I wish I got it right more!
Flash
Woo, I presented at Max
Dec 3rd
I gave my presentation at Adobe Max this morning on building Flex applications with PureMVC. It was a real privilege to get the opportunity to speak, and I hope those who attended found it useful.
I also feel fortunate that I had such a good topic to talk on, as that always makes it easier 
so many thanks to Cliff for doing such a great job with PureMVC
In case anyone is interested I have uploaded the slides and the sample code…
code
slides (keynote)
slide (swf)
Day one at Adobe Max Europe
Dec 1st
The highlight of the first day was always going to be the keynote. Whilst there was nothing revelatory, it was inspiring to see Adobe showcase their products. This was perhaps helped by the impressive circa 30m wide video wall.
I particularly enjoyed the talk given by the BBC. The somewhat muted service they provide for non-Windows users has always been a bug bearer for me. I was pleased to hear though that they have been handed a solution to their licensing issues by the DRM support in Air 1.5. This means we can now have the same download manager facilities, along with some notification goodness, wrapped up in a shiny cross-platform AIR app – result.
Another demo that caught my eye was a news reader for the New York Times. I was shown the current New York Times news reader about a year ago. It’s a chunky WPF application, so no good to me in Unix land. What it did do very nicely however was display column based text in whatever sized window you might have the app open in. That same functionally is now available (or soon to be, I’m not sure if it’s out yet) in an Air application. This is no doubt made a lot easier by the new text rendering engine within Flash 10, which allows text to flow between containers. For some more info check out this report
Ohh, and for general information about the Keynotes go here
ta ta
ps, I’m also posting on the LBi blog, check it out here
Project Snooze
Nov 1st
A little while back I started a project called Project Snooze. My idea was to port the basic functionalty of Hibernate to Adobe AIR, in the hope of making working with SQLite in AIR a much more fun/agile process. I got quite a way with it back when I was commuting as I worked on the train. Since then I have let it slip a little but now I’ve decided its about time I finished what I started!
The basic idea is that with a nominal amout of metadata Snooze can create your database, and perform CRUD operations for your objects. It supports the most common relationship types, one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many, and I am planning to build a querying api into it.
If your interested in finding out more about it you can check it out on github… where hopfully you will see a lot of commits from this lazy geek!
Flex Cairngorm code example
Jan 11th
Over the Christmas break I finally managed to claw an afternoon of free time together to knock up a little example application. Why bother? Well just about every client I go to meet and potentially work with wants to see some example code first… now since writing code is my job you wouldn’t think that was a very difficult task, but its not quite that simple. Often the projects I work on are very large, worked on by multiple programmers, and dependent on some server side code to run. Even when the projects are small enough to send to someone as an example I’m not even sure I have the legal right to-do so!
With the above in mind I though it was about time I created a little application that I could send around to plug my abilities etc, and you can see it here
A little about how it works
The app is built using Flex 3.0 and the Cairngorm framework. Data is pulled in via XML, and displayed using a simple image viewing component I created.
Why use Flex
Flex enables me to build the same breed of applications we have all been building with Flash for sometime… only with Flex we can do faster, more reliably, with a fuller api and using a decent IDE… whats not to like?
Why Cairngorm
Cairngorm is all about building complex RIA’s in a consistent MVC manner… adobe puts it like this “The Cairngorm microarchitecture is intended as a framework for Enterprise RIA developers”. As you may have noticed the little image viewer I’m using as my example code is no enterprise application, in fact it only has a couple of user gestures, I’m just trying to demonstrate my familiarity with the framework.
I think Cairngorm is very important to the Flex developer community, it offers a well proven methodology for building applications, which separates concerns, promotes testability and leads to very predictable, scalable solutions.
About the view
I wanted to build a little set of classes that would allow me to display items (which could be anything from products to images etc.) in a number of ways, and was simple to extend. The snappyviewer, which is the name of the component displaying the images is an implementation of those classes.
The main classes the view is built around are two interfaces IItemView and IItemDisplayer.
Both interfaces contain a function named display. The display function in IItemVIew is intended to delegate the displaying of items to the IItemDisplayer via composition. The display function in IItemDisplayer is implemented for various display types, ie, displaying items in a grid, or in a row (GridItemDisplayer & SlideItemDisplayer).
To change which type of view the IItemView uses I can set the IItemDisplayer though the dispayer setter function in IItemVIew and hey presto, the view is updated.
You can check out the code by right clicking on the application and selecting Source View.
Any feedback welcome
ps.. you can see the application here
Flex fights back with thermo
Oct 4th
Over the last few months I have been keeping my fingers crossed for some real big changes in the Adobe Flex camp, they just arrived!
Since I first heard about Flex over a year ago and started working with it I have been very impressed. It’s a great platform for developers to create amazing web applications on… but for me there has been one big elephant in the room, and that’s the designer developer workflow!
We’ve all seen Blend combined with XAML now, and if you’re anything like me the first thing you thought when you saw it was why on earth cant Adobe do that with mxml!!!! And now it looks like they have with the project codenamed Thermo.
Thermo allows designers to use the tools they love (like the mouse…) and to draw the application as that want it. Thermo will then convert, on the fly (or when imported from a program like photoshop) the graphics into mxml! Perfect! It even allows for visual tweaking of motions and transitions. Its looks the the application I have been dreaming the Flash IDE would become for ages!
I personally can’t wait to see what comes of this… my hope (and this may be pie in the sky right now) is that we can in the not too distant future say goodbye to the Flash IDE (well, us developers at least). This would enable developers to focus on building applications rather that bullying design into behaving like one!
For more info on thermo check out this demo.
yay for events in the display list hierarchies
Jun 16th
The new event model in actionscript 3 is glorious! At first I didn’t really appreciate how useful is was… I was pleased to see that you could create custom events as this, among other things, allows you to send custom objects in events without losing strong typing. Though it wasn’t until I came to understand the event flow in display lists that it made a massive difference to my code… (my thanks to Colin Moock for this book, that really helped me get to grips with events in as3)… when you dispatch an event in a display object you can specify a variable in the event constructor (bubbles) which causes the event to propagate through the display list hierarchy, enabling you to listen for events dispatched by DisplayObjects you do not have a direct reference to. This massively helps me centralising my code, de-coupling my code and cuts down on boring code repetition.