2009 July | Serge Jespers

Archive | July, 2009

Learn ActionScript 3.0 using Flash Professional CS4

by Serge Jespers on 30. Jul, 2009 in ActionScript

In the summer it’s usually a little quieter at work so why not use this quiet time to learn something new? ActionScript 3.0 for instance. Doug Winnie, Adobe’s group manager for designer/developer workflows, just started a new series on Adobe TV titled: “ActionScript 1:1″.

ActionScript 1:1 is a free training resource that combines video tutorials, documentation and sample files to teach you the basics of ActionScript 3.0 using Flash Professional CS4. The course is specifically designed for Flash designers and animators who want to add some custom interaction using ActionScript 3.0 but need a little bit of help getting started. Doug starts off with the very basics and then gradually explains more ActionScript that will make your designs and animations interactive and dynamic. He makes it very easy to understand and I’m sure you’ll be coding ActionScript 3.0 in no time.

ActionScript 1:1 is available on Adobe, through RSS and on iTunes. See Doug’s blog for the links to the videos and the sample projects.

Flash on!

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Getting to Adobe MAX 2009 on a budget. Get a $400 discount!

by Serge Jespers on 28. Jul, 2009 in Events, MAX2009

Can you believe that Adobe MAX 2009 is only 10 weeks away!? Now would be a perfect time to start planning your trip. Since we are still stuck in these grim economic times, I thought it was a good idea to give you some tips on how and where to find the best prices for your MAX tickets, flights and hotels.

MAX TICKETS
If you get your MAX ticket before August 31st, you can benefit from the early bird pricing. A full conference ticket will cost you $1295 or €907. That’s a $200 discount on the regular pricing! That includes lunch on all conference days, access to all keynotes and evening events and access to all breakout sessions and labs. Traveling alone is no fun so there’s also a group discount. If you travel in a group of three or more, your registration price per pass is only $1095 or €767.

If you’re in the US, you can get $400 off the regular price when you purchase one of the listed products from the Adobe Store. This offer is only valid in the US but for you, my regular blog reader, I can do something special. If you’re not in the US, you can use promo code EMA931(restrictions apply*) to get a $400 discount on the regular pricing. Your MAX ticket will then cost $1095 or €767. Register here!

FLIGHTS
Finding an affordable flight is all about timing. If you book your flight well in advance, the flight will be cheaper. Generally if you also include a weekend stay, the price of your flight gets a lot cheaper. In case of MAX, I would suggest flying over on Friday October 2nd. Spending the extra days in the hotel is in most cases cheaper than the extra cost on the flight. Also check with your local travel agent. They may have a promotion for a certain airline. And also shop around! I’ve just checked some routes from Europe to Los Angeles and you can get a flight today for as little as €350. Which reminds me that I should probably book my flight as well ;-)

HOTEL
There are a ton of motels and hotels in the greater Los Angeles area and if you’re not picky, you can even find a place to stay for as little as €14 a night. There really is a lot of choice in LA and I’m sure you can easily find a place to stay in your budget range. You can find a decent hotel starting at €50/$70 a night. For hotels near the venue, check out this Google Maps link. If you don’t mind a little drive in the morning, you should also check hotels a little further away from the venue. But beware that LA traffic can be brutal in the morning and evenings.

CAR RENTAL
Renting a car is not a bad idea. Los Angeles is huge and public transportation can be a bit challenging. If you are going to rent a car, make sure you shop around! Compare the prices from different companies and also check with your local travel agent. They usually have even better prices than what you can get online.

If you do rent a car, make sure you also do some sightseeing. Meet up with some of your friends and colleagues to share the milage and do a little road-trip. I can really recommend going to Santa Monica and/or Venice beach.

If you want to do some shopping for some cool attire, head on down to Melrose Avenue (between Fairfax and La Brea). If you’re done shopping, get yourself a cookies and cream milkshake at Johnny Rockets on the corner of Melrose and Gardner. Make sure you sit outside so you can watch the people walk by and maybe you’ll even spot a celeb ;-)

I can also recommend doing some shopping at Farmers Market. Whether you want to shop for some fresh fruit, hot sauce, get some goodies at an Apple store or get a new Taschen book, Farmers Market has it all.

If this is your first time in LA, you have to walk Hollywood Boulevard and get a photo of your favorite celeb’s star on the walk of fame. But know that that will only keep you busy for about half an hour.

WHERE TO FIND THE BEST DEALS
I’ve recently discovered Momondo.com. This Danish startup finds the best travel deals for you and displays them in a nice uncluttered interface. Not sure if this is the cheapest flight available for that period? Then click on the price calendar to see if there are any cheaper flights. It will also find the best deals for hotels and car rentals. I’ve already mentioned it before in this post but also check with your local travel agent. You never know if they have a promotion for LA if you don’t ask.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that Euro pricing is provided for information only. Exchange rates calculated with Google on July 28th 2009. Also read Google’s disclaimer.

* Offer good for new Adobe MAX 2009 registrants only. Offer good for Adobe MAX 2009 full conference pass registration only. Offer cannot be combined with any other offer, package or registration code. Offer expires at 11:59pm PST on October 4, 2009. Offer is not transferable and valid only for intended recipient. Void where prohibited. Terms and conditions for Adobe MAX registrations will also apply.

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OT Rant: SMS games: How can this be legal…?

by Serge Jespers on 24. Jul, 2009 in Rants

<RANT>When I tuned in to watch the news just now, I happened to catch a commercial for yet another SMS game. “Win a free Nintendo Wii!”, the commercial screamed.

Let’s see how free “free” actually is…
First of all, most of these games are subscription based (even though they only print that in unreadable text) and so is this one. €6 per week. In almost transparent tiny letters, the commercial says that this game ends on December 31st (their website does not mention the end date). So if I enter the game today, that still leaves me about 25 weeks. The subscription alone will cost you €150.

But that’s not all! You also have to answer a bunch of questions to actually get a chance at winning the console. Each question costs you an additional €1,5 (on top of the actual cost of the SMS)! The commercial doesn’t say anything about how many questions you get. Out of curiosity, I visited the advertised (although also in tiny almost unreadable letters) website and found that there are 15 questions per week! That’s an additional €22,5 per week adding up to a grand total of €712,5. And that only gives you a chance to win the console! You can almost buy 3 Wii consoles for that price…

This is just one example. There are dozens if not hundreds of other examples like this one. Is it just me or is this a very obvious rip off? Some of you will probably think that no one falls for an obvious scam like this. However, if you switch on any music television station, you see commercials like this every 10 minutes or so. Since these commercials also cost money, it’s obvious that people DO fall for this… So… Let me ask this… How can this be legal?</RANT>

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Next stop: Bangalore, India

by Serge Jespers on 23. Jul, 2009 in Events

I’m extremely excited about my next trip: Bangalore, India. It’s one of those places I really only know from hearing about it. India has rapidly become a key player in the world’s IT industry and I’m really looking forward to meeting the local developer community. I’ve been told by our local team in Bangalore that many developers in the area read my blog. I was really surprised when I confirmed that in my stats. My blog actually gets more visitors from India than from France or The Netherlands! And I live in Belgium! I just couldn’t believe it but I’m really happy with that.

So… Since there are so many of you reading this, this invitation is very appropriate. If you are in the Bangalore area on August 4th, I would love to meet you at Adobe’s Devsummit. We have an exciting day scheduled for you and we’ll cover everything from Flash Builder 4 to Flash Catalyst to ColdFusion to mobile and more.

Since I’m in India all week, I’ll also visit some customers, visit the Flex user group in Pune, speak at the Bangalore University and meet our developers and engineers working on Flex and ColdFusion.

Hope to see you there!

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Open at Adobe

by Serge Jespers on 21. Jul, 2009 in open screen project, open source

What is “open”? It’s a question I’ve been asking for quite a while now and I can’t seem to find a definitive answer.

Dave McAllister (Adobe’s Open Standards Evangelist) actually sums it up nicely: “Open is the currently most misused word in the IT space,” he says. “Open really comes down and says it’s accessible, extensible and can be freely used by anyone. Most companies define open as a single dimensional aspect. For Adobe it’s all aspects of communications and technologies. For us, those are open source, standards and community.”

Check out this video to learn more about the open initiatives at Adobe and just how open the Flash Platform really is.

Today we also released the Open Source Media Framework (formerly known as Strobe) and the Text Layout Framework on our Open Source website.

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No Twitter support outside US?

by Serge Jespers on 17. Jul, 2009 in Rants, mtwit

I know this is a bit off topic but it’s something that’s been bugging me. As many of you know, I am working on a Flash Lite based Twitter application (mTwit) that will run across all devices that have Flash Lite on board. Even though my account and my server have been whitelisted on the Twitter service, this is now the second day that my Twitter account gets suspended “due to strange activity“. I’m not sure what else I can do to make sure that a) Twitter doesn’t suspend me while developing the app and b) my server back end gets accepted as a Twitter proxy. I’m pretty sure I did all I was supposed to and did all I can.

In dealing with the Twitter support people, I noticed that it seems that there isn’t a single support representative outside the US. That means that getting support outside the US business hours seems to be a big no-no. I wonder how many people outside the US use Twitter. I bet it’s a massive number.

This is rapidly becoming one of my pet peeves… Companies/startups should start thinking outside their borders! Especially when they are active on the Internet. The Internet doesn’t stop at the border!

So… Because of no support outside US business hours I won’t be on Twitter (and won’t be working on my app) until they reinstate my account.

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Why I love the Flash Platform…

by Serge Jespers on 16. Jul, 2009 in Flash Platform

Before we start and just so we get this out of the way… For 2 years now, Adobe pays my paycheck. That said, I “saw the light” of Flash more than 13 years ago. Because of my long history with Flash, I feel I can say that this is an unbiased post.

Everywhere
First of all, Flash is everywhere. I’m not just talking about its ubiquity but also about the variety of devices it is available on. It’s not just a browser plugin anymore. The Flash Platform now extends from desktop to mobile to consumer electronics. There are already more than 1 billion devices in the market today that support Flash content. While this is a “lighter” version of the Flash Player, it already has a lot of its bigger brother’s features and is already used for lots of mobile applications, games and promotional content. Together with the Open Screen Project partners, Adobe aims to bring the same consistent runtime that you’re used to in your browser to a broad variety of devices. In the not too distant future, you’ll be able to repurpose the code base across multiple devices. I’m actually doing a workshop about that very topic at MAX this year!

Consistent
With Flash, you never needed to worry about how your application will look in browser X or on operating system Z. And you still don’t have to worry about that. If Flash Player is installed, the application works and behaves consistently across all browsers and operating systems. Even applications/sites built with Flash 1 still work as designed. If you want to use any of the new features that are available with a new release of Flash Player, you (as the developer) can use express install to transparently upgrade the Flash Player. The same thing goes for desktop development with AIR. A single AIR application installer runs on Mac, Windows and Linux machines without having to worry about operating specific settings or features.

Community
Even back in the early days of Flash, the community around it grew every day. Just about all of the early community sites around Flash are still alive and kicking. Ultrashock and FlashKit, for instance, are still going strong. If you get stuck somewhere, there’s always someone around to help out. If you’re looking for a particular ActionScript library, chances are that someone has already created one. Some of these ActionScript libraries have even caused some amazing innovations on their own. Papervision 3D and FLARToolkit are just a couple examples. Many sites and applications like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter even have dedicated ActionScript 3.0 libraries.

Open
Yes… Open! Not only is Adobe very open about what it’s doing and future roadmaps, the file formats used by Flash Player are also open. The specs for the SWF and FLV file formats are open as well as the specs for AMF (the binary format for exchanging data used by the Flash Player) and RTMP. Adobe also uses and supports many open source projects like Eclipse and WebKit and also contributes to the open source community.

But the most important reason is actually pretty simple. The Flash Platform is just a lot of fun to develop for and it’s very clear that the future is looking very bright for Flash Platform developers. Flash on!

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My 9 favorite ColdFusion 9 features

by Serge Jespers on 13. Jul, 2009 in ColdFusion

coldfusion.jpg (JPEG Image, 253x250 pixels)-1.jpg In case you haven’t heard: ColdFusion 9 Beta and ColdFusion Builder Beta are now available on Adobe Labs. Some of you may find this surprising (;-)) but I’ve been playing with CF9 for a few months now and actually really love it!

To give you a bit of an idea on what I like about CF9, I’ve listed my 9 favorite features.

1) Adobe AIR database synchronization
By enabling this feature in your AIR application (both on the server and in the client app), the application syncs the data from a ColdFusion datasource to a local SQLite database. On the server side, it’s as simple as setting the persistent property to true on an ORM component. On the AIR side, it takes a little bit more depending on the features you need. In some cases you may need things like conflict management but even something as complicated as that can be done with just a few lines of code. Read more about this feature.

2) Object Relational Mapping (ORM)
This was a true eye-opener for me. ORM allows you to do complex database calls without writing a single SQL query thus making your code a lot cleaner and more manageable. This is a serious time saver and your apps will even run faster because of the built-in ORM optimizations. Read more about this feature.

3) Flex integration
I’m not just talking about the data centric development features in Flash Builder here. By using the ColdFusion proxy ActionScript classes, you get access to several ColdFusion services without actually writing any ColdFusion code. You just call the ColdFusion service straight from your Flex code. Read more about this feature.

4) ColdFusion Builder
Not really a ColdFusion 9 feature but ok… ColdFusion Builder is an Eclipse based IDE for CF development that is deeply integrated with CF9. So it’s ok to post it in this list ;-) I absolutely love how easy it is to create your ORM code. With just a few clicks, you can create all the necessary CRUD code to use in your CF application or your Flex application. I also really like that it’s extremely easy to extend ColdFusion Builder with your own extensions. You can easily write those extensions using CFML. Read more about ColdFusion Builder.

5) ColdFusion as a service
Ever tried calling an Exchange server from a PHP server (or any other server)? Or read a PPT, DOC or XLS file? Did you have fun? ;-) Next time, you should consider using CF9. ColdFusion 9 has an exposed service layer meaning you have direct access to a bunch of CF9 services from any server language you use. You can even call them using SOAP. Read more about this feature.

6) Server manager
If you work with multiple CF servers, this is surely going to make you very happy. Server Manager is an AIR-based desktop application that allows you to centrally manage multiple ColdFusion servers from one location. Apply hot fixes, change configs, create data sources, etc to all servers at once. Read more about this feature.

7) Office application integration
Ever wanted to create a presentation (PPT) from an bunch of images? Or from an HTML page? The <cfpresentation> tag allows you to do that and more! With just a few lines of code, you can create, convert and read presentation files. The same thing goes for documents and spreadsheets. Read more about this feature.

8) PDF integration
With the enhanced PDF support in CF9, you can extract all the content form a PDF file. You can also update PDFs and even optimize them on the server. Read more about this feature.

9) <cfscript>
The <cfscript> tag was really confusing to me when I first started playing with CF. Some CFML tags could also be scripted and others couldn’t. With CF9, everything you can do with CFML, you can also do with <cfscript>. Read more about <cfscript>.

Obviously there are a lot more new and cool features in ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder but I thought 9 was an appropriate number ;-). Go ahead and download the public beta versions available on Labs and start playing with it yourself.

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Multi-screen development session at Flash On The Beach

by Serge Jespers on 08. Jul, 2009 in Events, Flash Platform, devices, mobile

Although Flash On The Beach is only 4 years old this year, it has already become a highlight in the Flash community. There something about FOTB that makes this one of the “must-go” conferences of the year. And it seems to be growing year after year!

This is going to be the first year that I’m actually doing a session at FOTB. “I’d better come up with an appealing session”, was my first thought when I got accepted as a speaker. After all, I am sharing the billboard with Flash rock stars like Keith Peters, Mario Klingemann, Mike Jones, Grant Skinner, Joa Ebert, Colin Moock and many more.

But… I think I have an interesting session lined up. With multi-screen development becoming increasingly important, I thought it was a good idea to do a session about that. Even more so because we have some interesting announcements lined up around the MAX timeframe which coincidentally happens to be just 2 weeks after FOTB… So… I’ll show you how to build an application that runs on multiple screens sharing the same code-base and using the capabilities available in the different runtimes.

Can you read between the lines…? “Same code-base across the different runtimes…” Anyone? ;-)

Early bird pricing for FOTB ends on July 24th and FOTB did sell out the last 2 years… So… What are you waiting for? See you in Brighton!

More info and tickets on http://www.flashonthebeach.com/

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Where to watch the Michael Jackson memorial online

by Serge Jespers on 07. Jul, 2009 in Flash Platform, flash video

Today we say goodbye to one of the biggest (if not the biggest) pop icons of our time. Some already call this the media event of the century. Over 1.6 million people registered to get a ticket for the event in Los Angeles. Only 8700 people were selected.

This is surely going to be an event that is going to watched by many. If not on TV, then most certainly on the web. I watched that other big event earlier this year (Obama’s inauguration) live on CNN.com with no hiccups whatsoever so I’ll probably watch the memorial there as well. I thought it was a good idea to give a quick overview on where you can watch the event online.

CNN.com (CNN is teaming up with Facebook)
FoxNews
ABCnews
CBSnews (using uStream.tv)
Hulu (Not available outside the US)
USAToday (Using Livestream.com)
NYTimes
MySpace
MSN/MSNBC
E! Online (via Justin.tv)

Coincidentally/As far as I know all of the above are using Flash to stream this event to no doubt hundreds of thousands of viewers. Yes… You are right… This post should not be about promoting the Flash Platform.

(Image by Kristof Saelen)
(Via NewTeeVee.com)

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