Back a few months ago at max. BlackBerry announced they would be giving away free PlayBooks to developers who develop an application for their platform. I for one am all about free stuff. So I set out to develop a tool that I thought would be useful and I would use regularly. The app I decided to create was a programming calculator.
Today the application is finally complete and has been accepted into the app store.
While creating this app I used the latest version of Flash Builder Burrito. I found it a lot easier to use vs Flash Builder 4. The new built-in mobile wizards and device simulators were very helpful. Also the flex framework really worked great with layout and positioning as it always does. The only real gotcha with flex was how skinning works on mobile devices vs desktop apps. Everything else was a breeze.
Thanks Adobe and Blackberry for making such great tools that work!
I found this cool example of an HTTP based socket server over at Christophe Coenraet’s blog. Basically he setup a socket and made it listen for incoming HTTP connections and server data based up the requests. Very neat stuff. It’s always interesting to see people push the uses of AS3 in new directions.
This should also be possible under older versions of AIR too. since those versions supported sockets too. the only difference is in AIR 2.0 we now have UDP sockets.
You can view the code and examples here.
I have to say i was rather surprised when I woke up this morning to find out new betas of the Flash Player and AIR were released. I don’t believe I’ve been this excited for a new release of flash in a long time. But what I’m more excited about are all the new features in AIR. It seems like Adobe really listened to the community and put in the features we have been asking for. The feature I’m most exited about is the support for native code integration. Finally i wont have to rely on Merapi any more (even though it is a great project that helped me with what I needed at the time). So if you want to hurry an try out all the latest and greatest go ahead download the files below to get you started and take a look at the samples below to see what is possible.
< Air 2.0 Beta runtime / Air 2.0 Beta SDK >
< Flash Player 10.1 Beta / Player Global SWC >
< Developer Guides >
< AS3 Language Reference >
Samples:
Samples are from Adobe
In my never-ending attempt to rid myself of a relentless cell phone service that I hardly ever use. I decided to work on another AIR Application a few months back. The concept was to make an application that would easily bridge Google Voice and the free Gizmo5 service to allow you to make and take phone calls from your PC.
I did a bit of research into the web API’s for both companies and was going to give it a shot and see what I could create in an attempt to figure out how I could rid of my blaster iPhone for once and for all. But now that Google has acquired Gizmo5 that may all have changed and I hope for the better. I guess we will see. But even despite of this I’m still working on this application when I have time so stay tuned for more.
So I’ve been looking into the new Adobe Social API for a little application I’ve been planning on working on. One of the things I hate is trying to update my avatar / icon on all of these different social media sites. So I’m planning on making a simple Adobe Air application that I can add an image to, resize and then upload to all the social media sites I use. The only problem is from what I understand is that the Social API will only work from a valid domain that you setup and will not work from localhost. So as a result this new API is incompatible with AIR. Oh well. Shouldn’t be to hard to figure out all of the different API’s for uploading to a bunch of different site. Right?
One of my biggest covets with xbmc is trying to fix movie and thumbnail information. It’s just a too complex of an operation for a remote and just plain annoying. Being that i don’t have a PC and only use a mac I’ve found it difficult to update the XMBC / Plex database. OSX just doesn’t have as many cool tools and developers as windows does. so I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to edit the database with a separate application. I’ve looked at using Media Companion but then i would have to figure out how to run the application under mono (which so far hasn’t worked).
So as an alternative i started looking into how XMBC and PLEX both organize and manage their thumbnails and have decided to try and make a simple application in Adobe Air to do this. Right now I’m still in the planning stages. So i’ll post more details back here as i make progress.
