Space of Flex/AIR technologies

This week I got an info that Flextech User Group got registered at Adobe Groups. If you want to join this group you can find it here: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/05e8d70699/summary It is based out of Wrocław Poland. Of course their official blog is here http://blog.flextech.pl but I think everyone in Polish community already knows that

Important to note here is that Flextech is not a new group. Actually guys behind it (especially Paweł Cichoń) are one of the most active Flex community supporters in Poland! Big kudos for Paweł and his crew for doing really great job, keep it up guys!!!

I’m really proud that Polish Flash Platform Community is becoming really strong and active. We could also see it last week at Warsaw Flash Camp (checkout the photo review) event were we had incredible atmosphere with unbelievable attendance.

Tomorrow is a big day for Polish Flash community. We are having a Flash Camp event in Warsaw! The day is expected to be really amazing in terms of content and expected 300 attendees. For those that cannot attend in person there will be streaming available at: http://flashcamp.istream.pl/

Agenda and more datails is available here: http://g-media.pl/aug/flashCamp/

Lets spin Polish RIA scene…

I got a message today that new Polish Adobe User Group was created (RIA Freaks - http://www.riafreaks.com/). It is located ouf of Toruń (this is the town of Nicolaus Copernicus) and it is gathered around University of Mikołaj Kopernik staff and students. I think these guys there are trying to follow Copernicus and are actually one of the most advanced RIA enabled universities in Poland. You can check their TV at http://tv.umk.pl/, which is full featured Internet TV website with live campus video streams and recorded events, lectures and interviews.

If you want to join this group at Adobe Groups the link is here: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/887feaa4c1/summary

If I counted correctly on Adobe Groups we have 7 officially registered groups out of Poland. I encourage anyone who is passionate about Adobe technologies and products to open up new groups in their cities. This way you can connect with other people sharing similar interests, knowledge or job. Also you can meet other members outside your area as there is over 700 groups registered world wide. As an Adobe we will provide you with some benefits like, software licenses, access to weekly presentations, access to selected beta programs and many others. So feel free to register at Adobe Groups and create your new user group!

Today we released first betas of Flash Builder 4 (formerly known as Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst. This was long awaited release as we could already feel its taste with public and open releases of Flex 4 SDK. Now the tools and SDK are available on Adobe Labs http://labs.adobe.com.

This release brings a lot of new features and improvements especially to Flex skinning and styling architecture. There is whole new framework introduced called Spark that allows full separation between UI component logic and their look. For better designer and developer workflow Flash Catalyst comes in hand supporting import of artwork from tools like Photoshop or Illustrator and converting it to Flex components.

When it comes to developer productivity improvements there are very noticeable changes in compiler performance, integrated into Flash Builder FlexUnit test wizzards, asdocs support in code hinting and I think also very much awaited code indentation.

We have also released interesting articles where you can learn more:

• What’s new in the Flex 4 SDK
• What’s new in Flash Bulder 4
• Getting started with Flash Catalyst

and some videos:

• http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/

The Merapi Project http://merapiproject.net was just released as Open Source. Merapi is a Java-to-AIR bridge framework, that brings power of Java API’s to AIR/Flex applications. I’m very excited to see this finally happen and looking forward for new applications with event tighter integration to underlying operating system.  With Java cross platform capabilities this is a perfect mix that will bring RIA’s to another level!

Congratulations to Merapi team!

You can find Merapi Project code on the Google Code Web site:
http://merapi.googlecode.com/

Example applications are located here:
http://merapi-examples.googlecode.com/

And to participate in the conversation with other Merapi project members and folks in the community, be sure to head over to the Google Group that was setup here:
http://groups.google.com/group/merapi-project

New product from Acrobat.com family was just released (its an early release so you can find it on labs at the moment)! Its an online presentation editor that allows its users to share, edit and collaborate presentations on Adobe hosted services. It is very similar to in concept, layout and of course technology to Buzzword - an online text editor. You can check it out here: http://labs.acrobat.com/

Tour de LiveCycle is a desktop application designed by the Adobe Evangelist team to serve as both an introduction to Adobe LiveCycle ES and an extensive reference tool. We have organized over 1,000 pages of content into a hierarchical tree that you can use to explore the areas most relevant to you. Whether you need to build a full application or you just plan to spend 10 minutes getting a feel for LiveCycle ES and the kinds of problems it can help you solve, Tour de LiveCycle can help.

You can find more info here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/tourdelivecycle/

Here is the badge that you can use to install Tour de LiveCycle:

You can also check Tour de Flex which is very powerful demo of Flex and AIR technologies:

Yesterday Amethyst Beta 5 was released. Amethyst is a Flex development environment for Visual Studio. With every release it becomes more and more feature complete. I think in the future it has a big chance of becoming the Flex IDE of many VS/.NET developers.

This release bring feature like:

Refactoring

• Rename variables, classes and methods
• Encapsulate field (add getters and setters and update references)
• Preview and edit (check or uncheck items) before renaming
• Rename from ‘smart tags’

Organize imports

• Auto-add class to import list
• Sort imports
• Remove unused imports
• Sort and remove imports in a single operation

Configuration-dependent property pages

• Seven pages of categorized project properties
• Save properties as named configurations for easy re-use
• Option to select alternative Flex SDKs
• Options to define symbols for conditional compilation

Find all References

• Highlight an ID such as a class, method or variable to navigate to all references in project

Run and debug on server

• Option to run or debug applications using a web server
• Supports WebDev, Apache, IIS

Join us at Adobe MAX 2009
October 4-7, 2009
Los Angeles, CA

Adobe MAX (max.adobe.com) is an experience unlike any other. It’s an opportunity to connect with thousands of Adobe users, expand your Adobe product skills, and learn the latest about Adobe AIR and the full benefits of the Adobe Flash Platform.

Early registration is now open, take advantage of Early Bird pricing and the best opportunity to secure a seat in popular preconference labs (limited to 50 attendees).

Mateusz Małczak one of our Polish Flash Platform gurus (an author of an awards winning Komixo http://komixo.com/ comics editor) has released an asynchronous JPEG encoder that is based on libjpeg and compiled into AS code with Alchemy. More info about his work you can find here: http://segfaultlabs.com/blog/post/asynchronous-jpeg-encoding

Here is also a preview where you can compare it with optimized JPEGEncoder. It not only is faster but it also produces smaller jpegs: