Harish Sivaramakrishnan

There is a lot of excitement after the release of Adobe Flash Builder and Flex 4 framework last week. I can’t wait to meet the Adobe User Groups at various locations to share the excitement and be part of the celebration. I am looking forward to the AUG tour events at the following locations in the coming month(s)

Crystal Gaze – Adobe User Group, Chennai, India (Apr 9th, 2010) The Chennai user group along with RIA-RUI society is organizing Crystal Gaze – a very special event to celebrate the launch of Flash Builder and Flex 4. Chennai has a vibrant and passionate community and I am sure this event is going to be rocking. The event promises a lot of fun with music performances along with the tech sessions. I will be speaking here along with fellow evangelist Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan. The event was sold out in just 8 hours!

Kerala Adobe User Group, Cochin, India (Apr 10th, 2010) Kerala UG is still young, but it has some really great and experienced developers passionate about Adobe Flash Platform. Cochin also happens to be where my parents live, its going to be a great event!

Flex User Group, Singapore (Apr 15th 2010) I was in Singapore last year speaking at RIAction – The Singapore Flash community totally rocks! I will be speaking about Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst, we also have a session on Flex 4 by the UG manager Shunjie Hu. I will also be catching up with some of my old buddies from Macromedia during this trip.

FX4Tour – Adobe User Group, Bangkok, Thailand (April 17th, 2010) Another sell-out event! This time in Bangkok.  I will be speaking about Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and LCDS 3. There will also be a session on iphone development using flash by local community expert Apichai Ruangsiripiyakul.

Flex User Group, Coimbatore, India (May 8th, 2010) Will be kicking off the first ever UG meet in coimbatore. Topics are still TBD.

If you guys are in any of the locations, I would love to meet each one of you – do swing by and say hi!

I had build a small AIR application called colrful a while ago, which searches for images on flickr based on color. I have been working on porting this application to flex 4. In the meanwhile, I just wanted to do a small experiment with my new google nexus one phone which runs flash player 10.1. I had already finished building the skins and the basic UI for the the flex 4 port using Adobe Flash Catalyst. I thought I’d quickly port this application to run on my nexus one before I release the AIR version of colrful. This is what I got This version of the application will let you search for images based on color from a flickr image set*. 

You can check out the application by visiting: http://www.flexgeek.in/nexus/c.html [Note: This will not look pretty on your desktop browser, its optimized for a mobile screen ]

Key Takeaways: The good

1. Flex 4 based applications run well on the nexus one, the rendering is fast, touch-based scrolling is snappy
2. Porting Catalyst based skins to make Mobile apps is quite easy, skinning can now be completely offloaded to catalyst once you know the screen size you are working with. Doesn’t really matter for browser based apps, we can always set the dimensions to 100%
3. The Spark List (Flex 4 List) works like a charm. Keep an optimized itemRenderer, you will get snappy scrolling performance.
4. Flash builder is amazing! with the new code hinting features coupled with network monitoring, enhanced debugging capabilities and faster compilation, building on Flash Builder is quite a nice experience.

Key Takeaways: The not so good

1. Flash Builder design view is far more suited for building apps for larger screen sizes. That said, the design view is far nicer now than the Flex Builder 3.
2. Flex 4 SDK makes the app heavy, makes me want the mobile flex SDK now!

*The color search is powered by Idée Labs

I was invited to TEDxPilani to deliver a talk on rich user experiences at the TEDxPilani chapter on the 13th of March at BITS, Pilani – which also happens to be my alma mater. The event had an eclectic mix of speakers, it was a great privilege sharing the stage with some of the best minds in the country in their respective fields. The event started out with a talk by K N Ganeshaiah – a plant scientist and an award winning mythology book writer. My session was the next – I spent some time setting the context, speaking about the need for building great user experiences. I also got to sing a song on stage and closed my talk with a demo. My session was followed by Karthik Satyanarayan – co founder of WildlifeSOS, Cleo Paskal – climate change expert, Nitin Gokhale – a leading journalist with NDTV, Vishal Talreja – A social entrepreneur, Rahul Roshan (@fakingnews) – the funny guy who runs fakingnews.com and finally Nakul Shenoy – a brilliant psychic entertainer. We also had two TEDx fellows from Pilani present mini sessions.

It was hard to tell which one was my favorite talk – each one of them were great in their own respect. Overall, it was a fantastic experience to be part of TEDxPilani. A special word of congratulations needs to go out to the organizers, who painstakingly made sure everything was done to perfection – right from booking our flight tickets to setting up the stage. TEDxPilani has indeed set a very high standard for any exclusively student run conference with the poise they demonstrated with this event. Take a bow, Guys!

I didn’t have an elaborate presentation, just a few slides that goes with my talk. You can check out the slides below

TEDxPilani trailer is out! I am super excited to be part of this, especially because it’s happening in my alma mater, BITS, Pilani.