flex
Recap: TEDxPilani – a fantastic event!
Mar 17th
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 
Flex Bootcamp at BITS, Pilani
Jan 27th
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
Simple Flex4 color swatch using Spark List
Jan 19th
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.
New Flex 4 Theme : Plastic – Built using Adobe Flash Catalyst Beta 2
Jan 15th
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
BITS | 360 – Virtual Tour App built on Flash Platform
Dec 15th
I stumbled upon this *amazing* Flash application while browsing through the website of my university (Birla Institute of Technology & Science or Simply, BITS). The BITS | 360 app allows the users to get a 360 degree panorama of various BITS campuses (Goa, Dubai, Pilani and Hyderabad). The application has an extremely clean and intuitive user experience (unlike some of those patchy, slow panorama apps that we see on the internet often!). The application brings in some amazing features like taking a snap shot of a particular section of the panorama, interactive overlays, Google map integration etc. to name a few. Check out the application here
The most impressive part of this app is that it is built by a student – Abhinav Asthana (Engineering student from BITS, Goa campus). It is incredible to see a work of such high quality come from a solo developer gig. It is great to see the expertise the student fraternity of India has on Adobe Flash Platform.
Flash ahead, guys!
New Flex 4 theme: Somethinglikemac! Built exclusively using Flash Catalyst drawing
Nov 25th
Here is another Flash Catalyst experiment I have been doing through last week. The aim was to build a Flex 4 theme that looks like the mac aqua theme exclusively using Adobe Flash Catalyst drawing tools *only* (yeah, no illustrator / photoshop) The theme isn’t an exact replica of the mac look, it is an extrapolation of sorts. This is work in progress (hence the name Somethinglikemac!), may be at the end of it all, I would be able to make a theme that exactly looks like the aqua theme
You can view the demo in a separate window by clicking here
You can download the FXP here. If you want to grab the skinPart Classes alone, download it here. If you want to edit this theme in Flash Catalyst, download the catalyst source fxp.
If you thought that was interesting, do check out the flex theme black glass by Anirudh
Call for Sessions: Adobe devsummit (chennai & Hyderabad edition)
Oct 29th
Adobe DevSummit is the biggest annual developer event focused on the Adobe Flash Platform in India. This event attracts a rich demographic mix spanning designers and developers in India. Adobe has consistently showcased path breaking technologies at DevSummit.
For the first time DevSummit is coming to Chennai and Hyderabad. DevSummit in Chennai will be on 24th November, 2009 and in Hyderabad on 1st December, 2009. Watch out this space for more information on venue and timings
We would love to have the experts from the Adobe developer community take the stage and share their knowledge and insights on Adobe Flash Platform. Please find more details and submit your session proposals at the URL below. Show off your Flash Platform Geekiness!
http://flashahead.adobe.com/events/devsummitsessionproposals/
New Flex 4 theme: OrangeCandy – built using Flash Catalyst Beta 2
Oct 19th
I have been working on this theme for an app that I am building. Just thought I’d share it here. The theme was entirely drawn in Flash Catalyst using the drawing tools. This theme is inspired by Adobe Scope Skins & the kingnare theme with a dash of orange to it!
Known Issues:
- TextInput accepts multiple lines
- MouseWheel does not work for the list
Please note that this is work in progress. I will keep updating the FXP as I make more changes.
Meanwhile, You can download the FXP from here.
Download the FXPL from here
Video Tutorial: Building a List with realtime data using Flash Catalyst, Photoshop and Flash Builder 4
Jun 8th
Check out the 4 part video tutorial on building a DataList which uses realtime data using an Adobe Photoshop PSD, Flash Catalyst & Flash Builder 4 in a single work flow.
Check out the tutorial
PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV
This series also marks the launch of my video blog – The Flexgeek Show. All my video tutorials will be henceforth posted in The Flexgeek Show. The blog will also feature under the hood sessions on various aspects of the Adobe Flash Platform tools by the flex engineering team, videos of Adobe events, customer interviews and many more fun stuff. Please do add http://broadcast.flexgeek.in to your bookmarks.
Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview @ bangalore rocked!
Jun 4th
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!
