So its time I pose another question. Today in Google’s IO event Unity3D played a small yet impressive part. Displaying native 3d in the browser (chrome of course) without a plugin, 3d on Android. Ill be blunt…. what are the chances of Google trying to aquire Unity3D to make an open 3d browser standard for others to adopt, in a similar way to the On2 acquisition.

Next question… Did Abode miss the boat. Roll back to december last year and some rather high profile flashers were saying Adobe should buy Unity3d. This stemmed from the fact they had been wanting 3D capabilities for so long and Adobe didn’t seem willing to offer them. I thought the same. I have seen clients consider 3d and try to achieve their dreams in the flash player but to be honest your dreams don’t have to be that big before the flash player falls short. But at the same time the Unity3D plugin didn’t have the install base for them to be comfortable. I saw at least a partnership as a perfect arrangement.

This is all based on that fact that the owners of Unity3D would be open to a partnership/acquirement, as I don’t think its a publicly traded company (correct me if Im wrong). Which may be why we see more of a partnering with google, but history shows, thats just not how Google rolls.

Regardless of all of this the guys at Unity3D have done an awesome job of bringing an awesome tool to the market, at the right time, with the right features. I am sure that if they continue to deliver the solution both developers and the people paying the developers want they will do fine on their own. If someone from Unity reads this please feel free to comment on your visions of 3d on the web past plugins.

I got some great news that I have been made an Adobe Community Professional. This group is AKA Adobe Community Experts program which has been re-branded to make it a little clearer.

2009 was a good year and 2010 is shaping up to be even better. Feel free to ping me on twitter @campbell, skype:campbellanderson, or xbox (see to the left) as always ill do my best to help out, or noob tube you on Call of duty.

So a big thank you to Adobe for the privilege to be apart of this group, its a great honor!

Also of note congrats run out to my fellow Pacific based friends (even the Aussie’s in there ) :

Kai Koenig (@agentK) NZ
Dale Rankine (@dalerankine) AU
Justin Mclean (@JustinMclean) AU
Geoff Bowers (@modius) AU
Andrew Muller (@rebel) AU
Mark Mandel (@neurotic) AU

But a simple summary:
“Athena” : StorageVolume APIs

• “Athena” API
• Monitors mounting and un-mounting of storage volumes
• USB / Firewire
• Cameras and Devices that mount as drives

“Athena” : NativeProcess API

• New API in AIR 2.0
• Can call and communicate with external applications
• Requires application be distributed as native installer (no AIR files)
• Cannot execute applications within application directory
• Must add “extendedDesktop” to support profiles

AIR 2.0 : Launch Default

• Allows files to be launched with default application
• Works in any AIR application
• File cannot be in application directory
• File type blacklist

Update: Also Raw microphone access YAY: http://theflashblog.com/?p=1426

“The Tamarin virtual machine is used within the Adobe® Flash® Player and is also being adopted for use by projects outside Adobe.” - http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

Just to start out, I highly recommend having a look through the source if you have any understanding of c/c++ and are working with the flash player at any level. Playing with it I have learnt so much about what really goes on under the hood. I can only liken it to being a mechanic and driver at the same time compared to being just a driver. Things are fine as a driver while everything is going as planned, but when things go wrong as a mechanic as well you can tell whats going on behind the scenes and can make fixes (educated guesses) very quickly.

I began by just extending the virtual machine in c++, and soon found myself adding database abilities. These could then be in turn called from actionscript. This ineviatably led me to looking into server side actionscript. I found the mod_actionscript project on Google code and used this as a rough guidline to do my implementation. I wrapped the virtual machine in a Fast CGI wrapper. This allowed the application to remain loaded inbetween requests and just start from an entry point in the actionscript. Soon I had raw compiled actionscript returning text from Apache. And wow its fast. I have now started building a bit of an actionscript core for fun, giving it activerecord (think rails) like capabilities.

Im starting to look at the different web focused frameworks out there and how they might fit with this. Google Web Toolkit is a really nice implementation, and I can see now why it is like it is. More of a javascript application than web pages. GWT allows the strongly typed world of Java to work well against tested javascript components, forming the larger application. Then theres the rails style. Convention over configuration, loosely typed objects etc. I really love rails but I also love the debugging of Actionscript, which requires the Strongly typed objects. So Im unsure where Ill take things, but for now I will keep playing.

It sucks that the development tools are very limited, jumping from Xcode, to eclipse, to textmate etc but still fun hacking. I have even given the little project a name; RedRocket. And I found a now un-used logo for it

(hehehehe)

All this leads me to the question that has been bugging me for the past week. What ever happened to the examples we saw glimpses of during max last year. They showed actionscript sections inside of an HTML page, being executed on the server.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uImhKFhwAu0&feature=player_embedded

Does anyone have a link to this? Was it just some side project of the developers at Adobe? Did it get canned with the current economic situation. Was it killed as it competed with Cold Fusion to much? – Does anyone know….. does anyone care?

“Why spend your time off doing dusty dirty work” – you ask? Well Its a nice way to get your brain working on something other than computer based problems, and a beer never tasted better after a days of primer sanding inhalation .

First up, what I started with many years ago:

Then where I am at now:

Getting close to final paint. Cant wait

Scrat the chinchilla is highly partial to sticky notes so you can see how I did the draw below:

Nom nom nom….

So to all the entrants (See this post) sorry I couldn’t give you all a book, but I do think it is a great buy and please consider checking out the Amazon page

And from Scrat, Little Miss and I again congratulations Thom Theriault!

Professional Flex 3

Authors from left to right: Joseph Balderson , Andrew Trice, Jun Heider, David Hassoun, Todd Prekaski, Joe Berkovitz, Tom Sugden, [Peter Ent not present], plus five tech editors: Matthew Fabb, Charles Bihis, Campbell Anderson (meeee , Greg Jastrab and Douglas Knudsen

Im some of my little free time over the last year I helped out technical editing on the book above. Professional Flex 3. I have read many flex books in my career, some good in some areas some in others. This book has it all. If you click the image above you can visit the Amazon page and read the first review by Alan. It sums this book up really well.

“Generally, something that does many things well, doesn’t do any one thing great….
This book does many things great.

How did the publisher do this? Well, by making the book 1300 pages and having 8 authors. I think of this book not as ‘one big book’ but more as a few smaller ones put together. ”

I like to think I know the flex framework pretty well, having worked with it solid the last few years, but even this book had points I hadn’t bothered to explore. So to all involved, well done!

And to make things even better I have a free copy to give away. I can send pretty much anywhere in the world, but some places might take a while to see the book delivered from NZ (hate to think of the miles this book will have done in the end).

So to win:

If you win you must write a review, either on you blog or Amazon. Good bad or indifferent I don’t mind.

Leave a comment below (obviously providing your email in the form), and I will get my chinchilla to draw the winner. The winner will be announced next week Friday NZT

And if you dont win, I would still seriously consider buying a copy. I dont get paid for it, so Im not doing a sales job on you. I just think that if your at this blog, you must have some interest in flex

UPDATE: Congratulations Thom Theriault  He was drawn as the winner here.

If you see me (see photos on the about page, and add stress wrinkles) wandering around in a cafine induced stupor, please come say hi to me. And if your around for the code wars event on wednesday night, come cheer for the WANZAC team, and if we win its Kai’s shout at the bar.

Also note to the right hand side of this post my awsome new avitar (I have been waiting for soooo long for one of these), created by the great people at Nectarine. They do the great animated intros to the conference and I cant wait to see what they have in store for us this year.

AppPuncher Interface

Working with Flash/Flex remoting can be a difficult process, esspecially to debug. You can have alot of factors that contribute to the success of the application and not all can be debugged from inside Flex builder or other debuggers. Up until now I have been using a product called Charles which has done the job very well and had support for AMF structures, but I have now switched to AppPuncher.

Why? Well apart from a few hiccups with the Mac version at the beginning, AppPuncher has been proving itself as a very useful tool. AppPuncher is targeted at Flex/Flash remoting. You can re-invoke the same calls to the server again from within the debugger, without having to touch the flash based application. You can live edit the AMF objects coming in or going out of the debugger to try and fix any issues (this is esspecially handy if you have a non Flash/Flex person developing the server side). Filtering of captured/displayed data is great too. So many of the other alternatives capture and display every request which leaves you having to wade through the masses of automated requests from Google toobars etc to find your service calls.

Talking to the people at The Midnight Coders, they have told me there are A LOT more features coming, and that this is a very early release. New features like, Regression tests from recorded sessions, Code coverage tests and load testing, which is something often hard to test as there are no RTMP based tools for this. Also possibly a lot more tie-in to their server product WebOrb, which will help clients diagnose and work through issues.

If you have always wanted to be able to do something, or wanted a proxy/debugger application to do “XYZ” then now is probably the time to ping The Midnight Coders and let them know while they are still in the development stage. You might get lucky and find the feature in the next release.

For a complete list of features and plenty of images showing the interface head on over to the product page and trial it for FREE! AppPuncher Product page.