Ted’s post is good, so I’m not going to detract from it too much, but we haven’t heard the entire story behind the language and building actual apps. They won’t be able to compete with Flex in 1.0, but they make make some big strides. We should have a much better picture of how all this shapes up after MIX.
Browsing articles from "April, 2007"
Huh, Flex development jost got much more interesting
You’ve heard the news (in case you didn’t, it’s all about Flex going Open Source). Very good move from Adobe, and not only for the community, but for Adobe itself.
The Flex SDK and compiler have already been freely distributable, so Adobe’s money is coming out of Flex Builder and server products. On the other side, money is spent on creating those freely distributable products. So why not kill two flies with one stroke. By open sourcing the SDK and compiler, the community gets a better product (more frequent updates, better performance, more features), which increases interest in Flex and drives sales and resources can be pulled (well, at some point) from the SDK and compiler teams because the community is doing all the heavy lifting.
Now people of course start going “c’mon, the only thing you haven’t open sources in the Flash Platform is the FlashPlayer (apart from the AS3 engine), how about opening it up?”. Dare not wish things you really don’t want to see, say I. It’s ok to let everyone contribute to the Flex SDK, and have millions of builds flying in each direction, since in the end, a flaw build only crashes one single application. But imagine a community driven FlashPlayer out there. New releases and branches every week. Some group would add 3D Hardware acceleration immediately, others would work on MOD-player support, and both would be distributed and not compatible and we would loose the most important aspect of Flash – ubiquity.
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Silverlight – oh no they didn’t!
Ted has a great post on the shortcomings and mistakes of Silverlight. Some of the things he points out are obvious (Having 0% penetration is really problematic, although MS is of course going to bundle it with Windows/IE, but who uses them anyhow 
) , but there were a few big surprises (at least to me). For example, Silverlight does not stream. Ok, that makes sense, since it’s not binary. But to me the killer was:
Silverlight does not have a scripting language built in, but uses the browsers JavaScript capabilities. Yeah, WTF? Welcome to debugging hell!
Of course, modern browsers are quite compatible, but to me it still means that I’ll opt for my sanity and keep my hands of Silverlight (well, at least until it supports hardware-accelerated 3D on Mac)
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Hi Ryan, does it really matter at this point? I mean, would you use a superior programming language and IDE if the result could only be played back by 1% (at the moment) of potential users? In my view, penetration is all that matters if you don’t have it. And when you don’t have it, you’re having the chicken-egg problem. Developers won’t develop, since there’s no installed user base, and users won’t install because there’s no developed applications. The only way to break free of the problem is to provide features in the runtime that are so cool that developers jump in even though they know there are no users. And Silverlight unfortunately brings nothing new to the table.
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The penetration issue will be interesting. If they flip on Windows Update, they get 80%+ penetration automatically, so they can hit the magic number. Even if they don’t do that, they can promote the runtime via their web properties and partners and still come out well for a V 1.0 product.
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“Silverlight does not have a scripting language built in”
You are so misinformed. Did you know that?! -
Actually I’m not. Silverlight 1.0 relies on the underlying browser’s JS engine. But Silverlight 1.1 does indeed have it’s own embedded script engines (multiple)…
Flex finesse – MillionClouds.com
I just put MillionClouds into production (it’s only a soft launch, so pardon the dust, I know it’s there…). It’s my first public Flex application and I’ve enjoyed working on it every minute.
MillionClouds is a joint venture between our company and Christian Yakowlef , a renowned finnish photographer. The idea behind it is that whenever you arrange a photo shoot the only thing that you cannot control is the sky, so advertising agencies very often require replacement skies. Now you could go out and wait for the perfect weather or try your luck with any of the major image banks, but searching for just the right sky is really a drag if you have to use keywords (blueish cumulus clouds with 20% overcast on a nice day won’t get you any results ).
MillionClouds gives you a very nice and intuitive user interface to search for exactly the sky you need, and IMHO it’s working beautifully. We’ve not yet tagged most of the images, but I just wanted to put this baby live. Oi, Christian, how about pulling yourself together and tagging the rest of the images, now that it’s live?
Try out the color sort functionality, found under the Global Filters panel. It produces some great looking results.
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Nice app!
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How are you filtering on color? Is the photo color information retrieved in Flash or in another technology an then queried?
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Nice work, Tuomas. Seems you got the color search figured out also.
I think I noticed a small visual bug though. When in gallery and click a pic for a bit bigger version, then click again and the pic resets to original size, the reflection tweens to a value too wide, resulting in a reflection sticking out from both sides of the pic. -
correction: the bug happens when you click one pic for a bigger version, then you DON’T click the same one but go straight clicking another pic.
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Hi Tuomas, nice work indeed.
I can confirm the bug, that Aki had witnessed too.
2 questions related to the technical implementation of the image gallery: How do you control Z-index of currently zoomed in-image?
(mx:TileList does not support overlapping)
I already had some ideas and implemented them to solve this issue.
Another question, how do you control zooming of the image? Are you using combination of mx:Move and mx:Resize effects?
Here is mine implementation of this effect:
http://www.motionid.com/checkin/ -
Hi Z. MySQL stores the average color for each pic and is then queried.
And thanks Aki and Andrey for the bug notice, working on it.
What comes to z-indexing, I’m not using a TileList; the gallery is a custom AS3 component derived from UIComponent. What I’ve come to learn during this project is that usually its easier to start a custom component from scratch than to extend one of the provied ones.
And yeah, since it’s a AS3 component I don’t use any of the inbuilt effects (their crap anyhow). But i’ve built my own variable tweeners and render each picture myself. -
Thanks for the answers!
So, you do not blindly 100% rely on the power of Flex 2 SDK, that’s great.
But you definitely take advantage of some Adobe’s work:
a) ActionScript 3 language
b) Parts of Flex 2 SDK, such as States or mx:ViewStack
c) Flex Builder IDE debugging and coding
Great job! -
Hey Z. This is one of the coolest flex apps I have seen! Everything is so smooth!
Do you mind me asking on how you Tween your mouse overlays (the white border around the images)? I’m really curious on how you have it move so incredibly smooth, with no hiccups what-so-ever. Are you using the Caurina transitions Tweens? Or something you wrote yourself?
Thanks, and great job! -
Hi Brain, thanks for the kind words. I’m using our own Tweening classes, which we developed ages ago. But it really does not matter which tweener you’re using, all work as smooth as our Tweening library.
The trick to create smooth animation like the ones on the rollovers is to know at which level to start using custom components derived from UIComponent. The Flex framework is great in general, but it’s awfull at animating things smoothly. For example, the whole Picture grid is a custom component written from scratch. This way we have full control over all the animating and flipping of items. -
Hi,
Great application, very smooth transition b/w each section, could you tell us that what are u using in the menu?? i figured our the login/forgot password is accordion and states, but what is the other bar ??
Regards,
Tamuir. -
Thanks for the kind words Tamuir. The login/forgot is actually only states, no accordion there. Everything else in the app is a mixture of boxes, canvases and custom components.
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It’s Flex SDK 2? If yes, please describe how you make smoothing images? I’m try to use smooth = true, but it does not work/..
UPM Forest Life
Check out UPM Forest Life, in by opinnion one of the best Flash sites we’ve been working on in the past half a year or so. Although I’ve not contributed to the project that much, I’m still very proud of it.
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Wow, definitely a nice job. I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures and videos. It gave me a sense of zen while educating me.
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Wow!
Super good!! It draws you in – couldn’t stop looking!! Very, very nice!! -
I live in the USA, and I’ve seen the damage caused by irresponsible forest management: loss of biodiversity, erosion, loss of habitat, and increased fire danger. Not only was your site one of the best uses of Flash I’ve ever seen, but it exposed me to a different way of thinking about logging. If only this was practiced here in the USA.
I live in Indiana, and all the forest sounds made me homesick for Colorado. -
If they can’t even spell forest why should i take what they have to say seriously?
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John, you found this page by typing the same spelling mistake into Google, so give me some slack, will ya?
Technology moves too fast
Man, technology sometimes just moves too fast.
A few days ago, the Nokia N95 went on sale world wide and I got mine. Today, I got a newsletter from Nokia Forum with an interesting topic; Widgets go mobile. Apparently it’s a framework to Web driven applications for the S60 platform, much in the same way as Apple’s widgets or Microsoft’s gadgets. Both from a user and developer perspective it totally makes sense. Use technologies you know (html+javascript) to develop connected application rapidly and launch them like they were applications on your mobile. But! I just bought the newest, coolest and most expensive phone multimedia device and WTF! Mobile widget’s wont work on it! Cause mobile widgets come with S60 3rd edition feature pack 2, and my device only has feature pack 1.
God! It only took 4 days to make my shiny new device an old fart.
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Sorry to hear about the widgets. Look at the bright side—you still have the N95 (which some of us casual observers still covet). Best of luck with the widgets issue.
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Another view on the matter, maybe it’ll ease your pain.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/16/nokia_analysis/ -
Haven’t seen such crap (well, mostly) on The Register since… err… don’t know when. I think they are dead wrong. Their biggest concern is security. Now how does installing a Widget differ from installing an application? It doesn’t!
In both cases the end-user must trust the source. S60 applications are rarely signed, and even signing just guarantees they come from he claimed source.
But I don’t want to fight over this. For me, the most interesting point of Widgets is to be able to really quickly create a cool app with technologies I’m proficient at. Since I got my N95 i’ve been pondering on how to create a small app that trasimits my GPS coordinates to a server without having to shoot myself in the face with Symbian programming. -
Yeah, The Register write-up is pretty polemic as always, but it does offer some good points.
It’s pretty ironic if the in-built GPS on the N95 can’t be accessed with python or j2me, like almost any external GPS device can be on S60.
As far as the Nokia widgets engine, the balance between secure enough to be trusted and open enough to be interesting can be a tough nut to crack. -
I hear your pain. I bought N73 when it was brand new. However browser was missing some features such as tilted screen. These features were advertised in S60.com website. Since I could now find dowload link anywhere I asked Nokia about it. It took several mails before they answered.
“Sorry the new version is only available for 3rd edition feature pack 1 and not available to update N73, which is a 3rd edition phone.”
So, N73 was already old same week it came to shops.
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Hey!
nice informative post! thanx a bunch!
Thank you.
It is useful information for me.