Posts tagged Flash
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 
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
Will be Speaking at PHPCamp, Pune – 9th Jan
Jan 8th
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
Jan 6th
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)
Dec 16th
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
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
Indabamusic.com – has a nice sound mixer built on flash
May 20th
Just stumbled upon this site called indabamusic.com. Quite a nice idea to bring session musicians together to build and mix sessions on the web. The sound mixer is built on flash. Quite a neat app. Try it out here!
