Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF Flash

Adobe made a surprisingly big but long speculated announcement about a new project called the Open Screen Project for Flash. This announcement is fairly significant and hopes to ensure the future of Flash and its new AIR apps.

What is this project all about?

Flash, right now, does not maintain a consistent runtime environment deployed across all devices. This means the Flash experience can vary across different devices or ‘screens’.  In other words, it may not look and act the same on your mobile device, TV, or PC (PC being the most consistently high-quality experience). Through the project, however, Adobe hopes to achieve a more consistent experience across all screens.

To do this, Adobe has taken a few major steps:

Continue reading "Flash Goes Open Screen"

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Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF Flash

According to appleinsider.com, “Adobe has started development of a Flash player suitable for use on Apple Inc.’s iPhone.” The reason for the delay, according to CEO Steve Jobs, was technological limitations. Jobs said the Flash player is “too slow to be useful” on the iPhone and that Adobe’s Flash Lite is “not capable of being used with the Web.” While Flash Lite is very limited compared to the power of the desktop Flash Player, Jobs’ statement can be interpreted as something other than underhanded. Should we just accept it at face value, though? I’m not so sure.

Continue reading "Flash Player (Still) in the Works for Apple’s iPhone"

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Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF Flash and Opinions/Reviews

This month’s meeting was small (nine people) but friendly and featured two speakers.  The first presenter, Eric Coker of PStrat, spoke about PHP services for Flex. Eric discussed BlazeDS, an open-source, fast, scalable, Java-based remoting and web-messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time. He strongly emphasized the cheapness of an open-source technology. He also spoke about AMFPHP, PDO or PHP Data Objects and their roles, and light-weight messaging and remoting technologies.

Continue reading "Raleigh-Durham Adobe User Group (RDAUG) Meeting Recap"

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Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF Flash and Opinions/Reviews

Maps have come a long way on the web; having a powerful API will take them even further. Yahoo! introduced a very exciting API for AS3 in late February that proves to be the most powerful map API for Actionscript on the web right now.

With the map API you have a great map engine with the ability to create custom components, overlays and markers while taking advantage of different web services provided by Yahoo!.

Some of the goodies they have included in the release so far:

• Traffic
• Satellite
• Hybrid maps
• Custom Markers
• Geo Coding
• Geodesic Polylines (think of that map in Indiana Jones when he’s flying all over the globe)
• Local Search
• Weather Map
• Flickr Photos

The Flickr photos API is one of the fun new features. It takes the most popular key words based on photos taken and tagged within the cities and areas you are currently viewing on your Yahoo! map. The tags act as markers, so you click on a tag to reveal random photos and even videos taken by people who visited the area. It’s a great way to get an eclectic view of whatever area you’re interested in.

Getting started with the API really is very simple. All you have to do is download the swc and sign up for a free API key. Within about 10 minutes, I had the zoom component and the Map, Satellite and Hybrid views fully functioning.

This initial introduction is limited (for now) to Flex. However, a somewhat simple workaround has come from some talented developers for those of you who are very eager to take your maps into Flash right away.

There are some restrictions to usage. However, it’s fairly generous. The rate limits are based on the number of API calls made per IP address during a 24-hour window. You can think of the 24 hours as a day, but the clock does not reset itself at midnight, per se. Instead, the clock starts the first time you make the API call from the IP. Then, 24 hours later, Yahoo! resets the counters for your IP address.

I’m excited about seeing some great (usable) Flash maps on many more sites.

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Peyton Crump, ON THE TOPIC OF Flash and Opinions/Reviews

Occasionally, the design team here stumbles across a site that merits a good “wow.” Levitated.net presents visually beautiful, technically advanced, open-source Flash experiments that explore some of the “outer limits” of Flash.

Two greater points that we’d like to make about this site are:

1) We love it when Flash is not only used appropriately, but when it’s utilized for some of its advanced capabilities.
In many of these examples, Flash is used to emulate realistic movement through code that supports and applies the laws of physics to mimic the way objects behave in nature. Through this approach, users are presented with a piece of art/interaction that is dynamically generated and behaves so. In other words, each time you explore one of these pieces, you likely will not get the same results. They’re dynamic and organic and, therefore, remain engaging and interesting for repeat visits and uses.

2) We learn from and appreciate seeing the code.
Flash, by its nature, outputs files (.swf’s) that are not explorable from a code standpoint. While this protects the integrity of the code, it leaves everyone except the creator in the dark about how and why it works. We applaud the efforts of the contributors at Levitated to share their source code (.fla’s) and let us salivate at their brilliance. As we often say here at Viget, “The code behind the creation is often as beautiful as the creation itself.”

Perhaps, though, they say it best in their own (and fewer) words:

Levitated.net contains visual poetry and science fun narrated in an object oriented graphic environment.

The sketches and applications generated as a byproduct of research are provided online as open source Flash modules.

These pages are attempting to fasten a usable structure around a continually evolving computational ecology, so that it may be observed and enjoyed by participants of the network.

Visual, experimental, intelligent, and community/knowledge-friendly. A good recipe in our book.

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