Two great Flex conferences have recently posted their video recordings:
There were numerous great sessions and speakers at each of these conferences. At Flex Camp Wall Street I presented “Flex Stuff I am Excited About”. Check it out and let me know what you think.
I’ll be attending and presenting at a number of great events over the next few weeks:
I hope to see you at these events!
Here is a new screencast that walks through the basics of integrating Flex 4 and Java:
(Open full-size video in a new window)
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. :)
Over the past few days I’ve received some questions about the performance of Flex apps on mobile devices. My Census RIA Benchmark has been a great way to compare the performance of various data loading techniques and technologies. Now that I have my Android based Nexus One mobile device with an early build of Flash Player 10.1 I wanted to see how fast I could load and render large amounts of data in a Flex application. I’m really impressed with the results! 20,000 rows of data loaded from the server and rendered on my phone in about 2 seconds! Those 20,000 rows can then be sorted on the device instantaneously. Pretty amazing performance for such a little device! Check out the video:
You can run the mobile version of the Flex AMF Census Test and check out the source code. Let me know what you think.
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.
In Flash Player 10.1 there are APIs for gestures and multitouch events. I thought it would be fun to hook up the list scrolling on a Flex 4 List to the TouchEvent on my Nexus One. Check out the video:
If you want to see how I created this simple demo, check out the source code. Let me know if you have any questions.
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.
BTW: The app I created for the demo is available at bit.ly/tdfmdb.
This week in Denver is going to be a total geek fest! I’m pretty excited about three great events:
There is a rumor that we might record a Drunk on Software episode after the event on Thursday. Apparently there are some people who disagree with my definition of “Flex app”. This could be the episode where we move from an Oprah style show to a Jerry Springer style of show. Sounds like fun to me. :)
If you are using a Flex SDK before 3.5a then it’s probably time to update. Flex SDKs before 3.4 have a security vulnerability. I believe the problem is actually in the HTML template, so when you update make sure that you also update the HTML templates that you are using. The Flex SDK 3.4 had the double responder bug. And the initial release of Flex SDK 3.5 had a bug with AIR’s ApplicationUpdaterUI. If you overlay your own AIR SDK on top of the Flex SDK then be aware that you will actually be overwriting the ApplicationUpdaterUI fix (comments in the bug report discuss how to deal with that).
So it’s time to move to the latest Flex SDK 3.5a!
Also, if you are using BlazeDS, LCDS, or FDS then it’s time to update that as well due to a security vulnerability that was published yesterday.
Flex 4 is Here! Go forth and build better software!
Flex 4 and its counterpart, Flash Builder 4, are now publicly available! We’ve also launched a new flex.org and added a ton of new Flex 4 samples in Tour de Flex!
Rich Internet Applications are the next generation of software. For the first time in the history of software the goal is not to simply collect or interpret data, but to make those tasks productive and simple. RIAs move us up the hierarchy of user and business needs. It is unproductive to change technologies and create the same old stuff. We change technologies because they provide new value like closing more deals, reducing task completion time, or gaining customer loyalty.
I got into Flex 1.0 about six years ago because I could more easily deliver usable software with Flex than I could with any other technology. A key aspect to creating more usable software is working with designers. The new Spark component model in Flex 4 sets the foundation for developers and designers to work more closely together using tools such as Adobe Creative Suite and Flash Catalyst. This is what sets Adobe apart in the RIA landscape. Designers use Adobe’s creative products. The key to building better software is creating ways for designers to more easily work with developers.
By bringing together designers and developers, Flex 4 enables a world of better software! I’m truly excited to see the amazing things you will build with Flex!