Harish Sivaramakrishnan » Flash

Prototype: Flex 4 Gantt Chart

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:50:31 +0000

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.

5th Anniversary at Macromedia & Adobe

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:36:39 +0000

It feels like yesterday, doesn’t it? It does, at least for me! I remember sitting in the library of the Macromedia India office in Bangalore on the 2nd of June 2005 waiting for my interviews for a position in the Macromedia Flex SDK Quality Engineering team. I still remember waiting for that one call from Macromedia till it happened on the 6th of June, confirming my appointment at Macromedia! The dream job – in all respects! I have been working on Flash from the first year of my undergrad days (back in 1998) and Macromedia indeed was my ultimate destination. And here it was! I was now going to start working in the company that makes flash! I now have an opportunity to work for a new product that was going to change the landscape of rich internet applications – When I think about it, I still can feel all the emotions that I went through – a combination of excitement, happiness, nervousness – It was that kind of an unexplainable feeling! Yes, I am getting emotional, but that’s exactly how I feel!

And boy, what a great 5 years this has been! I had the great fortune of working on some really amazing features on the Flex 2.0, 2.0.1 & 3.0 releases! I also had an incredible time working in the Adobe Media Player team implementing the DRM features for the 1.0 release. The year 2008 was a significant turning point in my life – I was offered a position in the India Platform Evangelism team. This is the job where I get a chance to travel the breadth and depth of India spreading the love for Adobe Flash platform, I will be working with some of the best minds in Adobe Flash Platform in India in the community – Now, how many people get to do something as cool as this!

This post is incomplete without thanking a few very important people – Arul Prasad for referring me to Macromedia, Lauren Park & Ram Krishnaiyer for hiring me in Macromedia, Ananth & Arijit for offering me a position in the Evangelism team, Raghu, my partner in crime in both the QE and Evangelism roles, Ramesh for his guidance & support and the whole of India Evangelism team, the best team in the world!

My job couldn’t be more exciting than it is today – With the release of Flash Builder 4, Flex 4, Flash Catalyst and with Flash Player and AIR running in all major devices – there can’t be a better job than evangelizing the Adobe Flash Platform! Here’s is looking forward to great times ahead working for the best company in the world!

Cheers!

Flash + HTML 5 : Offline Flash Apps using DataStore API

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Fri, 28 May 2010 13:44:45 +0000

Have been hearing a lot of discussions and arguments about how HTML5 is going to replace (kill!) flash in the near future. And no, this blog post is not about which technology is going to replace or kill which one! I have been a flash developer for quite a long time now and I love the stuff that I can do with Flash and ActionScript. As a developer who cares about technology, I like to experiment with new technologies and try to see how they interoperate.

This blog is the result of a small experiment that I did with the HTML5 datastore API. I wrote up a very simple ActionScript + JavaScript library that would enable developers to make their flex applications work offline in browsers that support HTML5 datastore APIs. The API will now let you use SQL statements (as of now, CREATE, SELECT, INSERT, DELETE & UPDATE) within your actionscript / flash / flex applications.

Check out a demo here . The demo creates a database “SampleDB”. You can perform basic operations using SQL statements that can be previewed live in this application. I have tested this application on Safari & Chrome. If you find issues, please do send me an email and I would take a look at it!

Tested browsers: Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 and Safari 3.2.3

You can download the source files of this experiment from here. If you want to see the demo in action from your own system, download the demo assets from here. Just unzip the contents and paste it in the webroot of your webserver and run.

Incase, you are wondering what SQL statements to try out, you could use the following to start with.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT Exists CUSTOMERS (customername TEXT, customeremail TEXT, customerdesignation TEXT, customerphone TEXT)
INSERT INTO CUSTOMERS (customername, customeremail, customerphone, customerdesignation) values (‘a’,'b’,'c’,'d’)
SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS

NOTE: The API supports prepared statements, but the demo doesn’t (blame it on my laziness). If you want to try out using prepared statements, download the source files and try out by making your own flex app.

colrful mobile – Flex 4 app running on google nexus one (Flash Player 10.1)

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:32:44 +0000

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

Flex 4 based applications run well on the nexus one, the rendering is fast, touch-based scrolling is snappy
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%
The Spark List (Flex 4 List) works like a charm. Keep an optimized itemRenderer, you will get snappy scrolling performance.
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

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.
Flex 4 SDK makes the app heavy, makes me want the mobile flex SDK now!

*The color search is powered by Idée Labs

Recap: TEDxPilani – a fantastic event!

Harish Sivaramakrishnan — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:42:23 +0000

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

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!