Harish Sivaramakrishnan

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

A full house,additional 2 rows of chairs at the back for the folks who came in, kick ass demo’s and fantastic dinner – That’s what the Adobe Flash Platform tools review was.

The evening started with Arijit’s intro on the Flash platform and the new tools. The context behind renaming Flex builder to Flash Builder was captured well in this session and it indeed made a lot of flex guys feel confident about what we are doing in terms of re-branding. The general vibe was surely positive.

In the next 25 minutes, I presented the Flash Builder 4 beta.  I focused the first 10 minutes speaking about the new IDE features that we have added to the tool. (getter-setter generation, event handler code generation and network monitor generated a lot of excitement in the crowd.) In the last 10 minutes I went on to do a coding demo of building an interactive dashboard application using the DCD features of Flash Builder using HTTPService over PHP. Had a minor challenge with the screen resolution, but overall the demo went well. Many folks walked up to me after the event saying they would *absolutely* want to move to FB4 for *just this feature*.

Next was the flash catalyst session by Raghu. He spoke briefly about the need for an good designer to developer integrated workflow and how Flash Catalyst would bridge that gap. His demo was an end to end enterprise data viz app starting from Photoshop to Catalyst to FB4. The interaction design for states & transitions and component conversion features recieved massive applause from the audience. Raghu concluded the demo with a BlazeDS remoting workflow using FB4 DCD. We were bombarded with questions about catalyst features and there were many folks asking about the pricing and the release time lines.

Sujit spoke about the data management features and also did a whirlwind preview of model driven development on the FB4. Sujit also presented the new client side paging feature which recieved a lot of cheer from the audience. As always, Sujit had several guys asking him stuff on LCDS / BlazeDS integration – something Sujit is synonymous with. Ramesh followed Sujit’s session with the “looking forward” aspects. Ramesh also announced the launch plan of the Adobe India Evangelism portal = http://flashahead.adobe.com.

Dinner (quite an awesome one! Taj Residency serves some really good indian fare especially on the dinner menu.) followed and got fantastic feedback on that one too. In a whole, a fantastic event! All thanks to the community and the attendees who made it an astounding success!

I, along with Ramesh will be talking at the Great Indian Developer Summit ’08 from May 19-23 at Bangalore. We will be giving a focused session of Flex, AIR and other platform technologies of Adobe. We are also going to have a demo stall running through the 5 days and also plan to have the team to be present there. If you are going to be there, do drop in to the Adobe stall. I am going to be there all the five days and also hoping to meet many of the RIA developers.

The summit also will feature  Yakov Fain from Farata systems talking about building enterprise applications using Flex and Mike Grushin will be talking about developing flex applications over Microsoft technology stack. Ram and Rupesh from Adobe will be talking about Adobe ColdFusion and Adobe Java technologies in the Java thread of the summit. This is certainly something you don’t want to miss!

Raghu and I will be in Bangalore BarCamp 6 [BCB6] as well (19-20 April ’08) If you want to catch up on any flex / AIR / Adobe platform related stuff, catch hold of me at the venue or drop me a mail at hsivaram [at] adobe [dot] com or call me at +91 9980338894. Will be delighted to meet you. See you in BCB6 and (or) GIDS.

Adobe Media Player (AMP) pre-release is available for download on Adobe labs website. From Labs site about AMP:

Adobe is driving the next generation of internet video delivery with the Adobe Media Player (AMP), Flash® Media Server software, content protection technologies, and a broad and powerful ecosystem of partners providing key solutions from content creation through delivery and monetization. AMP brings the best of both the broadcast television and web video worlds to your desktop—providing high-quality content both online and offline, with a wide range of business model possibilities.

I joined the AMP team just 2 months back on deputation, and I was overwhelmed by the cool features that this application bundles. What more, this is built on Adobe AIR, which will redefine the desktop application world in the days to come. On a personal note, this is also my first application development assignment at Adobe and I am mighty excited about the work that I am doing and also the outcome! Test drive AMP today!