bedenk.de/sign blog - Flash/Flex

Flex in the Future

nospam@example.com (Thomas Bedenk) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:30:37 +0100

I asked Allen Seirafi from Adobe a couple of questions about Flex. Thought you would be interested, of course these are not official Adobe statements. Here is what he had to say:

- Is Flash Player 9 going to be included in Windows Vista?

We don’t know yet, since it is really MS call. The good news is whether they include or not, about 80% of PCs will have it by the end of the year regardless. We get about 10 mil downloads daily. Sites like myspace and google video all use Flash 9. therefore the adaptation is very high. Also Flex 2 has the auto detect and upgrade capability, therefore users can get the upgrade without getting redirected to Adobe’s site…

- Are there plans to include the main Flex framework classes in the flash player to reduce file size and redundancy?

That is a very good question, and I believe the answer is no. however, Adobe is working on a new technology called Apollo, which will give ability to have more of these libraries loaded, and a much much better performance. The Alpha or Beta should start becoming available during the beginning of next year. They really like to keep the player slim, therefore most likely not…

- Are there plans to improve the support of rotation of visual elements (buggy in some aspects)?

Yes, that should see some improvement in the next dot release, and a lot more by the next major release. Already there are some 3-D charts that people have built for rotation etc. that works pretty good… this area needs improvement and is one of the major ones they are looking at…

- Is the Flex framework staying free?

Yes. They are definitely doing that to increase adaptation. Therefore the sdk is definitely staying free. This model has not slowed down the sales and only increased it, so I very much doubt if they change…

- When will be the official release date of Flex 2.01?

This is not dated yet, so anything I say would be a pure guess, and my guess would be mid-year next year!

Great questions Thomas!

Best,
-Allen

photoDesk RIA demo

nospam@example.com (Thomas Bedenk) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:56:44 +0100

Check out our cool rich internet application based on flash 9 that makes it possible to discuss images online in a whole new way. There are even video tutorials available on the website. Be sure to check out the amazing live feature with a friend!

As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, photoDesk live can give you a whole new experience of sharing and communicating your ideas about pictures.

photoDesk enables users to simultaneously arrange and manipulate pictures online, through a flash application that connects to the photoDesk Live Server. In combination with a voice-over-ip solution it tears down the wall in communication about pictures. photoDesk provides an direct and innovative way of viewing and discussing pictures online. It just takes your desk with your pictures spread out on it and makes it virtual. Selecting a set of pictures becomes as natural and intuitive as it always was in the analog world.

This is not a public release, but everyone who is really interested can check out our photoDesk RIA demo at http://photodesk.bounceme.net.

Please be aware that the demo is not running in a appropriate server enviroment and might be slow or unstable. Be nice and only upload small image sizes!

Read more about it and see screen shots on my website photoDesk project on bedenk.de/sign

enjoy and please give me feedback

Flex 2.0 rotation

nospam@example.com (Thomas Bedenk) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:21:00 +0100

We are currently working on an advanced Flex 2.0 project. No details yet, but soon to read about it in this blog. But what we discovered working on it is that the Flex framework has some lacks regarding rotation of elements.

While the "no device font in rotated objects problem" is already known we tripped over some new interesting stumble stones.

- For example placing a rotated element in a canvas doesnt generate the scrollbars as you would expect, but only takes the width and height starting from the upper left corner to define the size of the element.

- Another problem is using the implemented drag n drop with rotated elements. It seems like there is a "non dropping area" created that resembles the size of the used canvas (or other element) at the top of the application. While this area is out of screen for unrotated objects it comes into stage when rotation is applied. For example a 180 degrees rotated object can be invisibly found in the top left corner of your application. This might be a bug in our application or a flex feature, lets see...

We are working on these things and i keep you up to date when we figure out how to solve this problems.