Adobe Air: Get Free eBook Download

Mike Chambers and Aodbe AIR team has released new Adobe AIR book for JavaScript developers called Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide

Download PDF from HereÂ

This Book covers following topics

• Introduction to AIR
• Getting Started with AIR development
• Working with JavaScript and HTML within AIR
• AIR Mini Cookbook
• Command line tools
• Aliases

Thanks guys for the free book.

Flex 3D: papervision3d.org homepage – A Good 3D example

PaperVision3D is putting great effort in making the 3D engine in actionScript 3. I love their surprises of releasing cool experiments.

Today I have seen http://www.papervision3d.org home page, which has good 3D experiment.

This shows capability of flash player 9, which is 10 times faster then the flash player 7/8. I am impressed by looking at the flash player performance for playing such a complex 3D objects.

Kudos to papervision3d Team
Kudos to flash player Team¦

To view experiment visit http://www.papervision3d.org

Adobe AIR: Windowing Applications – nice Article

Alberto GL has written a good Article on Windowing applications with Adobe Air.

Read article on AgknoloGy

Microsoft Seadragon: New Image Technology

With the aqasition of Seadragon Software in February Microsoft is coming with new Imaging Technology called “Seadragon”. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.

Currently Seadragon is promises following:

• Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of
• objects. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
• Transitions are smooth as butter.
• Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

You can watch demo here or for more info visit live labs.

Six must-see Adobe AIR sample applications

Rob Christensen has written nice Article on “Six must-see Adobe AIR sample applications”

Rob has mentioned about his view on six impressive Adobe AIR sample applications (which is but a small sample of the outstanding work rob have come across in the past few months)

Follwing are six out standing Adobe AIR Applications:

Twitter

Download Twitter AIR Appliction

Kuler Desktop

Download Kuler Desktop AIR Application

Kuler Desktop AIR ApplicationFresh

Download Fresh AIR Application

Finetune Desktop

Download Finetune Desktop AIR Application

DiggTop

Download DiggTop AIR Application

SearchCoders/Dashboard

Download SearchCoders/Dashboard AIR Application

Read “Six must-see Adobe AIR sample applications” on Adobe Dev Center

Mumbai Flex User Group Meeting

This is to invite you all to the first Mumbai FUG meeting.

Date: Saturday, 16th June 2007
Time: 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Venue:
Barista cafe,
5 A Jilkar House,
Next to Dena Bank,
Keluskar Road,
North Shivaji Park.
Dadar(W) – Mumbai – india

Agenda: Since this a first meeting this will be more of hanging out
and setting agenda for future meetings.

So Let’s meet up..
Please book your calendar for the same and reply if your gonna make it….

See you on Saturday…

Adobe AIR (Apollo) Developer Derby Contest

With the release of AIR (Apollo) Beta Adobe has announced a Developer Derby Contest.

Oh God… You can win cool prizes.

Grand Prize / Best of Show
The Best of Show winner will receive the trip of a lifetime, a travel certificate valued at up to US$100,000, to be used for the travel of your choice!

Five category winners will each receive “The Ultimate Development Environment” to power your Adobe AIR development (and play) for years to come:

• A Mac Pro 8Core with 4 gigs ram, 1.5 TB (2×75) of storage.
• (2) Dell 2707WFP 27″ widescreen monitors.
• (1) one Sony Playstation 3.
• (1) $200 gift certificate to Amazon.com.
• (1) Herman Miller Aeron chair.
• (1) Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones.
• (1) copy of Adobe Flex Builder version 3, Macintosh edition.
• (1) copy of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection for Macintosh.
  And one squishy stress ball.

Plus each winner also receives:
A trip and conference pass to the Adobe MAX 2007 annual user conference.
Your application showcased on Adobe.com for the world to see.
Contest open for following categories:

• Best Business Application
• Best Community Application
• Wild Card
• Grand Prize / Best of Show

This Contest is open to individuals who are citizens or working or studying under a valid visa/permit in the 50 United States (including Washington D.C.), Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey.

For more info Visit here…

Go On AIR

Flex 3 for You *********

Flex 3 Beta 1 is released and it is available for download in Adobe Labs.

Some Important Links for Flex 3:
DOWNLOAD FLEX BUILDER BETA 1
DOWNLOAD FLEX SDK BETA 1
LABS WIKI FLEX 3
Flex Bug Database
Flex Standards and Community Process

Lets do more Flexing……

Flex 3: * Most Wanted Enhancement* Smaller Flex SWF Files

Like every day in this week we are getting lot of suerprises by looking at new flex 3 features.

Today is Ted Patrik has blogged about the most wanted enhancement in flex 3. which is reduceing swf file size by caching the Flex Framework and Componet in new Flex Player 9 update 3 (FrogStar).

If you create a new Flex Project using Flex Builder 2.0.1 (Compile with Flex SDK 2.0.1) then your basic .swf file size will be around 122 kb because by default flex SWF will embed the Flex Framework. .swf File size will increase dramatically as you use UI components in your project.

According to me this was a drawback for the flex applications where your swf file size likely to be 400 to 500 kb (if you use datagrid and charting components) that will be very heavy for loading.

According to Ted’s post Flex 3 and Flex Player 9 update 3 (FrogStar) will solve this problem.
Moving forward the Flex Framework will be cached within the Flash Player dramatically reducing the size of the output SWF files. Your application SWF files will only contain your code plus the Flex Preloader containing the caching/loading logic and will exclude by majority the Flex Framework. Simply put, the file size cost of using any additional component adds negligible size to your base SWF files Ted Patrik

For more Information read Ted’s Post..

Hmm…. now can’t wait more… for next release…

Flex 3: New Features (Enhanced Collection API, Advanced DataGrid & DeepLinking)

“Straight form Ted Patrik’s Blog” Ted has blogged some more cool features for Flex 3, which are part of Components and SDK Enhancements

Following are the new features:

Advanced Datagrid and Collection API:

Flex 3 Data grid will support more complex view you can view screenshots on Ted’s Post.

I feel this feature is gr8 addition to the flex because we can use the advanced DataGrid for more complex reporting view.

This feature is achievable with the help of new enhancement in collection api. Here are the New collection classes that were added:

mx.collections.HierarchicalData
mx.collections.Grouping
mx.collections.GroupingCollection
mx.collections.GroupingField
mx.collections.HierarchicalCollectionView
mx.collections.HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor
mx.collections.ListCollectionView
mx.collections.SummaryField
mx.collections.SummaryObject
mx.collections.SummaryRow

Deep Linking:

This is one more good feature.

Ted has posted “allows a Flex application to manage data within a URL using the HTML Anchor(#) feature. Using the new BrowserManager a Flex application can bind to data within the URL to both set and detect changes in the URL. This feature makes it easy to persist data in the URL for bookmarking and provide a new way to input data into a Flex application.”

I think this is a good feature and open up many ways to communicate with the external container (Browser).
I can think of many use case of this feature like:

• You can sore the current application state in browser URL.
• Use URL which has the application state and open flex application which will get you the same state of mentioned on URL.

In this way you can sync the flex application with the browser.

You can grab detailed information form Ted Patrik’s Post