Archive | June, 2008

Demand for RIA-jobs on the rise

by Serge Jespers on 28. Jun, 2008 in Jobs

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for quite some time but for some reason never got around to it.

I remember someone asked me about Flex jobs in Europe when I showed this graph at the Flex pre-release tour last February. This graphs shows the increase in demand for Flex coders but is based on data from the US. I remember responding to the question saying that everywhere I go, people ask if I don’t know anyone that knows Flex or ActionScript. So I did a quick check with a few companies in Belgium and the demand is definitely there.
Boulevart is currently looking for Flash developers and Flex/AIR developers. LBi is looking for Flash/AS3 developers. iDa/MediaFoundry is looking for RIA developers. These Days is looking for Flashers/Flexers.

And I’m pretty sure there are more jobs out there if you look for them. And that seems to be the big problem right now. You’ll have to do a little bit of extra effort to actually find these jobs. You usually won’t find them in the newspapers…

Peter Elst is trying to make that a lot easier. He just launched RIAjobs.org, a job board targeted at Rich Internet Application developers from various backgrounds be it Flash, Flex, AJAX or Silverlight. As it only launched a few days ago, there aren’t that many jobs yet but I’m sure that will change soon. Usergroup meetings and conferences are also a great way of meeting companies who are hiring and obviously keeping an eye on your favorite company’s website is also a good way of finding out about job opportunities.

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AIR 1.1 adds localization and performance improvements

by Serge Jespers on 18. Jun, 2008 in AIR, News


AIR 1.1 is out the door and even though this is a dot release, that doesn’t mean there’s not much new to tell. AIR 1.1 includes the following new capabilities:

  • Installation and other runtime dialog boxes have been translated into:
    • Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish
  • Support for building internationalized applications, including keyboard input for double-byte languages
  • Support for localizing the name and description attributes in the application descriptor file
  • Support for localizing error messages, such as SQLError.detailID  and SQLError.detailArguments, in the SQLite database
  • Addition of Capabilities.languages property to obtain an array of preferred UI languages as set by the operating system
  • HTML button labels and default menus, such as context menus and the Mac menu bar,
    have been localized to all supported languages
  • Support for certificate migration from a self-signed application to one that chains to a
    certificate of authority (CA)
  • Support for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and support for 64-bit editions of Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise.
  • Addition of File.spaceAvailable : API to obtain the amount of disk space available on a disk
  • Addition of NativeWindow.supportsTransparency property to determine whether a window can be drawn as transparent by the current operating system
  • Bug fixes and memory improvements

To start working with these new capabilities and performance improvements, there are updates available for your favorite development environment.
For Flex Builder, see this Flex Builder Technote.
For Dreamweaver, download the updated version of the Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver.
For Flash, follow the instructions in this Flash Technote.

Additionally, Aptana Studio (for AJAX development) is also already updated to support AIR 1.1

Download the updated runtime from http://get.adobe.com/air/. Get more information here (PDF).

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Updating AIR applications

by Serge Jespers on 16. Jun, 2008 in How-to, onAIR Tour

My presentation at the On AIR tour through Europe was about signing, deploying and updating your AIR applications. If you didn’t make it to the tour or just want to read up on these topics, I wrote three separate posts about them on the train somewhere between Prague and Munich.

This is probably the most important step to take when you are building your application and it should probably be the first thing you do. Let’s say someone found a bug in your application and you fixed it in a newer version. How are you going to tell users about that bug-fix if you don’t have an update mechanism in place? AIR has everything on board to make updating applications a breeze, both for you and the user of your application.
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Deploying AIR applications

by Serge Jespers on 16. Jun, 2008 in How-to, onAIR Tour

My presentation at the On AIR tour through Europe was about signing, deploying and updating your AIR applications. If you didn’t make it to the tour or just want to read up on these topics, I wrote three separate posts about them on the train somewhere between Prague and Munich.

You created your AIR file… so now what? The easiest thing to do is to upload the file to your server and put a link to it on your website. But this is not very user-friendly for whoever is going to download and install your application. In some cases, when your server isn’t configured to handle AIR files, it may even fail altogether. That’s why we created the concept of install badges. Install badges are basically a small Flash application that handles download and install in such a way that it becomes very easy for the end user to install your application.
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Signing AIR applications

by Serge Jespers on 16. Jun, 2008 in How-to, onAIR Tour

My presentation at the On AIR tour through Europe was about signing, deploying and updating your AIR applications. If you didn’t make it to the tour or just want to read up on these topics, I wrote three separate posts about them on the train somewhere between Prague and Munich.

First of all, why is signing an application important? Easy. When your application is unsigned or signed with a self-signed certificate, the user will get two red icons on the install screen. The first one is related to your code signing certificate. It’s telling you that the “publisher is unknown” which is very normal since we have no idea who actually signed this application.

When you do get a code signing certificate and sign the application with it, the icon will turn green or in some cases yellow. The yellow icon will appear when you are using the file I/O API.

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Why I think the Open Screen project matters…

by Serge Jespers on 12. Jun, 2008 in Industry, Rants

It’s all about user experience. I could just end this post right here because that’s what I think is the main reason the Open Screen project matters. The Flash platform has really revolutionized the user experience on the web and we have all gotten used to having this rich experience. With more and more devices being connected to the web, people expect these devices to have the same experience they are used to. Just the other day, I was witnessing a new high-end-phone user surfing the web. She could not understand why some parts of the sites she was browsing to, worked fine on a PC but not on that new, shiny and expensive high-end-phone. Things like little widgets on a page or even full sites would only show a little “missing plugin” icon. “That’s because this phone doesn’t have Flash”, I remember saying which she just couldn’t grasp.

We’ve all become accustomed to things just working without having to think about it and also to having rich interfaces on the web. We are used to seeing animated menus on DVD’s and are rapidly getting used to seeing interactive menus on Bluray discs. We’re used to animated rich menus on game consoles and its games. So why can’t we have this experience everywhere?

If I switch on my digital TV set-top box at home, it’s far from a rich ‘engaging’ user experience. The interface is dull and dead slow with no connectivity to online information and communities. I always think about what I could do with Flash to have a richer experience Flash only were available on this STB. The same thing goes for the menus in TV’s. How much more could you do if you could ask a Flash designer/developer to make the menu instead of having to write it in some obscure language that offers no richness whatsoever. How much more exciting would it be to control your TV/STB/PVR with a rich connected user interface that immediately gets online reviews, ratings and comments about the TV-shows you are programming?

This is why I think the Open Screen project matters. It’s not just about bringing Flash/AIR to mobile devices, I think it’s about bringing that rich experience that people are used to, everywhere.

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On AIR tour part 2: 2000km of 3500 done

by Serge Jespers on 07. Jun, 2008 in Events, onAIR Tour


Some 2000 kilometers (about 1300 miles), about 31 hours on 5 different trains and about 10 battery charges later, we arrived in Prague today. Well… Actually, I’m writing this on the train from Warsaw to Prague so we’re not actually there yet and we still have about 5 hours left on this train but I can’t actually post this until we do arrive in Prague. But anyway, I thought this would be a great time to look back at last week.
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Buzzword out in the open on newly released Acrobat.com

by Serge Jespers on 02. Jun, 2008 in News


One of the apps we have been demoing a lot is Buzzword. Buzzword is a web-based word processor that can be used to co-author and share documents for comment and review–but you could just as easily create high-quality print results with it. It’s not because I work for Adobe, but I really think this is the best online word processor to date and I can’t wait for the AIR version to become available. But that’s not all we’re releasing today. Buzzword is now part of Acrobat.com, a set of online services that take advantage of PDF, Flash and AIR. Acrobat.com has everything you need for file sharing and storage, converting files to PDF, online word processing and web conferencing. The cherry on the cake is that Acrobat.com has a full set of developer APIs that you can use in your own Flash/Flex/AIR applications to easily enable real-time collaboration, file sharing and conversion. Go check it out.

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