Adobe's Create the Web Tour - Montreal Edition

Adobe is passing by Montreal on Thursday December 6th, 2012 for the "Create the Web Tour". At this event you will get a chance to see the various Adobe Edge Tools in action and also how to create mobile apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS using PhoneGap.

So all really cool stuff and if you want to attend follow this link to register, there is still places available.

AIR 3.0 beta and Flash Player 11 beta available!

Well a big day today, shows that Adobe is busy at work even though we are in the middle of the summer. Today Adobe has announced the beta availability of the next major versions of AIR and Flash Player.

The AIR 3 beta, is a run-time only beta at the moment, so as to test backward compatibility with applications built with the AIR 2.7 SDK. The AIR 3 SDK beta will be made available at a later date. Major speed improvements are the highlight of this release, but more details will come I'm sure.

As for the Flash Player 11 beta, we have a bit more details on this side. The next version of our little player that could will contain Stage 3D APIs, 64-bit support (finally!), HD Surround Sound, Socket Progress Events (you can now built FTP clients), G.711 audio compression and H.264/AVC for higher quality video encoding. Well that was a mouthful, go check it out!

My first Flex 4.5.1 android mobile application

So I finally got myself an Android tablet this passed week and needless to say I've been playing with it ever since. And of course today, I build my first application with it using both the Android SDK and Flex 4.5.1. But it wasn't just click a button and voila! I had to go thru several steps and just wanted to note them all here, just in case someone else is getting started in the mobile development environment anytime soon and will be going thru the same thing as I experienced.

Before I get started, the tablet I bought is the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101, which you can read all about here. Its a nice 10 inch tablet at an affordable price of $399 CAD. And my PC is running Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

So here are the steps that I took to build my first "Hello World" application:

1. Enable Debug mode on your device.
   
2. Download and install the USB driver for your device. The Android web site links to whole list of OEM sites, so you can find the one for your device. In my case, Windows 7 installed it on its own.
3. Download the latest Android SDK from here. I downloaded the zip version and extracted to my folder of preference.
4. Since we are using Eclipse for our development, install the ADT plugin by following the instructions on this page. I am using Eclipse Helios (3.6).
   
5. Once the ADT plugin is installed, start Eclipse and go to Window > Android SDK and AVD Manager. You can now download and install some extra components related to the Android SDK. The most important one as I recall is the "Android SDK Platform-Tools".
6. Again within the Android SDK and AVD Manager (see above step), under Virtual Devices, add your device... I just had to specify Name, Target, SD Card size.

Once I had done all these steps, I was ready to rock'n'roll. Once way to check that your device and your PC are talking to each other is to do the following:

1. Open a console window
2. Goto <android sdk>\platform-tools folder
3. Run the following command: adb devices

You should see your device listed with some alphanumeric identifier assigned to it. If you dis-connect it from the USB port and run this command again, you should see that the device is no longer listed.

The next thing that I did was to create a Flex Mobile Project and just add a label to the UI and set its text property to "Hello World". Then I ran the application and voila, the application was compiled and auto-deployed and auto-launched on my device!

NOTE: Make sure that the Run Configuration has it's Launch Method set to On Device.

I hope these steps help out all those that are getting started in Android development with Flex!

FlexCommon 1.0 library launched

Well my first ever venture into open source has happened. I have created a Flex library called FlexCommon on the GoogleCode web site. This library contains some utility classes and validators which I have been using at work lately and that I wanted to share with the Flex community. It is not much to start, but hopefully I will be adding some more as the months go by and hopefully it will be useful to some of you.

Any feedback is welcomed, but for now, just go download it and use it!

Adobe.com updated

Very nice indeed. When Adobe/Macromedia merger happened, the Adobe website took many elements from the old Macromedia web site, but for the first time since then, a complete re-designed of the Adobe.com has occurred. More emphasis has been put on content and taking advantage of wide-screen real estate is a real nice touch. Head over there now and check it out!