May 2009 Archives

After the success of Tour de Flex (which just recently celebrated its 5,000,000th sample viewed) the fine folks at Adobe have released Tour de Livecycle, a one stop shop for discovering the many, many facets of the Livecycle Enterprise Suite. Hopefully this initiative will help put this powerful yet underrated offering from Adobe onto people's radar screens.

There's no point in me going into what Livecycle is, but suffice it to say that any self-respecting enterprise Flex developer owes it to him/herself to seriously consider gaining some Livecycle-related experience. "There be gold in them thar skills."

You know Ottawa has arrived when the Flash Builder 4 / Flash Catalyst Launch Tour announces a date at Adobe's offices here in Ottawa! Aside from the upcoming Flash Builder and Catalyst (if you haven't seen it yet, slap yourself now), there'll be a tutorial for PixelBender (which is freaking awesome), as well as a show off session for CartoVista (no clue).

Inquiring (make that "trivial") minds want to know: What logo will Adobe now associate with the re-branded, better than ever, sliced bread tasty "Flash Builder"?

Since Adobe seems to have somewhat linked the underlying technology that their authoring/development tools use to those tools by making both share similar logos (e.g. the red Fl for Flash CS4 to match the red f for the Flash platform proper), what does that mean for the upcoming re-branding of Flex Builder to Flash Builder?

Flex Builder currently has a gray Fx as a logo. Flash also has a red logo... Will the gray Fx therefore be replaced with a red Fx? (Oh but "Fx" still makes me think of Flex and that word is now a no-go as far as Builder is concerned)

Ok, then. Will Builder get a gray Fl, like a Flash CS4 logo only much, much more serious? (But then what about colour-blind people who can't distinguish red from gray?)

Hmmm. It sure does make one ponder. (For about 10 seconds and then you go back to doing actual work.)

[Follow-up edit: I just got my answer: The new logo is a gray "Fb". Boy do I feel better now that that's out of the way!]

[Edits:

• Added Jun Heider's materials on run-time resource profiling (Day 3, Session 2)
• Added Ryan Phelan's slides on Pixel Bender (Day 3, Session 4)
• Added Lafferty and Frishberg's slides and an example on custom ItemRenderers (Day3, Session 4)
• Added Sanchez' slides on Degrapha (Day 1, Session 2)
• (Über Edit) John from 360 Conferences has uploaded all of the presenter slides from 360|Flex Indy that he could get his hands on here. There are 33 of them, at last count. Thanks a million, John.
• Added Laura Arguello's slides from her (excellent) Mate session (Day 2, Session 5)]

As you've probably guessed by now, if you missed 360|Flex by your own choice, you're kind of a... well, a loser. Many of the best presenters, mentors, open-source community leaders and trend-setting Flex developers were there, pouring their knowledge out in exchange for a hotel room and a 360|Flex "speaker" t-shirt. (If the room was in a train car, then just maybe it's a fair trade.)

One of the worst things about 360 (yes, I'm about to complain here, apologies to Tom and John) is that since there are generally 5 session going on at once, you're going to miss something. (I'll give you a second now to get over it.) Some things you'll never, ever get back (look through your high school yearbook for some quick examples). Fortunately, I have compiled a quick list of presenter materials that didn't make it onto the USB key. I will update this in the next few days as more stuff things trickles in.

I've listed these by day and session. (Note that I'm not counting the keynotes in numbering the sessions.)

Day 1

Session 1

Assert Yourself (FlexUnit 4) -- Michael Labriola (ably assisted by Jeff Tapper)
Slides

Session 2

Degrapha Declarative Graphics Framework - Juan Sanchez
Slides

Session 3

Structured Log testing - Renaun Erickson
Missed Points

Another Mapping API...Not! - Mansour Raad
Slides

Session 4

Any Which Array But Loose - Michael Labriola
Slides

Day 2

Session 1

Creating our first i18n (internationalization) Flex application - Oğuz Demirkapı
Slides

Flex Server Lib - Andy Powell
Slides

FLEXperience - Putting the UX in Flex -- Joe Johnston
Slides

Session 3

How Not to Code Flex Applications - Jeff Tapper
Slides

Session 4

Developers are from Mars, Designers are from Venus -- Chad Udell
Slides

Session 5

Building an AIR Video Recording Spy Camera with Motion Detection -- Rich Tretola
Slides

Breaking Down your Application with Mate -- Laura Arguello
Slides

Day 3

Session 2

Flex Profiling by Example - Jun Heider

Slides and source

Session 3

Merapi: What's Next -- Adam Flater
Source announced at 360|Flex

Session 4

Bending and Flexing with PixelBender - Ryan Phelan
Slides

Custom Item Renderers - Lafferty and Frishberg
Slides Example

That's all for now. Check back later in case more stuff pops up (it surely will).

Well, normally touch-downs in Indy are welcomed with the roar of a crowd of hysterical fan. Strangely, when my plane touched-down last night, no such noise was heard from the fine denizens of Indianapolis.What gives?

So here I am, 2 minutes before the keynote is to begin. The room is huge, cathedral like and brimming with techy talent. Check-in was easy and quick and the people seem friendly enough. They gave us a bag and a USB key. I'll let you know later what the contents of it might be. I suppose I'll have to introduce myself to someone... not exactly a stretch for an extrovert like me.

Anyways, gotta go. I still haven't reviewed the list of presentations for this AM. But first I'm going to scan the room for Brad. He has to be here somewhere... or I'm telling!

And now for a quick time out for some fun.

As anyone who has talked to me about PC gaming would know, I hold the Half-Life series dear to my gamer heart. It is (IMHO) one of the best crafted, most originally imagined game universes that I know of. The original Half-Life (developed by Valve and distributed by Sierra) was simply a revelation while the second (which I am currently playing through) is no less innovative.

The series has spawned a number of high quality quasi-sequels and mods (e.g. Day of Defeat, Counterstrike), many of which I have wasted untold hours on. One spin-off that I haven't played is the "cult classic" Portal. It seems very original and visually stunning, but the gaming budget is tight in the Bastien household. Perhaps someone will donate a copy to me someday out of pity <hint hint>.

2D Tribute to 3D Goodness

While digging around Newgrounds, I came across a Flash 2D port/fan tribute to Portal. This little game is very polished and will provide you with a lot of brain-teasing fun for your money (i.e. MSRP of $0.00). Thankfully, Valve hasn't come down hard on the developers for using their intellectual property in making this game. If anything, I'm surprised that Valve hasn't bought it up outright and used it for their own purposes. As with all well-designed software, the interface is intuitive and elegant, regardless of the complexity of the task on hand.

In case you haven't heard of it, the original Portal is a 3D puzzle game where players must attempt to navigate an obstacle course of sorts by using a "Handheld Portal Device". It allows you to project a pair of linked tears in space-time (or portals), one blue and one yellow. They are "linked" in that when you (or another object) pass through one portal, you will come out through the other. The objective is pretty simple: you must find your way to the exit of each section (or room) of the obstacle course without getting squashed, burnt or ventilated. The games physics are meant to be realistic, which leads to some interesting quandaries involving "looping" portals (i.e. picture falling from a portal in the ceiling into one in the floor... over and over again until you reach terminal velocity).

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Just click on the logo and try the game, for crying out loud.

Sure doesn't take some folks long to figure out how to profit from mass hysteria. Case in point: SwineFighter.

Regardless of its playability value, this "viral" Flash game (pun intended) demonstrates just how quickly you can develop a basic 2D game using Flash to cash in on the pet cause of the day. The premise of the game is that infected porkers are invading the planet and need to be innoculated, lest they bring our very civilization to its knees. In case you were wondering, at last count over 16,000,000 infected swine had been injected with the spicy serum of justice.

HeyZap Flash Game Aggregator

More interesting than the game itself (which isn't very fun or particularly clever) is how it is distributed. I had never heard of it before, but the game is made available on HeyZap (presumably the sound one hears during a phaser-related friendly fire incident), a Flash game aggregator that allows a developer to easily promote his app across the Web. HeyZap  provides a means of embedding their aggregator app into any website, allowing their member developers/distributors to propagate their products across thousands of sites. Very clever indeed.

So, the next time a new form of media-driven mass hysteria is hyped to level 5+ on the panic scale, you too can ca$h in (see: Y2K, avian flu - coming soon, vaccines causing autism, global cooling/warming/catastrophic climate change, the "population bomb", antiperspirant causing Alzheimers, hovering black helicopters listening to your dreams, etc.)

Please allow me to digress for a moment

Frankly, I think that people should forget about the deadly plague du jour and be more concerned with their levels of exercise and the quality of their diet. But then again, you won't likely see anyone making a killing off of Flash versions of "FibreFighter", "Touch Your Toes For Justice" or "The Extreme Sit-Up Throwdown".

That said, if the swine flu cases start to pile up, expect SwineFighter II Alpha Turbo Extreme Re-Mix to pop up on a Flash game aggregator near you.

Well, after some delay, uncertainty and ambivalence, it is confirmed: my employer (4Point Solutions Ltd.) is sending a colleague (Brad) and I to 360|Flex in Indianapolis. In the interest of good relations with our gracious hosts, I'd like to warn the fine people of the Hoosier State to tie down your valuables, hide your pets and children and inoculate your livestock.

I'm looking forward to going, first to learn something new, but I'd be happy just to get to meet other Flex developers and hear first-hand from/meet some of the people whose blogs I've been reading. 4Point is sponsoring the business summit at the conference, so keep an eye out for our banner somewhere in the conference centre.

In case you will also be at the conference, after you've secured your valuables, you might just want to say "Hi", so here is a (not exactly recent) picture of me to help in picking me out of a crowd of nerds (a category of fauna in which your humble author doesn't include himself, of course). Since I've never been to Indy, I'd love to hear about good places to eat within walking distance of the conference. Also, feel free to drop me a line if you'd like to have lunch and talk shop.

I haven't yet gone over the sessions that are offered and am open to suggestions. Here's hoping that someone will be covering (in some way) advanced Flex concepts and architectures, test-driven Flex development (including IOC/DI) and implementing full-on enterprise Flex/Java projects (scalability, maintainability, etc.). I also enjoy beer, pretzels and lightly seasoned, medium-rare animal flesh.

Consider yourself warned, Indianapolis. Don't let me down!