Yesterday at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco Adobe launched the Adobe AIR and Flash Player Incubator program. The Incubator is a technology preview program for more adventurous developers who are willing to experiment with Flash Platform runtime features that are in early development stages.

One of those features is the Molehill API for 3D. Molehill is a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that enable advanced 3D experiences across devices through the Flash Platform runtimes. Adobe worked closely with the most popular ActionScript 3D frameworks so that not only advanced 3D developers can take advantage of these new APIs. These 3D frameworks already have Molehill enabled versions available today:

• Alternativa3D
• Away3D
• Coppercube
• Flare3D
• Minko
• Sophie3D
• Yogurt3D
• Zest3D

But Molehill does not just offer high performance 3D APIs but can also be used for 2D graphics! Flash Player Product Manager Thibault Imbert has more information and an example on his blog.

Unity added the cherry on top of yesterday’s news. They announced that an upcoming version of Unity (the very popular game development tool) will allow developers to target Flash Player. I can’t wait to play around with it!

These are very exciting times for Flash developers! Check out Tinic Uro’s blog to see how you can start playing with Molehill today!

Flash on!

HTML5 makes adding video and audio content to your site very easy but there is currently no way to protect that content. If we’re all completely honest we know that content protection is still a big deal for record companies, movie studios, and TV channels, yet HTML5 puts their content just up for grabs. Let me give you a few examples.

Unnamed video site
Video site X just rolled out a brand new HTML5 video player. Like I said, HTML5 makes it really easy to add video content to your site but it makes it equally easy to download that content. It only takes a “view source” to find the URL to the video file. Some video sites have also noticed that and are now building custom JavaScript based players in an attempt to make it more difficult to get to the video file. On this one site I counted almost 3000 lines of JavaScript code for a rather basic video player with sharing functionality. 3000 lines of code and it still only took me three clicks to download the video file! I already hear some of you saying that you can also easily get the video file from a Flash based video player. If you use progressive download that is completely true. I’ll get back to that later in this post.

Unnamed new music discovery site
The release of the beta version of this new music discovery site is actually what sparked the idea to write this post. As per usual the tech blogs were buzzing about it as a new music discovery site that didn’t use Flash because Flash is dead. So I checked it out… This particular site gives you unrestricted access to the entire music library. I was able to look up any artist and play back any song in high quality… I can also buy the song on the site for the industry standard $0.99. But with just two clicks I was able to download any song from any artist straight to my desktop without actually buying it. No need for torrents or the risk of downloading viruses. It’s all right there on this official music discovery site in high quality AAC audio (in an M4A file).

Flash
I already mentioned that it’s also pretty easy to download a file used in a Flash based media player if the site uses progressive download. The difference between HTML5 and Flash in this case is that you CAN protect your content when using Flash. As there still is no standard audio/video codec in the HTML5 spec there also is no way to stream video and audio content using HTML5 across different browsers. Companies (including Apple) have been experimenting with streaming technologies but I’m sure you remember that that only worked in a specific version of Safari on a specific version of iOS. The HTML5 spec also has no guidelines for any sort of content protection.

Flash does work cross browser and cross platform (as I’m sure all of you know). With the use of Flash Media Server you can also completely protect that content and get the added benefits of features such as adaptive streaming (to adapt to changing connection speeds), reduced bandwidth usage, DRM, multicasting, peer to peer delivery, and more. Bottom line: Flash is still the best platform to stream (premium) video and audio content.

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

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.

We’ve been talking about Flash Catalyst (the project formerly known as Thermo) and Flash Builder 4 (the updated and renamed Flex Builder) for quite some time now. Today, we’re releasing the first public beta for both products.

I am really excited (and I’m pretty sure all of us at Adobe are) to see what you guys are going to create with these new tools and how it’s going to improve your workflow. You can get the betas on Adobe Labs. To help you get started, we’ve created a bunch of tutorials and samples to get you going. I’ve just listed a couple of them here. For more tutorials and samples, check out the Adobe Developer Connection. Flash on!

Flash Catalyst:
The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce designers, familiar with Photoshop, to the basic concepts and workflow involved in using the beta version of Flash Catalyst.

This tutorial covers all the skills and techniques needed to take a concept from a static file to a completed interactive, multimedia interface.

[ Read more ]

In this tutorial Andrew Shorten shows you how to build an employee address book application that lets users enter search criteria and view a list of results fetched from a database (via a ColdFusion service), from which they can select an employee to get their full contact information. The completed application could work either as a browser-based application (using Adobe Flash Player) or a desktop application (using Adobe AIR).

[ Read more ]

For more information, tutorials and samples for Flash Catalyst, check out http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/tutorials/

Flash Builder 4:
Matt Chotin (product manager for Flex) provides an overview of what you’ll encounter as you play with the new SDK and framework.

The work on the Flex SDK has been focused around three primary themes: “Design in Mind”, “Developer Productivity”, “Framework Evolution”.

[ Read more ]

Tim Buntel (product manager for Flash Builder) provides an overview of what’s new in Flash Builder 4. While the name has changed, this is still the evolution of Flex Builder 3—a professional-grade, Eclipse-based development tool designed to help you rapidly build rich Internet applications (RIAs) and content using the open-source Flex framework—but with an incredible collection of powerful new features.

[ Read more ]

For more information, tutorials and samples for Flash Builder 4, check out http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/tutorials/