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.

So I asked myself where to begin with this post, about what should I write that will be worthy to read. The answer: everything! I should write about every thing that is influenced by climate change, because this world that we live in is like a food-chain, everything relates and is interdependent. I often considered that we humans have a symbiosis with things that surround us. But, like I said there is so much to cover that I’ll have to stick to one subject in particular: Technology.

As we know the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the result of various activities of the mass population. This includes the economics, politics, agriculture, events, business, industry, technology and much more. GHG emissions can be reduced by a decreasing activity from each of the above mentioned areas. When talking about economics and politics you encounter a block of bricks regarding ecological views. But technology on the other hand is a sure thing. In the past years much attention has been directed toward the role of technological improvement has on reducing carbon emissions and its imprint on economic market.

Countries around the world have adopted different policies regarding taxes for residential and commercial purchasers of new energy-efficient homes, energy efficient equipment such as electric and natural gas heat pumps, natural gas water heaters, advanced central air conditioners, fuel cells and many other technological aspects.

Various fields from technological industry have made serious development toward a green and safer world. The automobile industry for example: hybrid cars (Toyota Prius), computers: LCD and Plasma screen, refrigerators, wash-machines and so on. This steps that were made in order to reduce the CO2 emissions will influence other factors especially in the longer term, we just have to imagine the whole picture at this moment. As I sad, our world is interdependent and everything we do reverberates in other ares.

I am glad that bloggers around the world gather and use their online power to make a statement that will matter, that will be heard. The world faces a climate and environment change and now is the time that we make a change to avoid these things to evolve.

5 Eco Tips

To finish this post properly I wrote 5 tips for computer users to maintain a low use of energy during the day.

1. If you take a 10-30 min break turn off the monitor, and if you know you will be gone a while switch off the computer
2. Reduce the paper using by: reading online news, magazine and resort to online payment bills
3. If you upgraded to LCD or Plasma which are more economical by the way than CRT, don’t forget to recycle your old computer components
4. Purchase online products from e-commerce site. This will not only save you a lot of time but will also save gas and lower the carbon emissions that you usually produce when driving to the market
5. During day work use the natural light, first you’ll make an economical energy act and second it’s healthy for your eyes, very healthy!

For more information about the action visit http://www.blogactionday.org

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.

Which one is the best?Or it can provide what I am interested when using Twitter? I sorted a list of various applications created with Adobe AIR.You can find out which of them are cross-platform, only for Mac, iPhone or Linux. I tried to highlight the known ones but I might have missed a few.All in all I hope you like the list.

Cross-platform Apps

1. Ada
Ada is the perfect little Twitter app with a clean, compact design

2. AlertThingy
AlertThingy v3 brings the very latest updates from your favourite social networks direct to your desktop

3. Birdshot
Too busy to keep up with Twitter? Birdshot is a Twitter client stripped down to the basics: send tweets and tell me when I have new responses

4. Destroy Twitter
DestroyTwitter is a robust but compact Twitter application built on the Adobe AIR platform

5. Fedalizr
Feedalizr is a social media desktop client that keeps track of updates from friendfeed, twitter, facebook, Flickr, Twitpic & Jaiku

6. Mixero
The new generation Twitter client for people who value their time and are tired of information noise

7. MySocial AIR
A Twitter client with FriendFeed integration

8. QKTwit
A Twitter client with FriendFeed integration

10. Posty
Posty is a microblogging application which allows interacting with twitter, jaiku, tumblr, friendfeed and identi.ca right from your desktop

11. ScreenTweet
ScreenTweet allows you to post images to your Twitter account by capturing from your screen, dragging and dropping, pasting from clipboard, or browsing your computer

12. ScreenTweetr
Screentweetr enables you to quickly post screenshots to a twitter image service – enter your twitter login credentials, take a screenshot and click upload

13. Seesmic
A desktop client to manage your lifestream from Facebook & multiple Twitter accounts. Create groups and searches and view them any way you like

14. Sideline
Sideline is an application that allows advanced searching and monitoring of the Twitter public timeline

15. Skimmer
Skimmer is an desktop application designed to streamline, beautify, and enhance the experience of participating in your most frequently used social networking activities

16. Snitter
Snitter is “Snook’s Twitter”: an Adobe AIR-powered application for twittering

17. Spaz
Spaz is a free, award-winning Twitter client offering notable features such as access to direct messages and replies, CSS theming, and event sounds

18. Spreadtweet
So, you work at a big corporate, huh? And you’re not allowed to use Twitter…Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a Twitter tool that looked just like Excel?

19. Statuzer
Statuzer is a multi-platform Twitter Client running through Air

20. Telexer
Telexer, the feed reader for serious news addicts: it’s the lightweight, uncluttered way of getting breaking news

21. T-Messenger
T-Messenger is a very intuitive and powerful Twitter client for every-day users that has a very low memory footprint

22. Tweetdeck
TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more

23. TweetDoc
The TwitDoc desktop uploader makes it easy to share your documents and pictures on Twitter

24. Tweetnewz
TweetNewz, a news aggregator and desktop ticker with Twitter integration, keeps readers connected to the news and content they love, all while browsing the web

25. Tweetr
Tweetr is a twitter client that allows you to send and receive twitter messages but has cool features including support for taking photos with your webcam, sending file

26. Twhirl
Twhirl is a social software desktop client for services like Twitter, Seesmic, Friendfeed and identi.ca

27. Twibble
Twibble desktop is a multi account twitter client for Mac, Linux, and Windows

28. Twicker
Twicker is the first (and only) Twitter client that focuses on search.

29. Twitter Local
The TwitterLocal AIR Client allows you to watch as many location-based Twitter feeds as you want

30. Twittm
Follow friends and trends, topics of your interest, and tweet like a maniac.Twittm is fast, clean and unobtrusive

31. Twitulater
Twitulater is an Adobe AIR microblogging client that supports Twitter and Koornk and makes life easier

32. WiURL
WiURL is a great application for shortening any link. It is great for social networks like twitter or pownce

Mac and iPhone Apps

33. Birdbrain
Birdbrain takes snapshots of your Twitter account and tracks changes in your friend and follower lists over time

34. Fring
App for twitter, social networks and Instant Messenger (IM) applications. It supports tremendous number of mobile phones types like iPhone, Nokia, Sony Erricson, HTC, Motorola, LG and many other

35. Incoming!
Incoming! is a Twitter search client designed for power users and social media experts. It lets you cut through the noise and find the tweets that matter to you most

36. Tweetie
A very popular twitter client for iPhone and Mac

37. Twitterrific
Twitterrific is a fun application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website

38. TwittShare
Share pictures, music, video, and other files with friends using Twitter

39. iQuickTwitter
QuickSilver + Twitter + iChat + Growl Hack in one. You have to modify some the code with Script Editor to make it work, however it has gotten some good comments.

What is Mate?

Mate is a light, powerful MXML-based Flex framework with an MVC architectural pattern that eases the developers work by giving them maximum flexibility. The framework is entirely tag-based and its focus is on event handling, data binding and asynchronous processing.

This Flex framework has a built-in event-driven (based on the idea of a Map Event) thus allowing you to define who is handling those events, whether data needs to be retrieved from the server, or other events need to be triggered. This feature makes it very unobtrusive and easy to learn.

Mate allows you to keep using Flex event model, it does not invent its own like most other frameworks. You can dispatch an event from anywhere in the view hierarchy and have it bubble up to the framework automatically. Other powerful feature is that it implements a form of Dependency Injection which allows you to connect your models to your views without either one knowing about the other one. That makes it easy and fast to create, maintain, and debug applications. “An Injector will insert the appropriate property into all instances of a particular component, without having to pass it through the component’s parental hierarchy.”

The specific code can be encapsulated in a handful of objects. Also the application code has no dependencies on the framework, it is highly decoupled, reusable and testable. When using this framework we won’t work with Singleton pattern anymore because it has a caching solution that detects which objects have been instantiated and handles the flow of data between them.

Mate read as “Mah-teh” was created by Nahuel Foronda and Laura Arguello from AsFusion. Mate had 17 new releases in the last year and hundreds of commits to its repository. I would say that this framework is gaining some quality reputation among Flex developers.

Endline

Since its release there were many tingles about the pros and cons about Mate and it is often compared with other Flex frameworks such as Cairngorm or PureMVC. From what I’ve heard there are some feasible advantages when using Mate in your development. The important novelty that this project brings unlike the others is that it has The Event Map (gives a clear vision about the control flow through the application) and the Class Caching(no more use of the Singleton pattern). You can use this framework both in small or large projects and you can relax because it will give all the flexibility you need and won’t restrain your imagination when creating a project.

But for further examples of projects developed with Mate visit the site at mate.asfusion.com. I forgot to mention that this framework has a well written documentation, tutorials and an active community on the forum. Even so you are used with other frameworks I’ll simply say it’s worth giving a shot. You may found out it is more suitable to your tasks.

Take your time and dive into the list bellow. These agency websites, not only they have a sparkling design but also they hold an interesting portfolio. I trust that you will find them useful for your own development.

You can also check a previous post that we have published 20 awesome agency websites.

1. Screenagers

2. The Egg Republic

3. Jam3Media

4. Socio Design

5. Hello Design

6. Buzz Image

7. Le Site

8. Un.Titled

9. Trix

10. Aaltra

11. Pixeling Life

12. Tangram

13. Duke Interactive

14. F&B Forsman Bodenfors

15. Checkland Kindleysides

16. Neostream

17. Cartelle

18. Also Online

19. Razorfish

20. D10Studio

21. Danka Studio

22. Hatica

23. Brand Studio

24. Zign

25. Caime & Friends

26. Nuova Design Lab

27. Underdog

28. Multiadaptor

29. Waypoint Design

30. Fiero Animals

31. Flash Zone

32. Dead Line

33. Cubic

Pixel Bender technology is embedded in a toolkit that includes the Pixel Bender kernel language and graph language, the Pixel Bender Toolkit IDE, sample filters, and documentation. The Pixel Bender run-time engine is integrated into a number of Adobe applications, allowing you to add your Pixel Bender filters and effects to those already offered in those applications.

The Pixel Bender kernel language is a high-performance graphics programming language intended for image processing algorithms. This language provides several built-in functions that can be used for calculations of many specific cases: Mathematical, Geometric, Region, Sampling, Intrinsics.

The Pixel Bender graph language is an XML-based language that describes the structure of a graph used for combining individual pixel-processing operations (kernels) into more complex filters. It allows you to create more sophisticated image processing effects by connecting multiple Pixel Bender kernels into a processing graph that can be treated as a single filter.

The Pixel Bender Toolkit IDE is an interactive development environment in which you can create, compile and preview Pixel Bender kernels. The IDE allows you to edit and execute programs that use the Pixel Bender image-processing engine.

One important note is that the basic unit of image processing in Pixel Bender is the kernel. The job of a kernel is to produce a single output pixel. In addition to the samples and documentation, there is a command-line utility for converting a kernel file into a byte-code file that can be used in Flash Player 10. Pixel Bender defines three file formats: PBK, PBJ, and PBG.

The technology development offers many advantages such as:

• Low learning curve — Pixel Bender offers a small number of tools that are sufficient to write complex image-processing algorithms. Learning Pixel Bender is easier than learning C/C++ and each application’s plug-in SDK. You do not need to know any graphics shading language or multi-threading APIs.
• Parallel processing — Pixel Bender allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems. It delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products.
• Supports all bit-depths — The same kernel runs in 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit within the application.
• Support by multiple Adobe applications — Pixel Bender is integrated with multiple Adobe applications. It allows you to develop filters that are portable among various Adobe products.

You can use Pixel Bender in you graphic development like: filters, fills, blend modes, calculations (the built-in functions from the kernel language).

If you decide to dive into this Adobe technology you can read more in the Pixel Bender Developer’s Guide and download the Toolkit from Adobe Labs page.

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

The PureMVC project began in November 2006 and its purpose was to deliver a simple framework that enables quick implementation of rich client applications based upon the classic Model, View and Controller concept. I sad earlier that this framework is more complex because, originally it was implemented in ActionScript 3 for use with Adobe Flex, Flash and AIR, but in time has expanded and now allows development on a wide variety of platforms. PureMVC is being ported in several languages such as: C#, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby.

The framework has two versions that are supported with reference implementations Standard and MultiCore. “In short, the Standard Version provides a simple methodology for separating your coding interests according to the MVC concept. Beyond that, the MultiCore Version allows multiple PureMVC applications to run within the same virtual machine, modular programming.”

PureMVC implements a different concept in contrast with the standard MVC design pattern. The Model, View and Controller are implemented as Singleton classes:

• The Model caches named references to Proxies, which expose an API for manipulating the Data Model (including data retrieved from remote services).
• The View primarily caches named references to Mediators, which adapt and steward the View Components that make up the user interface.
• The Controller maintains named mappings to Command classes, which are stateless, and only created when needed.

There is a fourth class, the Façade, that initializes and caches the Core actors (Model, View and Controller), and provides a single place to access all of their public methods. It acts as a communication bridge throughout the application. These classes are referred to as the Core Actors.

The framework has a Publish/subscribe-style Observer notification system and the communication is being done through this scheme rather than AS3 Events, which is understandable considering the whole group of languages that’s covering.

The differences between the Standard and MultiCore version, like the name underlines it is that the second one uses independent program modules each with their own independent PureMVC ‘Core’. And instead of Singleton classes there are Multitons(stores a map of instances). Each Core is referenced by an associated Multiton Key.

This project has a well developed documentation containing: source code freely available, complete API documentation, conceptual and UML Diagrams and plenty of demos show the basics and demonstrate best practices.

Conclusion

Because the amount of information about PureMVC is vast I tried to be as succinct as possible. Like most of the MVC frameworks, pureMVC has some good points and some bad ones. But the fact that it’s trying to be general and reach different platforms can be an issue. I am just saying that the generalization of this framework can make it mediocre in some way.

For a deep insight of this framework and its documentation check the PureMVC site.