Flex 2, Actionscript 3.0
May 17, 2010 1 Comment
So… Here are my slides from my talk on Usability & Prototyping at WebApps2010 organized by SiliconIndia in Bangalore on 15th May.
The talk went well and the audience were pretty responsive and involving. I managed to finish my talk within the time limit. Nice experience on the whole
March 9, 2009 2 Comments
Really interesting stuff… http://code.google.com/p/flash-thunderbolt/
ThunderBolt is a lightweight logger extension for ActionScript 2 and 3 applications using Firebug. For logging without Firebug, especially for AIR applications, check out the ThunderBolt AS3 Console.
For more information about ThunderBolt AS2 and ThunderBolt AS3 check out the Wiki.
The ThunderBolt project based on the Mozilla Public License 1.1..
July 15, 2008 11 Comments
So…. Here I am… in Bangalore. I quit from Extreme Networks and am joining Nokia R&D facility in Maratahalli Ring Rd, Bangalore. I shall be working with the Ux team at Nokia in the Software & Services division.
One of the first projects I am going to be engaged in is Ovi.com. It’s an exciting new concept from Nokia. I shall be blogging in detail about Ovi sometime soon.
In the last few months, I have received hundreds of mails from readers. Some had written in just to show their support and appreciation. Some had mailed me with technical questions and some with job offers. And because of the personal reasons mentioned here and here, I was unable to respond to any of those mails. I really apologize for that. I am just in the process of catching up with the hundreds of unread mails in my inbox. I shall respond to your mails asap.
Once again… Thanks for all the mails and queries. Keep reading and mailing…
March 11, 2008 27 Comments
A couple of weekends ago, I did a presentation for The Chennai Cold Fusion User Group (CCFUG Homepage). Am posting the ppt here. The presentation covered the basics – intro to RIAs, intro to Adobe Flex, a couple of examples and a little bit about Adobe AIR. Check it out… if you have nothing else to do 
… The audience were cold fusion developers who were new to Adobe Flex and Adoe AIR. I touched the basics and then walked them through some code examples of Flex and Air.
Check out some snaps from the event and check out this post by Akbar after the event. You may also want to check out the CCFUG homepage at http://www.cfugind.com.
February 11, 2008 8 Comments
Lately I have been getting a lot of mails about using CForm. So, I kind of wrapped up the whole thing into a SWC and here it is. So all you need to do is download this and add this to the Lib of your project. For the source code, you can still check it out of SVN. But, to just use the CForm, you really do not need the source-code, you can just use this swc component. Click here to download the component.
June 6, 2007 30 Comments
WANTED: Developers who can contribute to this open source initiative 
I have created a google project to put in some of the stuff that we have been working on and releasing through this blog. Some of the stuff that you can already download from Flexedtoolkit are -
I am working on a small component – CForms. The idea is to have a generic UI rendering engine that will create forms from an XML file. This is particularly useful in serious business applications where you have a lot of user entry screens. So, if the developer needs to have a screen, they just include something like -
<widgets:CForm controlsFile=”controls.xml” id=”VLAN”/>
Everything else – Styles, layout, look and feel etc. will be handled by the CForm component as per instructions in the abc.xml… Getting a picture?
We initially did this as part of my project requirements at work. And it was a life-saver. Now, I would like to extend it beyond what it is today. I want to make it more generic and feature rich so that others can leverage on it.
The project homepage is http://code.google.com/p/flexedtoolkit. If you are interested in joining the project, do leave a comment. Really hope some of you folks would find time to work on this.
May 18, 2007 23 Comments
Readers: I will be in Bangalore till the 25th of this month. Would love to meet some of you folks… If you have time, do leave a comment and maybe we can catch up for tea or something…..
April 17, 2007 8 Comments
First it was Sparkle and now the new babe in the block is Sliverlight. A month ago, I saw a video covering the Sparkle developers showcasing some pretty cool stuff about Sparkle. Ok. So, I am not one of those bunch who hate anything that comes out of Microsoft because it comes out of Microsoft. The way I see it, this is how it all maps -
There seems to be some really uncanny similarities between XAML and MXML… (Of course they are both XML!). Check it out. The graphics that these bunch of Latin-Greek-Hieroglyphs churn up are pretty good.
<Canvas xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation” xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml” x:Name=”_119_red_scanlione_gloss” Width=”1056″ Height=”816″> <Canvas x:Name=”Layer_1″> <Rectangle x:Name=”Rectangle” Canvas.Left=”0″ Canvas.Top=”0″ Width=”1056″ Height=”816″ Stretch=”Fill” Fill=”#FFFF0000″/> <Path x:Name=”Path” Canvas.Left=”404.558″ Canvas.Top=”258.867″ Width=”258.844″ Height=”258.844″ Stretch=”Fill” Fill=”#FFFFFFFF” Data=”F1 M 411.029,258.867L 656.931,258.867C 660.505,258.867 663.402,261.764 663.402,265.338L 663.402,511.24C 663.402,514.814 660.505,517.711 656.931,517.711L 411.029,517.711C 407.455,517.711 404.558,514.814 404.558,511.24L 404.558,265.338C 404.558,261.764 407.455,258.867 411.029,258.867 Z “/> <Rectangle x:Name=”Rectangle_0″ Canvas.Left=”0″ Canvas.Top=”0″ Width=”1056″ Height=”816″ Stretch=”Fill”> <Rectangle.Fill>
I really don’t think Sparkle or Silverlight is a threat to Flex or Flash Player. But, I definitely think here begins a competition. With Apollo, Adobe definitely has a head start over any new web 2.0 stuff. Lets not forget that Flash Player is what? 10+ years older than anything that will be born 2 years from now 
. As they say, we ARE living in interesting times!!! Definitely, we are!
Honestly, I think everyone has to learn from Microsoft to create such lovely sexy logos! It doesn’t make any sense. But, then who cares? Its a damn Logo and it looks great!
Silverlight samples – Pretty Impressive! (You will need to install Silverlight for this)
February 24, 2007 9 Comments
Many would have read or heard this before. I stumbled across this at O’Rielly’s onjava.net in a post by Shashank Tiwari.
Today we have between 3 and 4 million Java developers and we assume that this number grows to 5 to 6 million within the next three to five years. (Which itself is very optimistic, though Sun thinks they can grow the number to 10 million).
Now as per current estimates the number of Flex developers are still in thousands. Assuming that half of the 1 million developers that they claim they will have come from the set that are with Flash, ColdFusion,
PHP or any other skill set, we still have half a million coming from the set of Java developers. Considering that the server side for Flex is Java, this even sounds logical. This implies that 1 in every 10 or at worst 1 in every 12 Java developers is learning Flex or already knows Flex today. What do you folks have to say about this?
Ok. Now, this is an interesting topic . When we started looking at Flex for our application and were building the team, we had a really hard time finding actionscript developers (atleast in southern India). So, we got together a team of Java developers and started learning Flex. Eight months since, we are on the verge of our beta release. I can really see why Java developers would like Flex.
So, given the similarities in the coding patterns and the componentization features. There is a definite possibility that java developers could choose Flex as the presentation layer for their application. But, I really doubt whether they would move into full time from ejb development to gui development. That’s my honest opinion.
Shashank, interesting blog post, but this is also preposterous. Flex has very limited market penetration, and almost every Java developer (and some Flash programmers) that I’ve spoken to, don’t consider Flex to be anything more than a very limited use proprietary framework.
Flash is king when it comes to rich clients on the web, it can certainly trump AJAX, but Flex. I’d say it is more like 1 in 100 Java developers is learning Flex today.
Tim O’Brien
I kind of disagree with this reply. Flex has more than a limited market penetration. I think its just a matter of time, before flex has a 100% market coverage. With adobe acquiring macromedia, more than 80% of digital content delivery on the net is Adobe’s domain. Adobe already had PDF, Photoshop, Framemaker etc. Adding Flash, Flex and the other macromedia suite of products definitely gives it a clear headstart to many of the wannabes in the industry. I can clearly see how Flex can be used as the front-end for most java or .net thin client and thick client applications out there.
Flex, along with other Flash-based solutions like Laszlo, sucks because Flash is not an integrated part of any OS or browser. A Flash app running in a browser window is an even more ridiculous thing than a crippled 32-bit application running on Windows3.1 through win32s thunk. The splotches of Flash UI, which appear here and there in increasing numbers, do not react properly to keyboard, have fixed size, have fixed-sized fonts, have non-standard widgets, cannot be nicely printed (though I’ve heard that ActionScript supports CSS, so targeting print media should not be a problem in theory), are not integrated with other elements of a page or even with another Flash splotches on the same page, the UI itself is painstakingly slow and juddery, Flash objects are reloaded every time you go forward and back (even Google Finance does that, when you return to a page the stock value graph does not recover the parameters you set before leaving the page)
Leave Flash to what it does best — annoying ads and video clips.
I have only one thing to say here – Wait till Apollo is out!
January 18, 2007 2 Comments
My inbox had a pleasant surprise for me today morning. I recieved confirmation from Christian Cantrell that Flexed has been added the Macromedia XML News Aggregator! Thanks Christian. Now, stuff that we post will have better readership . Boy! Am I happy! Wait. Lemme get my trumpet!
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