FEATURES FLASH CS5:

• New Text engine
• Code Snippets panel
• ActionScript editor
• XML-based FLA source files
• Wide content distribution
• Video improvements
• New motion attributes added to the Bones tool
• …and much more

For more inside have a look at the video of Adobe Evangelist Greg Rewis who presented some of the exciting new features found in Flash Professional CS5.

AIR 2.0 comes with great updates and new features that will enable developers to create cross-platform applications faster and more secure. Working with AIR 2.0 will turn out to be an exceptional application experience. Here is the list provided by Adobe Labs with the improved features:

• Open documents with default application
• Mass storage volume detection
• Native process API
• Microphone data access
• Multi-touch and gesture events
• Global error handling
• Improved IPv6 support
• Server sockets sup
• Database transaction savepoints
• Screen reader support (Windows only)
• File promises (Windows/Mac only)
• IME API and IME text input enhancement
• Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support
• Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards

As for the prerelease of FP 10.1 we must know that this “is the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices”. Flash Player is a cross-platform runtime across desktop and mobile devices, therefore having support on a wide range of devices from smartphones to netbooks or smartbooks.

Note

A thing we should consider is that both versions are either beta or prerelease which means they will probably have some bugs, but the full half of the glass is that we can explore these new features and test them on our new projects. As Adobe developers is our job to provide a feedback in order to improve the future alpha releases.

For further information about these products and were you can download them access the Adobe Labs page.

Overview: Free 60-min Acrobat 9 PDF Portfolios for Developers eSeminar with live Q&A
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Time: 10-11am US Pacific (1-2pm US Eastern)
Free Registration: http://www.acrobatusers.com/events/1475/pdf-portfolios-developers

What you will learn:

• What you need to get started with the Acrobat ActionScript API
• How to bootstrap a basic Navigator in Flex Builder 3
• How to bundle your Navigator\’s SWF file into a .NAV file for use in Acrobat using ANT
• How to avoid the most common trouble spots
• How to turn on the debugging options in Acrobat

Who should attend?

Flex developers interested in expanding their skills and market reach.
If you are an Acrobat developer or power user and have never worked with ActionScript or Flex, you might want to skip this one.

Skills required:

• ActionScript 3
• Flex Builder 3
• ANT (recommended)

RIA Unleashed: Boston is a one day event about the rich internet application development using the Adobe Flash Platform such as Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Catalyst and other technologies. The event is taking place at Bentley University in Waltham, MA, on November 13th, 2009.

Intro

The novelty for this year is that there will be 3 tracks get going during the day event. They will cover exclusive topics on Flex and AIR development, ColdFusion and user experience (UX) design and the business of web application. So the great thing about this conference is that if you want to attend a session about one specific theme you have a flexible list to choose from and a pliable schedule. Like any other event, the participants can vary from beginners to advanced ones.

The day will start with an Adobe Keynote held by Tim Buntel and Adam Lehman, from which we may hear more information about the newst announcements that were made at Adobe Max. Speaking of speakers the list has a compelling lineup: Jeff Tapper, Andrew Powell, Shannon Hicks, Adam Flater, Peter Bell, Jason Delmore, Steven Erat ,Todd Yard, Raymond Camden (ColdFusion Jedi) and many others influential figures.

To continue the list of pluses about this event I’ll inform you about the price. The discount tickets are only 50$ (and for groups bigger than 3 it’s 40$). In my opinion this is a great deal considering the speaker list and what is included in this price: lunch, coffee and a variety of giveaways.You can purchase a ticket from here.

There’s also a contest where you can win a just released Playstation 3 Slim. I suppose that by now I kindled your interest. So if you are around Boston or have the possibility to attend to this event, you shouldn’t miss it. For further information about the conference check the RIAUNLEASHED.com page.

Final word

To draw an end line, I’ll just say that I’m excited to see that like minded people put all their efforts and time to organise such great events and make it possible for different stage developers to participate at it and gain experience, knowledge. Great job guys! Keep up with the good work.

The upgraded version of Adobe Flash will allow you to build stand-alone applications for iPhone and iPod using AS3. Through these new features you can use in your development every AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 APIs available at the moment. Flash Player 10.1 will be available on almost every mobile platform (such as Android,Blackberry etc, not to mention the desktop OS), but I’m guessing that is a matter of time until it will be on iPhones as well, especially with the beta release of CS5 by the end of the year.

There are 7 examples of Flash application and games for iPhone that were developed using a prerelease version and they can be purchased from the App Store. You can see the list here.

A thing you should consider is that the standalone applications build will be native iPhone apps, not the usual swf that we run in the browser. That’s because the final result, the swf file, is compiled using the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM). This compiler has flexibility and applicability to iPhone development. Thus the result is a native iPhone application.

The developer’s community has been waiting this for a while, and like any other exhilarating news about Adobe products the FAQ list is long and increasing. You can find out more information about this on the Adobe Labs page on the FAQ section. And if you want you can signup to be notified when the beta CS5 is released.

But despite the fact that Adobe TV offers a large variety of videos about almost every product from Adobe, there were several complaints about the user experience, the loading time and the mess caused by the uploading of videos in a hurry, without categorizing them.

There for Bob Donlon, along with the team behind Adobe TV re-built the site’s architecture from scratch and used a new search engine. Launched at the end of August, the site has great new features that will surely stand up to Adobe standards:

• Loading speed is really quick
• Easier to search content and find the videos you want to see
• User customizable Home page
• You can have the shows that you like, to appear on Adobe TV homepage every time you come and visit the site
• Save the favorite videos to a “My Library”
• Share any video to your Facebook wall, Digg or other social networks directly from the site
• Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite sh
• Pop-out video player to view videos at any size
• Commenting, Rating and Taging

Another important mention is that the site is now completely built in HTML, CSS and Javascript and for the video content, no need to say. The videos are being classified by Products such as Ps, Fl, Fx etc and by Channels like Design, How to, Developers and different other. On the home page they are even sorted by Highest Rated (since we can now rate a clip), Most Viewed. You got the main idea.

This new interface gave me a boost to create an account and play a little with these improved features. They are really great, like a virtual agenda with only the important stuff highlighted. But it’s up to you if you want to give it a shot. You can find out more on the Adobe TV site and convince yourself.

So, let’s go through some of the information I gathered reading about this event to have an in depth view of what’s going to happen there, who are the speakers, price tickets and so on.

Introduction

This conference is brought by On the Fridge, LLC. Last year the event was Pittsburgh’s first major Flash-centric conference. And because of the overwhelming response from the community the organizers decided to officially make it an annual event. This year is going to take place at Sheraton Hotel Station Square.

Flashpitt 2009 is a two-day conference for interactive designers, developers and artists. It’s a chance to take a break from the daily grind to recharge, learn and be inspired. The novelty that Flashpitt brings this year is the addition of a workshops day.

On the first day there are going to be four half-day workshops with topics about ActionScript 3.0(beginning and intermediate), Flash Video and Flash Media Server, iPhone Development. The workshops will highlight the important information and give you an insight note and training from the well known industry’s experts.

The second day is scheduled with full lecture-style sessions in two tracks. The organizers are also excited about the speaker list for this year: Jer Thorp, Seb Lee-Delisle, Odopod, Dan Mall, Stacey Mulcahy, Scott Janousek, Phillip Kerman, Ian Coyle.

Like any other event there are tickets at early bird price, regular and of course for students. At the time I’m writing this post there are only 5 days left to get Early Bird Flashpitt Conference tickets. But for more details about the price and how to acquire them visit the registration page.

The event is assisted by sponsors like O’Reilly, FITC, Peachpit, Influxis, RefreshPittsburgh etc.

Closure

“All without venturing too far from home.” That’s what the organizers say…so I guess if you are from around that place this conference should be a must go. Because like any event of this kind, the conference could provide you extra information and tips about areas in which you are interested, you get to know people like minded and it’s a useful experience for your development. Unfortunately for me it’s too far from where I live, but I’ll keep an eye on the afterwards info.

To find out more about the sessions, speakers or anything about the event visit Flashpitt.com

ABOUT THE CONF

The FITC Mobile Conference is a two-day event, September 13 – 14, that’s going to take part in Toronto, Canada this year at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The agenda consists of presentations, demonstrations, and panel discussions; an important note is that is one of the only events in the world covering all aspects of mobile content.

As the official site describes it, the conference will bring together leaders in mobile design and development, developers and programmers of mobile content, and all those who are curious to know all about the mobile development world. This event will cover along with the technical side of development, marketing, funding, and other business aspects of mobile development. The sessions will cover a variety of topics from iPhone applications, to Adobe’s Flash Lite development, to Googles Android, as well as Blackberry, Palm, SMS text messaging, QR codes, Mobile video, and other relevant ones. FITC Mobile aims to cover all these issues in an intelligent and informed manner.

The list of confirmed speakers is comprised by:

• James Eberhardt (Technical Director and Content Developer)
• Brandy Gilchrist (Executive, Investor, Mobile Evangelist)
• Deborah Hall (Mobile Marketing Strategist)
• Scott Janousek (Flash Mobile Design & Development Expert)
• Thomas Joos (Mobile Consultant, Flash Life Specialist)
• Tony MacDonell (Thought Leader, Rich Internet Application Design & Development)
• Collin Moock (ActionScript Expert and Author)
• Dom Sagolla (iPhone App Developer)

Another thing you should know about is that this conference has an optional pre-conference workshop on Saturday, September 12. The entire event is part of Mobile Innovation Week, scheduled for September 13 – 16, 2009 in Toronto.

TICKETS

The Mobile Development Conference is open to beginner, intermediate and advanced programmers and developers of mobile content. Ticket prices range from C$93.45 for a Student Conference Pass to C$418.95, a Regular Conference + Workshop Day. To purchase the tickets and find out more information click HERE.

The official sponsors are Motorola, Adobe, BlackBerry, Microsoft Mobile, the City of Toronto, Forum Nokia, Samsung, and EchoMobile.

CONCLUSION

Shawn Pucknell, the Executive Producer of FITC Mobile, asserts that: “Mobile is here to stay. It’s become a part of all of our lives. And as the need for content and applications grows, so does the need for talented and experienced developers to create that content and experience“.

Being one of the only events in the world covering all aspects of mobile content, there are anticipated 300-400 attendees from around the world. This conference is a great opportunity for both current and future developers of mobile content to learn from the leaders in the field and to share their knowledge with other developers. And if you need further information check the FITC site.

A recently Beta released product, created by Romuald Quantin – an Actionscript developer, is the Soma Framework. Being at its beginning is very probable that many of you didn’t have the chance to hear or work with it. So I’ll try to highlight the important information you need to know about it, structured in two parts.

Soma, the MVC Framework

Soma is an open source MVC Framework written in AS3 and it is specially developed for Actionscript and Flash website. Its goal is to ease the work by handling the common development that’s required in building a flash site: deep-linking, loading, backgrounds, page management, content management, assets, contextual menu, transitions and so on.

It’s a light framework that doesn’t require MVC knowledge for you to use it. An important fact for developers is that it has been built upon the core of another MVC framework: Cairngorm. The author explains: I’ve made this choice because I want Soma to be “easy-accessed” and even if Cairngorm is originally a Flex framework, I believe its syntax, event-based system and “design philosophy” are closer to what a Flash user would expect.

But Soma is not only a MVC Framework .It is XML-based and uses a reference to a XML site definition almost all the time. The structure, content, assets and assets behaviors are stored in this XML site definition. It also automates tasks and it is generated. But this is for the second part of the description.

SomaUI, the source code generator

SomaUI is an AIR-Java tool and its main purpose is to generate source code, the base of a Flash site in AS3, created with Soma ready to be used for further development, for Flash Player 9 or 10 and for Flash or Flex SDK developer. SomaUI has very useful features that ease you when starting a site:

• building an XML file required in order to make Soma working
• exporting deploy files (html, css, etc)
• exporting source (actinscript, Flash file, XML, etc)
• compile with the Flex SDK

This software gives you a large-hand when you create a project, choose specific settings such as name, package, flash player version, and so on. You can write the xml definition of your site or load a template and finally, export it.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, because I recently heard about this framework I didn’t get to use it, I can say that, from what I’ve seen in the video tutorial on the home page and red about this product, Soma Framework is a real easer for you work, time-saver and I like the fact that has a specific set: Actionscript and Flash development. When you want to create a Flash site you know there is a Framework especially created to help you in your development.

For further more information about this product, its resources, software requirements, docs and the latest version released visit the Soma homepage. And as an example of a Flash site built with this framework there is Soma Protest site where you can find out more stuff about Soma.

Serge Jespers recently made public for share a widget for the MAX 2009 event. The project is named “Quindici” which is Italian for 15. It’s a widget that allows you to record your own testimonial.

This MAX Widget was built with Flex Builder 3, Flex 3 framework, ColdFusion, Flash Media Server and Photoshop.

If you want to embed it on your blog/site you have the “GET WIDGET” button at the right bottom of the screen. Or you just can use the widget to record your own video testimonial and thus claim your 15 minutes of fame! For now it contains several testimonials from MAX attendees.

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