Topic Archive: Flash

Flash/Flex physics engines and examples

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 10:25 am

Flash technology has gone a long way from simple vector animations. Today it has support for video and audio, 3d rendering and interaction, all kinds of advanced data visualization libraries, great components of all shapes, sizes and purposes.

What caught my eye lately is that there is a lot of 2D and 3D Physics engines being added to the list.
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Data visualization and the art of conveying information

Sasha Dzeletovic, Tuesday, September 2, 2008 @ 1:42 am

As a coder, I go over tremendous amount of information on daily basis. My case is no different than anybody's else living in the world today. Regardless of where we live and how we spend our time we are saturated with all kinds of information, a lot of it that we don't care about and a lot of it that we wish we had fast access to, if at all.

Ironically, computer technology adds to the problem more often than not. All that computational power is often just creating more data that we will never experience because there's just too much of it everywhere and all the time. Traditional techniques of consuming information are becoming too slow and narrow to handle this kind of pace.

We have all heard that a "picture speaks a thousand words". Doesn't that sound like an efficient way to consume information? Now, there are pictures and there are pictures.

There are pictures that strike a cord with you and there are pictures that leave you bland. Which one are you more likely to remember and allot the time of your mind?

Here are some libraries for data visualization in Flex/Flash as well as some artful experiments that I found to be good tools/examples of data visualization.
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Flash 10 - FileReference Runtime Access

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, July 18, 2008 @ 11:06 am

This is what I was waiting for - FileReference Runtime Access! To quote the original blog post:

"This greatly lowers the bar to using Flash as a photo editor, document manager, customized application experiences, marking up content and saving locally, all without the need for server side script."

And then: "It is only beta (Flash 10) but there are great market opportunities to prepare for when this launches."

Flash is just getting better.

Also, do check out the other great posts from http://drawlogic.com

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Papervision3d 2.0 (Great White) in Flex 3 (Part I)

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, July 17, 2008 @ 7:22 pm

I'm developing a prototype that loads GPS coordinates/time of flights from an external file into Flash player in a browser and renders them at runtime using PV3D over an interactive Yahoo Maps API.

This prototype is in part being used to test performance of Flash Player running the excellent PV3D. So far it holds pretty good.

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Where is Flash at?

Sasha Dzeletovic, Monday, July 14, 2008 @ 10:49 am

For some time now, I've been using the same site to see how much has Flash content advanced - www.thefwa.com

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Google learns to crawl Flash

Sasha Dzeletovic, Sunday, July 6, 2008 @ 4:49 pm

For a technology used to publish content on the internet, not being able to be properly indexed by search engines is a big snag. That is one of the first questions that is raised about Flash in any IT environment. The second one is how do you get around it. That might be about to change... Continue reading »

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Can’t we all just get along?

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, June 5, 2008 @ 5:22 pm

I've came across an interesting article titled The Next-Gen Web: HTML5 - Will We Ever See A Real Standard? by Nik Cubrilovic that gives a nice overview of the history of web standards while focusing on the current HTML5 draft specification and its potential.

Web standards are not something particularly interesting to me as an Adobe Flex developer. After all, one of the reasons I've chosen this technology is that I can develop web applications without those standards limiting my imagination.

Adobe Flash technology is in part setting the standards of what Web 2.0 (and Web 3.0) really mean. Web experiences made using it are on the high end of what's available today and that's where I want to be.

One major lacking of this technology is that it is not utilizing web standards which makes some tasks harder, like making sites and apps search engine friendly, for example. I personally decided that its benefits significantly outweigh the problems.

Whatever one's perspective, I think that lack of full implementation of web standards causes a huge waste of time for people developing content for the web. Until that happens, I choose to ignore them altogether and use a medium that gives the same results on all platforms. To the best of my knowledge, content developed in Flash years ago still looks and acts the same in all browsers and operation systems.

You can find some great insight on what might be the future of web standards in Nik's article. In the meantime, my money stays with Flex.

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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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Flash Technology vs. Flash Developer

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, May 22, 2008 @ 10:21 am

My colleague Brian Dillard, having a keen eye on interface enhancing, posted an interesting piece about Flash user interface conventions. Of the things said, the fact that Flash development environments do not default to standard (traditional) browser behaviors is the most burdening. Flash developers often forget about these essential user experience elements. I think it is because with great power comes great responsibility.

By great power, I'm talking about the available possibilities when using Flash to create user interfaces. They are limitless. As a consequence of so many possibilities the default options are rather unusual. Flash developers should incorporate good practices as the ones mentioned in Brian's post about user input and don't reinvent the wheel where it's not of benefit. But the fact is that you can do amazing things with Flash technology and the only thing you have to know is exactly what you want.

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A case study in Flash UI annoyances: style-card.com

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, May 20, 2008 @ 2:16 pm

Maybe I read too much Victorian literature, but I've always wanted a personal calling card. Recently, I decided to get one: a little something to help new acquaintances remember my phone number, email address and important URLs. Based on a recommendation from Time Out Chicago, I turned to Style Card, a slick consumer service that promises a less generic riff on the basic business card.

Here's how the company describes its product:

It's a social networking card created by you for the purpose of sharing your details and your style. Let people get to know the real you – or the not-so-real you.

Sure, I could have fired up an Adobe product, used a commercial printing service and gotten 1,000 copies of my own design for about $25. But owing to my lack of graphic design mojo, I decided to shell out $59 (plus shipping) for a mere 80 shiny, round-cornered Style Cards. The 3,000 percent markup is ridiculous, but I wanted to see whether I could benefit from the company's idiot-proof design interface. Besides, I figured I could get a blog post out of the experience. I wasn't wrong.

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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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Visualizations & Election Year Coverage

Ivan Moscoso, Friday, January 4, 2008 @ 12:52 pm

The New York Times has an interesting campaign event flash-based interactive map (link from the image on the right) which works out to be easy on the eyes.

The animations are not that useful, but what I find most curious about this map is comparing the relative frequency of candidate visits to areas of the country.  Knowing something about each candidate, and all politics aside, it tells you something about their election year strategies, or lack thereof.

Nicely done.

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New Ajax for Old Iron

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, November 2, 2007 @ 11:49 am

In the rush to develop entirely new Web 2.0 systems based on Ajax, it is often easy to lose sight of how it can be used to improve the so-called "legacy" enterprise systems. Over at the Ext JS blog, there's a post about German developer who put together a reporting/BI application to front-end RPG code running on an AS400.

The backend serves up JSON data (together with this old article about reskinning a Spring MVC application with Tibco GI, it makes for a solid approach for refactoring existing webapps) to the Ext JS/Flash front-end. Slick. You can view a demo (unfortunately in German for you non-German speakers) here.

Technorati Tags: ajax, ext js, as400, flash, json

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Some Thoughts on Silverlight

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, July 12, 2007 @ 10:38 am

I'm not going to dig into the how and why of Silverlight, or write an inflamatory article bashing Microsoft. What I do want to set down are some simple observations on Silverlight. All of us who design RIA's need to keep an eye on emerging technologies, especially if they're backed by the market clout of MS.

So, what is Silverlight, and why should you care? It's has been described as Microsoft's Flash, but that misses the point just a bit. First, from the MS marketing droids:

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications.

Lovely. Cross-browser and cross-platform (Windows and Mac). File that away for future reference. For a better explanation, we can go to a report from Mix 07 from Miguel de Icaza (a mono project contributor):

Silverlight 1.0 uses a retained graphics system (a canvas) that exposes the internal structure to the browser DOM. It has no scripting capabilities built into it, all the scripting support is actually done by the Javascript interpreter in the browser and all changes are done by talking to a Javascript object exposed by the hosted Silverlight surface.

The scene definition is done using the XAML markup using a subset of the WPF primitives available in the full-blown WPF. Then the big announcement came:

The second edition was Silverlight 1.1, and this one is a different beast altogether. 1.1 extends the model by embedding a complete Common Language Runtime.

That's right, the dreaded CLR ;-), the JVM of the .NET world, in your browser. The CLR, of course, is supposed to support many different languages, and so VB, C#, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc., etc., are all supposed to be supported eventually in Silverlight. With the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), scripts can even be embedded in the page and compiled at runtime. In venture capital there is a saying that "too soon is the same thing as wrong"; let us all shed a tear as Java applets are carted off to the dumpster.

There's lots more research to do on this, but I have neglected the second question: why should you care? The obvious answer is that Silverlight doesn't just compete with Flash, but also with Ajax. Silverlight also seems to have more hooks into the browser (definitely some security research needs to be done there), so it is possible that it can be more of a complement to Ajax than Flash has been.

But looking beyond the next 12 months, it is clear that Silverlight will be part of MS's solution for Desktop RIA's, i.e. the emerging online/offline application space represented by Apollo/AIR, Google Gears, Firefox 3 (with it's embedded RDBMS), etc. Another thing that becomes clear is that language support and performance are likely to become more important, i.e. we need to be able to develop in more than just Javascript/ActionScript for the browser and Flash. And the performance of those browser runtimes needs to improve drastically to support the large and sophisticated client-side (ooh, the return of the fat client) apps that are likely to be developed.

GWT addresses some of those issues, as does the commercial product from Morfik. For performance, the inclusion of the Tamarin VM (kindly donated by Adobe) in future versions of Firefox will address some of the performance issues, but at the end of the day that is less than half the equation. If MS doesn't improve IE (where's the announcements about IE8?), Ajax apps will still perform like crap on over half of all browsers.

Last idea for the moment on Silverlight. Will OpenLaszlo target their framework to compile for Silverlight? Since they are the one group that actually targets their framework at more than one runtime (Ajax and Flash), they are well positioned to do the same for Silverlight. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: ajax, flash, silverlight, openlaszlo, mono

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