technologies and the web deployment model but adds many of the critical things needed for mission critical apps that people use all day long.