Harish Sivaramakrishnan

I had written a small proof of concept of building a gantt (like) chart using Advanced DataGrid component that shipped with Flex 3. The blog post with the source code happens to be one of the most popular posts in my blog. Folks keep writing to me asking for more details on the component. I haven’t really been able to keep that project alive, purely for want of time as I got busy traveling. Just yesterday, I was doing some Flex 4 hacking for my talk at the upcoming Adobe Flash Platform Summit in Bangalore and thought if I could re-write this component in Flex 4. I spent about 6 hours writing this and I got my first version of the Flex 4 gantt chart working. Doing this in Flex 4 is insanely easy and the folks at Ilog have done a fabulous job re writing their gantt chart component in Flex 4. Click here or on the screen shot to see a small demo. Please note that the demo is view source enabled, you can download the source code as well [Just right click on the demo and view source] or, just click here to view source

This is just a prototype and doesn’t handle all the cases that a standard gantt chart should be handling. I would strongly recommend testing the code thoroughly before you start using it in production (if you are planning to, that is) I am unsure how much time I will be able to spend taking this project forward. I have opensourced this one under MPL, feel free to take the code and do more stuff as you guys deem appropriate. Please note that this is a resultant of a few hours of careless hacking , I am sure this has a lot of bugs too. I plan to set up a GitHub project for  the same, just thought I’d post it anyways.

The video of my talk on User Experience at TEDxPilani is now live on you tube.

My 5 minute video on creating Spark Component Skins using Adobe Flash Catalyst drawing tools went live on Adobe TV today.

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

Posting another Flex 4 theme I have been working on. The look of the theme is heavily inspired by the scheme of picnik.com – an application I use in daily basis to touch up my pictures. Picnik is also one of my favorite flex apps in the web.  Do take a look at the application.

Check out the components individually styled using Lemon by clicking here

Give lemon a spin! Download the FXP (for use in Flash Builder) or the source FXP (for use in Flash Catalyst)

PS: This is possibly the most *incomplete* theme that I have posted, usual caveats apply. TODO: skin for toggle button / Regular list.

Had a fantastic trip to my Alma mater – BITS, Pilani last week for the first ever Adobe Flex Bootcamp in North India. It felt great to be back in the campus, spent a good deal of time going around all the places I used to frequent as a student (including the classrooms ) The bootcamp had about 300 attendees who turned up exactly at 10:00 AM despite the biting cold (it was almost 0 deg celcius in the morning) Me and Sujit had a great time talking about the Flash Platform, showing off some demos and some really cool stuff with Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. The hands-on lab was great fun too – BITSians are quite smart, most of them completed the 3 hour lab in less than 1.5 hours.

Here are some pictures from the campus and the bootcamp

I was just playing around with the Spark List component of Flex4 framework today. Wanted to build a simple swatch panel using the component. It was *much easier* than what I thought. With about 30 minutes of coding, I could get a basic, yet functional color swatch panel. Yes, doing this with the Spark List is insanely simple! Check out this simple demo

Select a color from the swatch panel to change the background color of the Application.

You can download the source code (as fxp) here (There isn’t a lot of code, and usual caveats apply as this is just 30 minutes of work and is vastly untested:) ) TODO’s include allowing customization of itemrenderer sizes and regular skinning capabilities of Spark controls. Will do those iteratively.

I have been working to get a minimalist theme for one of the Flex 4 apps I am building. I did some minor tweaks to my actual theme and created “Plastic”. This theme is inspired by the regular plastic ware that you would see everyday. It is a sober, light theme with a dash of boldness added by the sunshine-orange roll over scheme. As of now, I only have spark component skins built into this. I will add the styling for the halo components in the next iteration.

I cooked up  a sample application mock-up with Plastic theme applied. View the application Give this theme a spin – download the source files (Plastic.fxp), import into Flash Builder 4 and you are all set! Due to the limitations of the Beta 2, you cannot import this FXP into Flash Catalyst again. In case you want to dabble with the skins in Flash Catalyst itself, download the FXP for catalyst (This FXP will not have constraint based sizing)

Plastic can be applied to all the spark components that are available as wireframe components in Flash Catalyst. View Components Demo

Some of the components are likely to have sizing issues, if you find any – drop me an email or drop a comment in this post. Download FXP

I will be speaking at PHPCamp Pune on Building Rich User Experiences for your Flex based PHP apps. PHPCamp this year is oversold at 2000+ registrations. The event also brings together the best minds in the tech industry in a classic unconference set up. I am very excited about my talk. If you are in Pune, do gate crash to PHPCamp – It’s going to be a fun day for sure. Do swing by and say hi if you are there!