Sounds cool huh? You look at all the projects on sourcefourge and think, man if only I could do that in the flash player. Well now you can. The project named Alchemy which translates these C and C++ libraries into bytecode for the flash player is now available on Labs. I cant wait to see how people bend and twist this one. I think it may be one of the more interesting projects I have herd come out of MAX so far.
The Download and Documentation as always is displayed and well laid out on Labs:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
Looks like its a pretty intensive install for Windows, but Mac looks fine 
Adobe is providing some example libraries, and developers are encouraged to share their ported libraries.
On another note one thing mentioned in the 2nd Keynote spiked my interest:
“Ben then opens up Visual Studio and edits MXML with color coding in Visual Studio using a new plugin Adobe is creating. Next he shows a native AMF to .net implementation to build a back-end in C#.”
Hmmm to tell you the truth if the plugin for Visual Studio works well, I might end up doing my flex work in that. I never use the visual layout features of Flex Builder these days and Thermo…. I mean Catalyst will do that work for me.
Well I splashed out on the Iphone 2 and one of the first things I did was go an grab an Objective C book and sit down to sort this new lanuage out
2 weeks later I am versed enough at the principals of Objective C to start causing trouble. I must admit its a very different syntax. The first thing I found laborious was xml and http handling. I was accessing web services on my web server just mucking around an it was so painful. Having come from the wonderfull worlds of Flex Remoting coupled with .NET through WebOrb I started thinking there must be a better way.
Guess what there is!
After running round and learning a few new things I was exposing methods in my .NET dlls to the Iphone using common Objects through a service. All Binary too Sound familiar? Well it should, its what Flex remoting is. I couldn’t use AMF though as I couldn’t find an AMF sterilizer in Objective C and definitely wasn’t wanting to write one with my work load at the moment.
What I did find for now was Hessian, which covers a range of languages. After a setting up unit tests, I was passing native objects from each Language to the other (Iphone Objective C to .NET C#) in my unit tests and got all basic and complex types working along with custom classes etc. So now its off to build an app with this in hand.
Depending on how your objects are structured you can see a huge compression of the objects compared to markup (XML) alternatives. I was seeing 100kb xml to 9kb hessian protocol. Definitely something to look at with New Zealand’s 3G Data prices. And to top it off its less code than parsing xml, faster to develop and faster to use. Give me a yell if you want more info as it can be easily transported to ROR, Java etc.
Now if only Apple would hurry up and allow me onto the Iphone Developer program! its been two weeks!!!
Wouldn’t it be lovely to have the data pushes and streaming of Flash remoting on the Iphone. Stay tuned! 
FREE as in beer!!
Yep what used to cost 10k is now absolutely free. Mark Pillar from The Midnight Coders has made this latest version of WebOrb free, and there are a few special surprises in this latest version I managed to drag out of Mark.
If your currently using it please check your versions numbers as version 4.3.0.2 is about 400% faster.
What used to take 26 seconds now takes only 300 milliseconds. Mark will be publishing a bench testing application in the next few days to profile the performance.
For more indepth details about this head over to the WebOrb blog and check it out.
Cheers Mark for such a nice gift to the community.
Just like the title says. I'm looking for more Adobe community people to attack online lol. Halo 3 is Turning out really good, and lkiving up to alot of the hype
Totally out of the blue Microsoft has released a multi-touch display and operating system called Surface. My guess is its A vist/WPF mix that can register multiple points or cursors.
I have heard/read several rumors around the web that apple was going to annouce something similar at the apple developers conference next month- time will tell with that one.
It all seems to have stemmed from that original video that did the rounds a year or so ago, showing Jeff Han's research. [YOU TUBE Video HERE]
Over on Ryan's post where I originally read this are some links to more information, but it leaves me wondering about the price. 50inch plasma/lcd that has touch screen? I would cringe everytime someone put any liquid near it. I would love a big coffee table that can sync my phone, make pretty displays to set the mood even sell me more stuff I dont need, but I would also love to see it intergrate some RFD technology that would allow objects to interact. Im not sure how Microsoft has the display registering that a camera has been placed on the display so maybe they already have that in there.
