3 “hidden” gems of Adobe Labs
With the big announcements about Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 earlier this week you may have missed some of the other exciting new goodies available on Adobe Labs. Here are some of my favorites.
Visual Size Report
Hot off the grill, as they say. Visual Size Report is an extension for Flash Professional that allows for easier size optimization of SWF files. Designers and Developers often need to consider file sizes when creating content in Flash Professional, especially when deploying for mobile platforms or creating advertising assets, regardless of platform. This extension installs a graphical panel (“Size Report”) that allows you to see the various elements of a SWF file by category and their size. You can just double click an element to find it in the appropriate workspace window.
Pixel Bender 3D
Pixel Bender 3D is a version of the Pixel Bender kernel language that allows you to produce vertex and fragment shaders that run on 3D hardware to generate output images. These kernels operate on 3D objects and affect their appearance. Pixel Bender 3D is built on the Stage3D APIs, previously codenamed “Molehill,” and found in Flash Player 11, which handles the display of 3D objects in AIR and Flash Player. Pixel Bender 3D provides a quick and convenient way of supplying shaders to Stage 3D. Where appropriate hardware is available, Pixel Bender 3D is GPU accelerated.
Alchemy
Alchemy was released 2 years ago as an experiment and hasn’t really been updated since. That is about to change and it’s going to blow your mind! ;-)
We have not updated the original Alchemy prototype, and while we noted from the beginning that it should not be relied upon for production content, we’ve received persistent requests from developers asking for official support in the Flash runtimes. We’ve been listening and have decided to invest in creating an improved version of Alchemy, which we plan to release as part of a paid production offering for commercial development. We intend to make non-commercial use free of charge.
The production release will offer significantly better performance and productivity over the Labs prototype. By re-architecting major portions of the technology, we aim to enable code execution approaching native performance, scalable support for large code bases, full debugging support, up to 75% reduction in code size, and seamless integration with ActionScript – all while reaching virtually every connected computer on the web.
More on the Flash Player blog
New on Labs: Adobe AIR Launchpad
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.
Raising the bar… again: FP10.1 & AIR2 betas on Labs
Wohooow… It’s always great to wake up to new toys to play with! Flash Player 10.1 and AIR2.0 are now available on Adobe Labs.
This is a very exciting release for Adobe. Not only is it the first time that we sim-ship Flash Player and AIR for all 3 major operating systems (Mac, Windows & Linux), Flash Player 10.1 is also the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project. While we’re only releasing the beta version of Flash Player 10.1 for the desktop we do plan to roll out additional betas prior to the release with more features, performance improvements, new tooling options and support for mobile platforms. I’ve been lucky enough to play with some smart phones that already have Flash Player 10.1 and I am absolutely amazed to see the performance on these devices. It’s also great to finally have FP10 in the browser on a mobile device. It’s great to see you can now have the full web in your mobile browser!
We’ve already talked about and demoed some of the new features at MAX. Check out the feature page on Labs for a complete list of new features in Flash Player 10.1 and Christian Cantrell’s blog for a comprehensive list of new features in AIR. Christian also has a bunch of code samples on his blog demonstrating the new features. Also check out Adobe TV for more demos and tutorials.
Don’t forget… These are pre-release BETA releases. While the Flash Player and AIR teams do their very best to maintain backward compatibility, things may break. And that is exactly why we do these public betas. If you do come across an application that doesn’t work, make sure you tell us about it!
I can’t wait to see what you guys are going to build with this new set of building blocks… Flash on!
New on Adobe Labs: Squiggly – spell checking engine for Flash Player and AIR
One of the most requested features for both Flash Player and AIR is definitely a spell checker. Grant Skinner released a spell check engine about 2 years ago and it has been used in number of different applications. While it was totally worth the cost, I did hear from some people that they thought this was an expensive solution. Adobe also recognized the need for a spell check solution for Flash Player and AIR and a small team has been working on this for a while.
Today Adobe released a first preview version of Squiggly. The Squiggly library allows you to easily add spell checking functionality in any Flex 3 based text control. The distribution package consists of a utility for building your own spelling dictionaries, a sample English dictionary, an ActionScript package that checks individual words for spelling accuracy, and sample code that demonstrates “check as you type” functionality [demo]. At the moment the library only supports English but the team has promised to address this limitation in a future release.
Links:
Squiggly on Labs
Download Squiggly
Download Squiggly ASDoc
Squiggly forum
Start playing with Adobe Stratus (client to client communication)
Want to build a video chat application, multi-player games or voice-over-ip applications for the Flash Player or AIR without worrying about setting up a server infrastructure? Stratus (which we showcased at MAX) is your new best friend.
Stratus is a beta hosted rendezvous service that helps establish communication between Flash Player or AIR clients. Once two clients are connected to Stratus, they can send data directly client to client. The APIs in Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 allow for point-to-point communication between a small number of subscribers. Publishers have to send data to all subscribing clients, so the number of subscribers is limited to the available bandwidth on the publisher end.
The Stratus technology page is now live on Adobe Labs at www.adobe.com/go/stratus. Developers can use their Adobe ID to sign up for a unique developer key that is required to connect to the Stratus Service. While it is in beta, the Stratus service is free for developers to use.
To help you get started, we’ve also provided a sample video phone application. The working sample is live on the Adobe Labs site and we’ve provided the source code and a developer center article to help you build your own applications.
For more info about Stratus and answers to Frequently Asked Questions go to: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Stratus:FAQ
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