July 2007

Apollo has recently been renamed as AIR which is pretty cool because AIR is rich Internet application spelled backwards! Expectations are very high for flash lite 3 it is rumored to have flv support which is huge, if you are a developer you should also be aware that you can embedded your flash lite content in BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) in short flash lite is becoming a standard. The latest beta update for the flash player adds mip-map support. This comes in especially handy when you factor in the recent popups of numerous full 3d API implementations for action script! PaperVision 3d is currently adding the mip-map support to speed up its 3d flash-rendering engine!

To be quite honest the open flash community has become a hot bed of activity I highly recommend looking at it. There was recently an open source convention on-line you can find the screen casts at the following link. In short there are a slew of wonderful projects under way for example Haxe which has full implementation of Action Script 3 can publish for any flash player it also has support for flex as well you can use Haxe with flash develop or eclipse (You will notice on the screen cast of the OSFlash conference the debate between the two). Haxe also has a virtual machine that you can easily add to your Apache server Haxe also has api for Java Script and Open GL. I personally asked Nicholas about implementing Silverlight and he did say that if it became popular enough it would be added into the project. Your probably sitting their and thinking so what I like about the Haxe project in particular is its ability to be a CLR or common language runtime for RIA there are numerous platforms to develop for now with the advent of Java FX and Silverlight. I should also be noted that the mono project has already brought Silverlight to Linux in the form of Moonlight. Although these non-adobe platforms have eons of catching up to do it is good to have some competition in the field to ensure the products stay good and continue to be cutting edge.

Adobe has also hosted a website of their own that promotes open source software the RIA forge and flex has come along way if your not aware the latest flash player halves the amount of time it takes to load flex projects thanks to its caching ability. One open source project that I would like to point out is Tweener for animation and Gia for building a quick framework. Action Script 3 is considerably more flexible than 2 ever was and it is nice to pass animations and other tasks to xml this helps flash for over all supportability. There are also a slew of open source action script libraries out their for developers to use for example Mike Chambers library that allows developers to create mashups with Odeo, Youtube, Delicious, etc.. You can also find open source libraries for flash physics engines so the open flash community has a firm footing. You can also find a great article on OpenFlash on how to integrate flash into firefox extensions. I am also very cuious to see the tarmin project in action; on a side note for those who do not know Firefox three will have sqlite built in to it from the install

I have also recently heard numerous rumors of Director 11 my question is after 3 years without a release do they still have a devoted fan fare? Why is adobe bothering to tout this as a their premium platform? I would hope if it does come out it has premium extensions for flash in creating 3d content and will push the flash platform further I do not see the need in the future to keep pushing the shockwave player. It has been a good tool for years but in my humble opinion has seen its day. I think adobe should pull the good features of director and incoperate them into flash. They could use director to extend flash authoring sound tools with maybe an extension for sound analysis, they could also supply premium flash video effects and extension not to mention the fact they need a developer tool to push AIR out they could put a host of extensions that make AIR easily integrated into the desktop. I belive and hope this is the area they concentrate on for Director 11 and I see as the only viable option.

Earlier I mention flash lite well I was recently disappointed with the fact that the iPhone will not support flash. I personally think this is huge slam for the developers and apple is hindering the amount of adoption as a result of their decision. I guess I will have to wait for version 2.0. The irony of the whole thing is that adobe is supporting the iPhone developer conference hopefully they can show the apple people the light

I have also been diligently working on my own web developer distro of Ubuntu I will hopefully have the live cd for download soon it is a live dvd based off of studio ubuntu it will have flash 9 support, haxe support, eclipse, bluefish, opera, wine, ntfs support, automatrix preinstalled, a host of emulators and video games, cinepaint, pixel editor demo, a in short it will have a host of tools of the get go not to mention the server will work of the bootJ It will have preinstalled copies of drupal, wordpress, liferay, pligg and other highly useful open source content management systemsJ So I think people will enjoy it. If you haven?t noticed lately google has been ramping up its rhetoric on M$ monopoly of the desktop I would almost expect them to release their own operating system for free based off of Linux if so Linux would finally have the name brand support as a desktop primed for the masses. This could really through a wrench into the Microsoft model especially when you consider the fact that google has developed their own compatible office suite for free you can even use it off line with google gears. So watch out Microsoft a paradigm shift is around the corner?.

Useful Links:

http://homepage.mac.com/nephilim/sw3ddev/ Shockwave resource
http://www.osflash.org/ofla2 – Recoded Sessions @ the bottom
http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/2007/06/flash-lite-frid.html
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
http://haxe.org/
http://www.rgenerat.org/ehx/
http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/
http://www.felipeandrade.org/flyer/
http://www.riaforge.org/
http://www.mail-archive.com/osflash@osflash.org/msg01296.html http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/ActionScript_3:resources:apis:libraries
http://www.beedigital.net/blog/?p=897
http://osflash.org/gameswf_library
http://osflash.org/gamepackage
http://osflash.org/gamescroll
http://as3cards.riaforge.org/
http://dragon.riaforge.org/
http://sandy.riaforge.org/
http://blog.papervision3d.org/
http://www.suite75.net/blog/dev/?cat=11
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 -Handy Image Editor Pixel
http://www.osflash.org/tweener Tweener Lib
http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/ Gia
http://www.osflash.org/pipermail/osflash_osflash.org/2006-February/007659.html
http://aralbalkan.com/798
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/