FlexAbility

Last December Mrinal Wadhwa did a great presentation on Custom Components in Flex 4 at the Adobe DevSummits in Chennai and Hyderabad. We were so impressed with the slide deck that he posted that we asked him to present at our Boston Flex Application Incubator group meeting this Tuesday. He’ll be presenting via Acrobat Connect so you can join us from anywhere. Meeting starts at 6:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

Full details are here.

See you there.

Where: inTouch Technology Corp. 1 Broadway, Cambridge, MA – 5th Floor Training Room
When: Tonight at 7 pm – come a bit early and eat pizza and socialize

Brass Monkey is an SDK for creating cross platform experiences. At its core it is a networking library for interconnecting mobile devices and computers over a local WIFI. Brass Monkey allows a mobile device, for example a cell phone, to be used as controller. Input occurs through the device’s accelerometer etc. and is used to control a web based experience (Flash/Flex, Unity3D). Chris will show how to use the SDK, and demonstrate many of the possibilities this new technology opens up to developers.

Chris Allen: Chris is president and CEO of Infrared5. He is also co-project manager and a Java developer for the open source Red5 project, and has been a software architect and developer for major enterprises including Cambridge Technology Partners, Mass General Hospital and Scholastic.

Please RSVP at http://bostonfug18.eventbrite.com/

From the announcement at http://bostonfug.org:

“Daniel Rinehart will discuss his experiences and insights into developing for the 2.0 release of the Adobe AIR player. Daniel is known for his programming and architectural skill and his talk will be dense with worthwhile nuggets.”

I can personally vouch both for Daniel’s expertise and for his ability to clearly communicate technical information. If you’re interested in Adobe’s AIR technology, this meeting is definitely worth attending. For details, see the URL above.

See you there!

Douglas

The meeting starts at 6:15 PM, Eastern Standard Time.

Details at: http://www.bfaig.org/blog/?p=135

The main agenda item wil be a brainstorming session with Jack Hotchkiss from The Nature Conservancy about a project that he’s contemplating. See the above URL for details.

We hope to see you there!

Douglas

This is probably obvious to many of you, but I just discovered that placing the string ‘*.as, *.mxml’ in the ‘File name patterns’ field of Eclipse’s search dialog results in blazingly-fast code searches.

Lately I’ve been trying to get some sense of when AIR 2.0 might be finding its way onto mobile devices, and when the Flex Mobile Framework (aka Slider) might be available to developers. I’ve talked/emailed with a couple of people from Adobe but I’m not sure who would want to be quoted on what – so I’m not going to quote anyone. Just consider these to be my more-or-less informed best guesses.

• This first point I’m fairly sure of: While mobile devices with Flash 10.1 installed should be getting into the public’s hands by July 1, 2010, this won’t include AIR 2.0. So you’ll be able to run Flash applications in your device’s browser, but you won’t be able to install and run any AIR applications. (And, of course, even your browser based content will need to be designed so that it uses a lot less memory and CPU cycles than we’ve become accustomed to having at our disposal when creating Flash content for the desktop. For example, applications created with the current Flex framework won’t run satisfactorily, if at all.)
• It’s my impression that AIR 2.0 will be available for development devices some time in “late 2010″. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that this will happen by October 1st. But be warned – I’m an optimist!
• Then – guessing wildly here – it will start to appear on devices in the public’s hands – by January 1, 2011?
• And – more guessing – a beta version of Slider will be available to developers around November 1, 2010. With a commercial release by April 1, 2011?

It will be fun to check back in a year or so and see how well these predictions/guesses have fared.

I should also mention that we have another option available to us much sooner – Adobe is publicly saying that the CS5 Flash “export to iPhone” option will be available in a beta by the end of 2009. I won’t predict how well this is going to work, but for simple applications it’s probably worth considering.

If you know something that contradicts what I’m saying here, or even confirms it, I’d love to hear it – please add a comment!

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009
• Time: 6:15 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online, at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20091020/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
  • In-Person, at the Boston office of Broduer Partners, 855 Boylston Street, a short walk from the Hynes & Copley Green Line T stops.
• Agenda:
  • Announcements & opening discussion
  • The floor will be open to anyone who wishes to present. If you’d like to insure that you’ll get a slot please contact us and we’ll put you on the agenda.
  • If time allows, Douglas McCarroll will show how he uses the “strategy” design pattern to sequence audio in his Language Collaborative project.
• Attendees will be eligible for our bi-annual software raffle:
  • Twice a year Adobe allows us to raffle off a software package – of the winner’s choice – worth up to $2100. Here’s how it works:
  • Attend monthly meetings of this group or of ABUG (our parent group)
  • Your name will be entered to win the software
  • Attend multiple meeting and your name will be added to the raffle list multiple times
  • Raffle will occur twice a year, some time in the second and fourth quarters of each year
  • Read the fine print at http://www.abug.us/blog/?p=4!

See you there!

About BFAIG:

BFAIG‘s focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and obtaining input and solutions for the issues that they raise. For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

I’ve always wondered why it occasionally happens that a bunch of old blog posts from one blog come through Adobe’s blog aggregator (MXNA). Now I know.

This happens when you realized that your posts haven’t been appearing, and ping the aggregator (see http://feeds.adobe.com/PingProxy.cfm) to let it know that you’ve published something new.

There may be other scenarios as well – if you know what they are, please leave a comment.

Anyway, the Boston Flex User Group and Boston Flex Application Incubator Group meeting announcements that appeared on MXNA on Saturday are for meetings that have already happened. My apologies for any confusion. I’ll have a new BFAIG announcement out shortly, for tomorrow’s meeting.

The Boston Flex User Group presents Libby Freligh on This Business of Flex:

This talk is a departure from our usual technical focus, and we think it will be an especially exciting one. Our speaker, Libby Freligh, was a key player in the original definition, creation and launch of the Macromedia Flex platform, and our talk will take a fascinating look at the genesis of the platform from a business and product management angle, as well as a look at the present and the future.

Libby will start with a perspective on the early history of Flex platform, discussing how Flex evolved from an initial concept into the major force in RIA development that it is today. The rest of the talk will provide a business perspective on current RIA development, looking at how the landscape has evolved and how Flex and other platforms have essentially changed the terms of how software gets built now. Libby will also talk about her experience since Macromedia in designing and developing RIA products that successfully address the online market.

More info at http://www.bostonfug.org

Please RSVP at http://bostonfug14.eventbrite.com/

See you there!

The Boston Flex Application Incubator Group – a subgroup of the Adobe Boston User Group – is being reactivated after being inactive for about a year.

The group will be meeting monthly on the third Tuesday of each month, from 5:45 – 7:15 PM. Meetings will have a combined online/in-person format, with the in-person aspect happening at the offices of Metatomix in Dedham. The next meeting will be this Tuesday.

BFAIG’s primary focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. The group has a somewhat unusual format – rather than a “presenter dispensing knowledge and wisdom” we have “learner-presenters” who present a question or problem and get help from the other attendees.

Meeting details are at http://www.bfaig.org/blog/?p=83

BFAIG’s website at http://www.bfaig.org has a lot of details on how the group works.

BFAIG’s Yahoo Group mailing list is at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BFAIG/

I hope to see you there.