Category Archives: AIR

Flex 4 SDK

By Krzysztof. March 9, 2010
Flex 4 Gumbo SDK (download) is a next major step in evolution of Flex. Lately subsequent versions of Silverlight have offered some nice features which was absent in old Flex 3, and there was a necessity for Adobe to keep up (or even take over) with it’s biggest competitor.
Flex 4 introduces a bunch of new features, in my personal opinion the most important are:
  • new set of skinnable Spark components and skinning architecture which leads to better separation between data and view
  • introducing FXG declarative syntax for defining graphics
  • two way data binding

But if you want to explore full list of changes and improvements to framework, there is a “Flex 4 features and migration guide”, which could give you more information about it.

Read More »

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2
Trafikanten real time data on desktop and mobile

By Sven. October 10, 2008

maajegloepeMaking Waves recently released two totally free services for the citizens of Oslo, Norway. Trafikanten (trafikanten.no) delivers real time data on the public transport in Oslo and through development in Flex and Flash we have created two applications that help the citizens to get quick access to this data.

The desktop version is created in Flex with an AIR application as outcome, while the mobile version was based on Flash Lite 2.0 and developed using Flash. Both applications are based on the same design and both applications use Shared Objects to save the users favorite public transport lines. Part from that there are two very different solutions. Both solutions were developed within a timeframe of 70 hours!

Read more at http://mjl.makingwaves.no/

The main challenge when developing Flash content for mobile is to develop on a version that most available phones support. We decided to develop for Flash Lite 2.0 even though we lose a lot of today’s phones. But even phones with Flash Lite support have different specifications and it’s a jungle to find out which phone that supports which commands and so forth… but it is possible J

But the biggest issue with this application was loading XML. Flash Lite 2.x solutions are not very friendly to xml loading. It fills up the phones memory in no time. So the biggest lesson learned is to find workarounds if the first thinkable solution is to load xml data into the mobile phone. Part from that, developing applications for mobile phones is no walk in the park, but it’s really cool and not to hard either ;)

Also posted in Flex, Front-end, Mobile | 2 Comments

Everybody is talking about the weather

By Sven. August 7, 2008

The summer is over and this summer’s weather is on everybody tongue. Especially in Norway everybody is talking about the weather…

With that in mind I have created a little showcase of a small AIR application. The application collects weather info from yr.no and is limited to showing the weather in Norway (for now). You are able to search for locations in Norway and get the weather forecast for that location. Using SharedObjects you can also save your favorite locations and set your startup location. The forecast is updated every hour so you always can keep up to date to how the weather will be on your location :)

Try it out by installing from http://www.svenway.com/applications/weather/

The application is created in Flex based on a simple Cairngorm architecture.

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…but Director wasn't dead!

By Trond. April 8, 2008

Everybody has written Director off for the past two years. “It’s dead and buried” we’ve been chanting. Well then, prepare for a miracle, because Director has arissen from the dead and has just been re-launched in a version 11.

Features include support for all known and unknown media formats (videos, images and audio), a brand new 3D engine with physics subsets, Lingo is “gone” and replaced with JavaScript as main scripting language, text-renderer, a brand new interface and of course a vast selection of new Xtras (plugins).

Director 11 is not a competitor to Flash due to the lower penetration of the ShockWave plugin (4,5 MB). However, it sails ut as a competitor to AIR, and a serious one as many of the new Xtras are certified with Vista and OSX. Many of the new Xtras have capabilities far beyond the AIR environment.

Adobe is pinpointing the game-industry as well as the traditional video and e-learning markets with this new release. Personally I see it as an actor on the application-market for specialized task-applications as well.

Check it out here.

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Some useful RIA links

By wojciech. January 22, 2008

I believe that those links are worth mentioning, RIA & Flex communities:

Some other very interesting links:

I believe that list of other links, strongly related to the Flex and Actionscript 3, will be also helpful. Please, give me some time to choose some from my bookmarks :)

Also posted in Flash, Flex, Front-end, RIA, Silverlight | 1 Comment

Cairngorm vs. Pure-MVC – some thoughts

By Trond. January 18, 2008

Very nice intro to microarchitechtures, Wojciech, and I believe a correct assumption that Cairngorm is the one to choose.

However I want to advocate the use of PureMVC. I tried to use a “semi-Cairngorm” approach on my latest project and having only mediocre knowledge of how Cairngorm works it took me too much time to wrap my head around it entirely. Maybe it’ll help if you could publish a hands on example made in Cairngorm.
I have now tried to make an ideal small-app in Pure-MVC and I find the concept of MVC-Facade much easier to grasp than the MVC-Service logic (This of course since I know the Facade pattern better ;) ) I like the strict use of mediators and proxies, the way you kind of information-hide all the VO/TDOs known from Cairngorm.
The main critique of pure-MVC is that the strict-typing of retun values from proxies is gone, all you get is generic objects. This is a big flaw since you loose the ability ty type-check return values. You’ll need to know what comes back. However  I feel the same problem is present in the Cairngorm’s VOs as well? Or am I wrong.
Pure-MVC has scheduled a new release “soon” and I am curious of what to expect. If they address the few flaws they have now it’ll sail up as the best cross-language microarchitechture to use, since Pure-MVC is now language-transparent (ie .Net-compatible and SilverLight-compatible). Cairngorm is currently bound to ActionScript (AS3).
However… the word on the net is that “if you’re gonna use a microarchitechture…use Cairngorm”, so one day soonI’m gonna make an effort and use it :)

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