Category Archives: RIA

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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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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The iPad experience

By Sven. January 29, 2010

iPad
When Steve Jobs presented the newest Apple gadget, the iPad, the discussions started all over the world. Some call it a ”giant iPhone”, except that you can’t use it as a phone, so maybe a giant iPod Touch is more accurate. The similarities are many. The iPad can run most of the applications on Apples App Store, and to develop iPad applications you use the iPhone SDK, although a updated version with better support for the new giant. Will the iPad be the next big thing and experience the same success as the iPhone? There are a bunch of discussions out there. The price, the size, the possibilities and of course the limitations. One of the limitations I have read most about, and as a Flash developer are very interested in, is the lack of support for the Adobe Flash Player.

Since the release of the iPhone Adobe have tried to get Apple to release a Flash player version for the iPhone, but without any luck. The situation has not changed when it comes to the iPad. The big difference here is that one of the major things to use iPad to is surfing the web. We have been used to limitations when surfing the web on mobile devices. But I must admit that I don’t expect any of these limitations when it comes to a “mini-computer” like the iPad.
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Also posted in Flash, Front-end, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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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Silverlight 4 (Beta) unrolling!

By Trond. November 30, 2009

silverlightMicrosoft has really put an effort into the newest version of Silverlight (v4), making it into a fully usable platform for RIA development. I suspect the release of Windows7 has freed up some more resources for the Silverlight team. Microsoft has addressed much of the critique of the previous versions of Silverlight. A lot of new controls, support for data-binding, MP4-video and a lot of development-tools makes Silverlight 4 a platform worth checking out for your next RIA-project. I have scratced a bit on the surface of this upcoming release, and here are some of the reasons why I am looking forward to start with Silverlight 4.

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Also posted in .NET, Front-end, Silverlight | Leave a comment