Flex Performance on Mobile Devices

By James Ward | Published: February 21, 2010

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.

Posted in Flash Player, Flex, Mobile | 26 Comments

Flex 4 List Scrolling on Android with Flash Player 10.1

By James Ward | Published: February 19, 2010

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.

Posted in Flash Player, Flex, Mobile | 24 Comments

Flex Apps on Mobile Devices

By James Ward | Published: February 17, 2010

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.

Posted in Flash Player, Flex, Mobile | 3 Comments

Geek Week in Denver

By James Ward | Published: February 14, 2010

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. :)

Posted in Cloud, Drunk on Software, Flex | 2 Comments

Time to Update to Flex SDK 3.5a

By James Ward | Published: February 12, 2010

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.

Posted in Adobe AIR, BlazeDS, Flex | 8 Comments

London Event Tomorrow: RIAs with Java, Spring, Hibernate, BlazeDS, and Flex

By James Ward | Published: February 9, 2010

Tomorrow night, Wednesday Feburary 10 2010, I’ll be speaking to the London Java Community about RIAs with Java, Spring, Hibernate, BlazeDS, and Flex. I hope to see you there!

Posted in Flex, Hibernate, Java, Spring | Leave a comment

First Steps in Flex Screencasts

By James Ward | Published: January 24, 2010

A little over a year ago Bruce Eckel and I published First Steps in Flex. So far we’ve had great feedback on the book. The concise examples seem to resonate with how developers learn new technologies. Another way that developers learn is through seeing technologies firsthand. To better support that model of learning Bruce and I decided to create screencasts for each chapter of the book.
First Steps in Flex Screencasts
We took a very casual approach to the screencasts. They were not scripted. We wanted them to feel as though you are sitting in the room with us as we discuss the code. Check them out and let us know what you think.

BTW: The viewer app for the screencasts was created with Flex 4!

Posted in Flex | 3 Comments

Tampa Bay Adobe Developer Event this Thursday

By James Ward | Published: January 20, 2010

Adobe’s Enterprise Evangelism team including Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets, and myself are in Tampa, FL this week. On Thursday night we are rounding up the local geeks at Taverna Opa for free beers and drunken confabulation about Flex, The Flash Platform, and other topics that bore most normal people. Hope to see you there!

Posted in Flash Platform, Flex | 1 Comment

Flex and The Cloud

By James Ward | Published: January 19, 2010

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 :

Exciting stuff! Let me know what you think!

Posted in Cloud, Flash Player, Flex, RIA, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce.com | 3 Comments