From the first island to see the new year in… Happy New Year

Im always interested to hear success stories about how people have used Flex to solve a problem. I might have missed this story had it not been for one of my clients who has bought the software and is using it for mockups on a job I am working on.

“Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who’d built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going.” – Readwriteweb.com

On a particular post Peldi has openly exposed how his software is doing financially. And its doing VERY well. Granted the blog post was just after the whole financial crisis.”I just recently surpassed $100,000 of revenue. Balsamiq has been in business for less than 5 months”. Great to hear a single developer can still go out and make a software that answers peoples problems and gets them paid at the same time.

Maybe one day I will drop the contracting gig for a few months and actually make one of the many ideas I have been kicking round in my head for a while.

Well done guys.

I just got back from the Airport after catching up with Kai Koenig on his way home from MAX (got Thermo beta . Its 6:30am on a Sunday and the All Blacks are playing Wales (Rugby ,and Wales are winning??).

So While I wait for the Halftime crud to finish I thought I would post the first bit of c++ >> Flash I have seen.

“mrwelsh” has posted in the Alchemy forums his early port of Doom to flash . (not sure if he’s actually Welsh, but thats my tie in for the Ruby)

“Hopefully you enjoy The sound is a little choopy and the controls seem a little laggy, but overall, it runs pretty well.

Alchemy code doesn’t seem to run on PowerPC Macs — anyone else run into this?”

Anyway, check it out here LINK and see what you think. Seems there is a lot of new issues, and tricks to learn in this area reading through the forums though, as Libraries can be better preforming, but for most short running tasks the marshaling of objects is too costly to see any real improvements.

UPDATE: New Zealand won the Rugby! *Phew*

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.

Wow what a day. The press releases are running thick and fast from Adobe today.

First up Thermo, now known as Flash Catalyst. All attendees of the keynote aparently recieved a sneek peek DVD of therm… err hmmm Flash Catalyst. I have Kai bringing me back a copy This will be an interesting one to play with, and I know most developers will be looking at the generated code quality as this was a big concern.

Also the AIR runtime has had a new version release. 1.5. head over to the ushal place to get the release http://get.adobe.com/air/

Cocomo went public beta too:

“Cocomo basically leverages the Adobe Connect back-end to deliver features such as Data Messaging (think traditional Remote SharedObjects), VoIP Audio, Webcam Video, File Sharing, Text Chat and so on. The tool is provided in shape of a developer framework and component set that can be used to build Flex based applications.” - flashcomguru.com

This should be a great help to moving the video/voip platforms forward, though I will watch with caution as to how Adobe charge for this. If its anything like their localized sales of software, be afraid, be very afraid.

Also on the video front Flash Media server version 3.5 was announced with dynamic streaming and DVR features (New Zealanders think My Sky for live video on the web).

“Dynamic Streaming makes it easier to deliver a consistent stream even when bandwidth conditions and general network health changes during playback. While similar techniques were possible before it is now even easier and in particular much more seamless to integrate this functionality.
The DVR feature is great when viewing live streams, either to rewind back to the beginning of the broadcast or simply to re-view a certain part of the stream. I can see this being a great feature for sports broadcasts in particular.”  - flashcomguru.com

Also announced was a new Flex features tour app. This is something I suggested to Microsoft on the launch of silverlight. Its the best way to just “play” with the controls and think about what it could do etc. 

The app is an AIR app (which needs AIR 1.5) and shows you through the controls, and it seems that user submission of examples is coming to

Adobe also announced a new product called Wave 

“Adobe® Wave™ is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications. It helps publishers stay connected to your customers and lets users avoid the email clutter of dozens of newsletters and social network update messages.”

Still unsure about this one….

Flash player 10 for Mobile!!!! almost fully featured. Adobe has been working with ARM to have an almost fully featured Flash player 10 on the ARM processor. I guess this means that the open screen project is actually moving forward. I cant wait for the day I can hack the set top box at home with a different AIR app .

“Obviously hardware may be a limitation, but demos were shown on Symbian, Win mobile and Android (sorry, no FP on iPhone yet…that’s in Apple’s hands)” - philterdesign.com

Lastly a very cool post from Mike Chambers blog about the AIR framework accessing the Growl notifications on mac. Adobe offered to (and subsequently did) help the open-source project along by adding TCP support, instead of the only option of UDP (which the flash player doesn’t support *sigh*). This version of Growl isn’t released yet but will be soon, and is available from the nightlies. Head over to Mike’s blog for more, and the google project for a lib.

So enough of the re-spout of Adobe announcements. But I thought some of these were too good not to pass on. “We now return you to your regular viewing”….