Category Archives: Flex

The Future of Flash – some thoughts

By Trond. June 15, 2010

Once again Flash is in trouble. It’s not the first time, and I believe it’s still not the last. From Javascript, AJAX, Silverlight, Google, Microsoft… you name them, they’ve probably had some thorn in Flash’s side.

Now it’s piling up for Flash again: Steve Jobs is crusading against Flash accompanied by the entire HTML5 consortium. Atop of this all major video-service providers, mobile phone makers, and a whole lot of others are now leaving Flash behind in the dust.
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Flash and Search Engine Optimization

By Sven. May 19, 2010


HTML, video, and images are indexed by search engines and stored so you can easily find them in a web search. The question is still, does Flash content get indexed by the search engines? Already in 2008 Adobe announced that they had teamed up with the search industry leaders (Google & Yahoo!) to improve search results of dynamic web content and Internet applications. At the time Adobe said:

“Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.”

Two years later we have experienced that some of our Flash solutions does not get many results when googling them. Now why is this? Has Adobe/Google/Yahoo! failed or is it just that we have missed out on the details on how to really make the Flash more search optimized? Adobe stated in 2008 that all existing SWF solutions, across all versions of the SWF file format should be supported. That is without taking any grips to improve existing solutions for SEO. Can this be true? There are a lot of rumors and myths about Flash and CEO around on the web. I’ll try in this article to figure out what the real facts are…

What does it really take to make your Flash site optimized for search engines?
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On how to play HTML5 video

By Jørn. March 23, 2010

The movie playing on mobile devices

Most web developers agree that the ability to play video on webpages is a must, however the jury is out on how these videos should be played. I’m of course referring to the HTML 5 video format controversy. Throw FlashPlayer into the mix and you’ll end up with a humongous fight leading fast to nowhere. Based on this, focusing on finding a solution, I tried to piece together a player using both HTML 5 video, and FlashPlayer for less capable browsers like Internet Explorer. You can find a demo alpha version of the player here: http://makingria.com/demo/html5/videoplayer/

Browser support

The player supports the following browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 7 (FlashPlayer, H:264 video)
  • Firefox 3.6 (Native playback, OGG Theora video)
  • Google Chrome and Apple Safari (Native Playback, H.264 video)
  • iPad and iPhone (Native Playback)
  • Opera 10.5 (Native playback, OGG Theora video)

How to build it

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Also posted in Front-end, HTML, JavaScript, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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.

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Flash Builder – revolution or evolution

By Krzysztof. March 8, 2010

Flash Builder

Flash Builder (which is a succesor to Flex Builder) is currently avialable in beta 2 version for some time now. Since Adobe is still postponing release date of final versions I decide not to wait any longer and try to grasp it’s new features in some application more complicated than samples provided in tutorials that could be found around the webAfter dowloading and installing application we get 60 days of evaluation period, but it can be prolonged using valid Flex 3 license number.

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Easily format your code in Flex Builder

By Torbjørn. December 11, 2009

flex-iconA quick tip if you’re using Flex Builder and are missing a quick way to format your code. Flex Formatter is a free open source plugin that adds some very useful buttons to your IDE. These will make ASDoc, format, and code rearrangement just one click away.

Get the plugin from SourceForge or read Grant Skinner’s installation guide to install it from within Flex Builder.

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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 AIR, Front-end, Mobile | 2 Comments