Topic: Adobe AIR

3D Data Visualization in Adobe Air

Bernhard Kappe, Friday, October 2, 2009 @ 3:05 pm

As part of our ongoing development in the air traffic logistics and weather forecasting space, we developed a three-dimensional prototype for tracking flight path data and meteorological readings using Flex, Papervision 3D and PureMVC.

The framework is configured for using multiple APIs for mapping services from Yahoo and Google, as well as receiving live data streams from different sources. A number of custom controls were developed and integrated into the application, including altitude and rotation controls. The application can be re-used for any three dimensional map-based visualization such as weather patterns, demographic, political or economic data.

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Touch Screen Kiosk in Adobe Air

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, April 20, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

We recently launched a new Touch Screen Kiosk deployed in both Adobe Air and Flex. Touch Screen Kiosks pose some interesting usability challenges, some of which overlap with those for the iPhone. Take a look at a video demo or read the longer case study on the Pathfinder site.

Touch Screen Kiosk Demo

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jQuery 1.3: Good stuff, but the API browser’s the real news

Brian Dillard, Friday, January 16, 2009 @ 12:51 pm

I'm as geeked about jQuery's 1.3 release as the next developer. But I'm even more excited about the new API browser developed by Remy Sharp and available here.

For as long as I've been a jQuery user - going on 18 months now - I've been frustrated by the slow speed and sometimes intermittent availability of the jQuery documentation site. Now we've got a blazing-fast API browser that presents jQuery Core and jQuery UI side by side in the same cool interface. Better yet, it's available as an Adobe AIR app for offline viewing. Sweet!

I could quibble about the lack of bookmarkable URLs and the occasionally sparse documentation of corner cases. Instead, I'll just remain upbeat about this huge step in the right direction. No matter how intuitive jQuery's API, it's a powerful library whose roster of methods continues to grow. Nothing speeds up development faster than quick, persistent access to quality API documentation.

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News Rollup for the Week of November 17, 2008

Dietrich Kappe, Sunday, November 23, 2008 @ 2:19 pm

Two major bits of news from this week:

• Amazon has gone live with their new CDN (Content Delivery Network), CloudFront. Think Akamai for the rest of us. Pay as you go, hooks into S3. If you want to get a jump start on this, get yourself the latest version (0.4.5) of S3Fox, the S3 addon for FireFox. Getting started is easy: sign up for CloudFront (or sign up for Amazon Web Services if you haven't already, then sign up for CloudFront), create a bucket, put content in it, make it publicly readable, create a 'distribution', enable it and map a CNAME to the cloudfront.net hostname that corresponds to the distribution. We'll be doing some testing of the Amazon CDN over the next few weeks and do a review.
• Adobe AIR 1.5 has been released. Among the improvements: encrypted local database, Flash Player 10 support (no H.264 for Flash 10, though ), and an update to the WebKit bundled with Air. InfoQ has a nice summary of the Adobe MAX Air 1.5 buzz.

If you've got any news that you'd like to announce, ping us at ajax@pathf.com.

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Upcoming Conference: FITC Chicago 2008, June 22-23

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, May 30, 2008 @ 7:27 pm

Another Chicago area conference coming up: FITC Chicago 2008, from June 22-23 at the Chicago City Centre Hotel & Sports Club, 300 E. Ohio. We're even supporters. So what is it beyond the platitudinous "design and technology" event?

Obviously there's going to be lots of talk about how to develop Flex and Flash applications. Also how to develop online/offline apps with Adobe Air. Heck you'd think Adobe was a sponsor.

If designing RIA's with Flash/Flex/Air is your thing, you want to be here. It's not free, but based on last year's event, well worth the $125-$250 (depending on which sessions you go to).

Update: If you sign up here with our special ninja supporter code of PATH15, you get 15% off.

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FlashDevelop: Open Source Flash IDE

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, May 8, 2008 @ 1:44 pm

Despite my previous post, there is some activity around Open Source and Flash. For one, there is an Open Source Flash IDE, Flashdevelop. Right now it is tied to Windows, and it requires you to download the free debug Flash player and the Flex 3 SDK.

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Adobe “Open Screen” is not “Open Source”

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, May 8, 2008 @ 11:09 am

So Adobe is opening up their Flash platform via the Open Screen Project. Opening up in this case doesn't mean "Open Source," more like Open Spec. The spec for SWF has been published since 1998, but it came with onerous licensing restrictions. Adobe has now removed those licensing restrictions and promised to publish more API and protocol details.

Why is Adobe doing this? From their FAQ:

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ – that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by enabling the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

Some bloggers have speculated that this initiative is aimed at creating a Flash/AIR runtime on the iPhone. Maybe. But right now this thing looks more like an industry cooperative (not necessarily a bad thing) rather than a dynamic open source project.

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The Desktop Application is Dead…Almost

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, October 9, 2007 @ 10:12 am

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

  -- Mark Twain

Why is the desktop GUI dead? Is it dead? Tell it to Microsoft, which still ships enough copies of Office each year to exhaust the capacity of all of the world's toxic waste dumps. So maybe its not totally dead. But in one important respect the desktop GUI is disappearing: the custom app developed for and by small to midsize businesses (SMB's).

Now I have worked in the IT industry as an employee, a contractor, a freelance consultant, and, for last decade, as a partner in a outsourced software product development firm. In that last role, I've had to turn down an unusually large number of projects recently. Why is that?

In a phrase, opportunity cost. Clients come to us with products, existing or new, and we usually agree to work on them for a fee. Sometimes you have to turn down project A because project B is much sexier and you can't do both projects. That has happened a lot of late and mostly with prospective clients looking to develop purely desktop applications. Unless there is a compelling reason, we just can't get excited about a desktop GUI project.

So, by way of eulogy, let me present a numbered list of compelling reasons for developing desktop GUI's instead of Desktop RIA's.

1. It is unwise to expose the application to the outside world. Example: power plant management software.
2. The application calls for integration with custom hardware or mobile devices. Example: scientific software that integrates with custom measurement devices.
3. The application requires fine control of the underlying video/audio hardware. Example: first-person shooters.

That's a pretty short list. Note that there are a number of other applications you wouldn't do as a Desktop RIA, such as grep, but then you wouldn't do that as a Desktop GUI either (yes, yes, there are visual grep tools, but they don't function in quite the way that the easily piped command line grep does). Also, some of the examples above may have Internet integration (think XBox, etc.), but their architecture, runtime and user interface are pretty different from that of your typical Desktop GUI.

Note what isn't on that list: presentation software. I've argued in the past that Powerpoint was the one place in the office productivity universe where the Web 2.0 clones would fail. How many times have you been in a conference room without connectivity? No net? No presentation. But with the Desktop RIA runtimes, browser support and framework support coming out, online/off-line hybrids are becoming possible.

If you can add to the above list, great, but for the most part, I think the Desktop GUI is a vanishing breed.

Technorati Tags: ajax, desktop GUI, desktop RIA

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