Harish Sivaramakrishnan - Computer Scientist & Platform Evangelist at Adobe

TEDxPilani Trailer

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:13:10 +0000

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

Upcoming Events

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:14:24 +0000

The next couple of months are going to be super exciting. I will be speaking in the following events in the coming months. If you guys are in any of the following events, do swing by and say hi!

Adobe Flex Bootcamp – 21 – 23 February 2010, South India. I along with Ramesh will be kicking off the Flex bootcamps in Tamil Nadu, South India with consecutive events in two leading technical universities – Sastra University at Tanjavur and Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. The events are already sold out.

Adobe Online Creative Festival, 23 February 2010 Take a deep dive into Adobe’s current technology, as well as discover what the future holds for you. Join this free online event and benefit from Adobe’s expert advice on how Adobe technology can help you extend your creative skills and deliver unimagined. I will be presenting a one hour talk on Adobe Flash Catalyst and Adobe Flash Builder. I will also be hanging around in the online chat rooms trying to answer questions on Flash catalyst and Flex.

India Game Developer Summit, 27 February 2010, Bangalore, India First ever game developer summit in India, With the mission to build a robust community, advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers. I will be taking a focused session on Creating, distributing and Monetizing games on Adobe Flash Platform.

TEDxPilani, 13 March 2010, Pilani, India TEDx Pilani is slated to be one of the largest student-organized conferences in India. Organized by Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, BITS Pilani, TEDx Pilani aims at bringing some of the brightest Indian minds to the prestigious campus of Birla Institute of Technology & Science at Pilani, Rajasthan. Will be speaking on Rich Internet Apps.

Great Indian Developer Summit, 20-23 April 2010, Bangalore, India GIDS is the gold standard for India’s software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms,languages. GIDS is also one of the largest tech conferences in India.

New Flex 4 theme: Lemon – built using Adobe Flash Catalyst

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:48:45 +0000

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.

Flex Bootcamp at BITS, Pilani

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:42:23 +0000

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

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:09:36 +0000

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

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:08:24 +0000

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

Will be Speaking at PHPCamp, Pune – 9th Jan

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:49:34 +0000

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!

Preview of Flash Player 10.1 running on Google Nexus One

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:37:57 +0000

Video by Adrian Ludwig previewing Flash Player 10.1 on newly announced Google Nexus One Phone.

Google is part of Adobe’s Open Screen Project. Open Screen Project is an industry-wide initiative, led by Adobe with the participation of other industry leaders, to enable the delivery of rich multiscreen experiences built on a consistent runtime environment for open web browsing and standalone applications.

The year that was! (as an Adobe evangelist)

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:09:06 +0000

2009 has been a fantastic year! The last 1.5 years I spent in the Platform Evangelism team at Adobe India has been fantastic – The stuff I get to do as an evangelist is what dream jobs are made of. I am extremely excited looking at 2010, where there are a lot of great things lined up.Here is my recap of the year that was 2009

2009 was a truly action-packed one. Through the last 12 months, I made 21 trips to more than 10 cities all over India and Singapore and managed to speak to approximately 10000 people. This year also saw me getting more active on twitter, and also move my blog from wordpress to my own domain. Blog traffic grew 100%, with largest number of hits coming from India (33.60%) followed by United States (19.20%). The top 5 countries that generate traffic to my website are India, US, China, France, Brazil and Korea. My blog post on building a Gantt chart component using Flex 3 remains the top hit / top searched post on my blog, followed by my Flex 4 theme – Somethinglikemac!. I am amazed at the number of people downloading the Flex 4 theme. Its great to see that a large number of flex developers are already working with Flex 4 and Flash Catalyst. The best day for my blog was Dec 19th, when there was a surge of hits to my mac theme post, which brought my blog down for some time. 48% of my traffic came from referring sites, with a special thanks to Scalenine and fellow evangelist Sujit’s blog

Few highlights of this year include Adobe devsummit 09 Bangalore edition which saw 1200+ attendees join us – which made it the largest Adobe Flash Platform conference ever in India. The Chennai and Hyderabad editions had another 1300+ developers join the party. The first ever flex student bootcamp in kerala, India happened this year and trough the student bootcamps alone we addressed around 2000+ students. I also got featured in Khaleej Times (a leading news paper based out of Dubai) after my talk on Adobe Flash Platform at Webinnovations conference in Mumbai. On the lighter side, this year also had me running a flash catalyst session for an audience size of 200 people without a projector How many people would get to do something like that!

2010 already looks exciting! With the Flash community in India buzzing like never before, I am sure it is going to be one hell of a ride! Like Serge mentions in his blog – Being an evangelist is one of the coolest job in the universe! With heavy weight releases like Flash Player 10.1, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst, AIR 2.0 - year 2010 is going to be a crazy party for sure!

The writing style of this post is inspired by Serge Jespers’s life as an evangelist post

BITS | 360 – Virtual Tour App built on Flash Platform

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:12:37 +0000

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!