Ohhhhhh a few new tid bits given out at Flash on the Beach. Mike Chambers posted his presentation slides containing details outlining new features coming in Air 2.0. Its obvious that Chambers is also enjoying his new camera as the PDF presentation is 10mb and has some pretty cool texture backgrounds [ Download here ] [ Slide share version ]

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

As mentioned in my previous post I have been on a short holiday. One of the things I slated to do at nights was to dig deeper into the Tamarin project.

“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?

Hello readers. This week I had part 2 of my first real holiday in 2 years. Yes thats right, Flex development has been that good to me lately. And while I subscribe to the “Make hay while the sun shines” theory, it eventually got a bit much. Part 1 of my holiday was a trip to OZ (Australia) which was great, but part 2 was a week at home working on my mustang.

“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

Congratulations Thom Theriault. Scrat picked you as the winner. I will be emailing you soon.

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.