Hot job in Silicon Valley: Flash developer

Posted by on Aug 26, 2010 in Industry | 1 comment

The best way to measure the impact and relevance of a technology is probably to look at job openings. According to the Wall Street Journal the demand for Flash developers in Silicon Valley has suddenly surged:

With the advent of online social gaming start-ups such as Zynga Game Network Inc. and others—many of which make online games that involve Flash technology—demand for Flash engineers has suddenly surged.

Mochi Media (one of the largest online gaming networks) says it is hard to find good Flash engineers.

To get around the lack of Flash engineers, Mr. Hsu says Mochi Media tries to hire engineers who know programming languages such as Java and then train them to use Flash. “It’s a six-month time investment, but most can pick up Flash very quickly,” he says.

Be sure to read the rest of the article on the WSJ site. Oh… and ehr… Flash on!

Auto update API for AIR Native Installer Apps

Posted by on Aug 25, 2010 in AIR | 2 comments

If you’ve played around with native installers for AIR 2, you probably already found out that you cannot use the update framework. My fellow evangelist Piotr just released a solution for that.

Piotr’s NativeApplicationUpdater library works in exactly the same way as the update framework you use for AIR applications. When your app starts it loads an XML file that has all the update information. If an update is available you will be prompted to download and install it. Piotr actually uses another AIR 2 feature to launch the downloaded native installer. By opening the package with openWithDefaultApplication() the installer launches and installs the update.

I’ll definitely add this to the next release of my Package Assistant application (an update is coming soon!).

Check out the video where Piotr explains how it works and download the library from Google Code.

If you haven’t played with native installers for AIR 2 and want to learn more, then check out my video tutorial.

Tablet mania: Samsung Galaxy Tab

Posted by on Aug 24, 2010 in devices | 5 comments

Even though it has its flaws there’s no denying that Apple has done a great job with the iPad. A while back I got to play with one for a few days to prepare for a demo. Next to its obvious and well documented/talked about flaws I also think it is too heavy and too big and so I was on the lookout for a smaller and lighter alternative. Obviously everyone in the tech industry took notice of what Apple had created and we’re finally starting to see the details of some of the iPad’s future competitors.

I’ve been following the news about the Galaxy Tab from Samsung for a while now. Today they started an official teaser campaign. See the video below.

Now… I’m just wondering… Am I the only one that watched this video frame by frame? Am I the only that tried to decipher the blurry text in the background? (The blurriest one says “Flash support” by the way. After all Samsung is one of our Open Screen Project partners.)

This looks like it’s a great form factor. A 7-inch screen sounds just right to me and the widescreen aspect ratio makes a lot more sense especially if you want to watch video on it. I can’t wait to get my hands on one! The second half of this year is going to be very interesting… and expensive ;-)

New on Labs: Adobe AIR Launchpad

Posted by on Aug 24, 2010 in AIR, labs | 1 comment

The Adobe AIR Launchpad has to be the easiest way to learn some of AIR’s more advanced features. If you want to learn how to use the auto-update framework, drag-and-drop, sockets, native processes, and more then go and grab this application from Adobe Labs right now.

I think the app is also very useful for experienced developers. With just a couple of clicks you can set up your AIR project without having to rewrite some of the things you probably have in every app. Things like centering the main window for instance or detecting network capabilities and much more.

The Adobe AIR Launchpad spits out clearly written and well commented code that makes it easy to learn the APIs if you’re new to AIR and makes it easy to take a quick shortcut if you’re an experienced developer.

Go get it now on Adobe Labs.

How to stand out as a freelance web developer

Posted by on Aug 5, 2010 in Cool stuff | Comments Off

As an ex-freelancer I know how hard it can be to stand out from the crowd. Dave Berzack, a freelance web developer, created this music video about web development.

There’s not much else I can add to this… Just watch the video.

Great work, Dave! ;-)