Flash

I’ve just read some pretty valid concerns over at EverythingFlex with regards to Thermo, announced yesterday at MAX. I thought I’d post my response on here… At first I was also a little scared by this [tool]. But if you look at how it is at present, as Tink mentions there, you have to export layers out of Photoshop (which is a skill in itself unless your designer is ultra neat and doesn’t have a thousand layers with adjustments and masks). This means you are expecting your developers to be extremely savvy with Photoshop, luckily a lot of Flashers are, but that’s not always the case, particularly with Flex devs. ...

Base64 encoding is a very useful technique that allows for the sending of binary data, such as an image file, over the wire using plain-text. This means it can be embedded in XML (plain, SOAP or XML-RPC), it also means the binary data can be stored very easily in a database. It works by reading in data in packs of 6 bits, and turning each one of those into a character in a simple 64 character alphabet. This input data can be text, but it can also be binary data stored in a ByteArray; perhaps the contents of a file, or an MP3 your Flash application has constructed in memory. ...

Possible gotcha with the XML class, but I’d like to get this confirmed if anyone has a second to try this out. It seems that the XML class is converting " to its literal ASCII representation (i.e. the quote mark “) when converting a String into a new XML object. I’m sending this data over XML-RPC and I cannot have quotes being sent as plain-text, they need to be XML/HTML encoded. ...

There appears to be a bug with ExternalInterface when your Flash movie is inside a FORM tag, which is what ASP.NET does by default. You will get a “null has no properties” type error because the JavaScript that ExternalInterface generates at runtime is unable to reference the Flash movie. It appears to be due to IE not putting the form in the same place as other browsers’ DOMs (specifically the window object). ...

This affects projects that make use of FLAs and runtime shared assets, commonly sharing things like fonts or components amongst several SWFs to prevent embedding them several times in the various files that might make up a project. The first thing to note is the “Load Order” in the settings panel in Flash. It defaults to “bottom up”, and this means it streams in the contents of the bottom-most layer first, before loading and executing code that lives on any layers above it. ...

I’ve posted about Buzzword before, the upcoming online (/offline with Apollo?) word processor. To me Buzzword really illustrates why I continue to back Flash and Flex over AJAX. I don’t care what people use if it’s a good experience, but the limitations are definitely becoming more and more apparent, and perhaps in 2007 we will begin to see the Flash apps just accelerating away from the current kings of the RIA scene, not just in demos and prototypes, but in the real world. The great thing about this game is that you don’t have to compete by spreading FUD, you can just build users by building better experiences, they (/we) are a fickle bunch! ...

Fantastic, something else to learn 😉 Sun bloggers have been dropping hints to look toward the JavaOne conference in and around all of the Silverlight posts that have clogged up the aggregators the last week or so, and it appears the announcement for their new AJAX/RIA alternative comes in the form of “JavaFX”. JavaFX makes use of a new scripting language and utilises the Swing APIs for UI. This probably comes as no suprise, I have drummed on to my poor colleagues the last year how AJAX’s days are numbered in terms of the popularity it currently enjoys, it simply cannot keep up because HTML and JS were never intended to build this “new” breed of online app, too much reliance on the browser itself naturally brings with it serious yet fully justified limitations. We’re reaching the top of that particular bell-curve now. For an example of this you just need to compare Google Docs (Google being the absolute cream of the crop in AJAX scene, yes I know they use GWT), with early pre-alpha screens of Buzzword. The potential benefits of using the Flash Player are limitless in terms of real-time document editing (binary data transfer over XML refreshes, bitmap editing, video embedding, animation creation etc). Microsoft, Sun and Adobe of course are all providing better tools to craft future of the web. ...

I just got sent a very interesting link to a Flex app from James Ward that runs tests on a variety of different data exchange formats. The tests include results for: 1. Server processing time 2. Data transmission time 3. Parsing time and… 4. Rendering time Of course no real suprises that Flex/Flash Remoting performs the best in all cases (the Dojo example appears to transfer quicker, but it is actually only dealing with 500 rows instead of 5000 in the Flex tests, maybe because it is sadly let down by the incredibly long render time), “classic” AJAX performs fairly badly, with JSON and Dojo falling somewhere in between. ...

Just got sent this by a colleague, great fun and well executed, reminds me somewhat of LocoRoco…. http://www.acrobots.net/

Yesterday saw the first meeting of the Bedale group, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank James for organising it, and for the wine, there were a great deal of top quality bottles had over the course of the night along with some excellent cheese. I’d recommend anyone using Adobe products in an organisation to come along, many topics were discussed. From LiveCycle to Apollo to Flex, we covered a lot of ground regarding the products in terms of positioning, functionality, and in particular relationships with Adobe and the ISV outreach and support programme. It was interesting for me personally to talk to the guys from Arch Consulting who specialise in SAP R/3 and LiveCycle. In particular it was great to get a better picture on how Adobe fits in with the enterprise, I feel fortunate that I can pick up a beta and pretty much start using it in production, however at the other end of the spectrum there is a huge amount of proof needed before making leaps into new technologies. ...