Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

NVIDIA and Adobe together for optimizing the Flash Player graphic accelleration

Another good partnership for the Flash Player enhancement has been announced from NVIDIA and Adobe: 

 

NVIDIA and Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that they are collaborating as part of the Open Screen Project to optimize and enable Adobe® Flash® Player, a key component of the Adobe Flash Platform, to leverage GPU video and graphics acceleration on a wide range of mobile Internet devices, including netbooks, tablets, mobile phones and other on-the-go media devices. Adobe Flash Player will be accelerated across the range of NVIDIA processors, including NVIDIA Tegra™, enabling users to enjoy uncompromised Web browsing, full H.264 video playback, and rich, consistent Flash technology based content any time, any place, and on any platform.

Read the full "Adobe and NVIDIA Announce GPU Acceleration for Flash Player" announcement.

Adobe AIR has been installed on over 200 million computers in just 16 months

I've missed the Flash Camp Keynote in San Francisco where  Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch mentioned that AIR reached over 200 million installs. 

The Adobe AIR Team blog wrote that the Acrobat.com application provided with Adobe Reader continues to be one of the most popular applications.

Unfortunately in Italy AIR applications are not so populare and well accepted by enterprise companies (this is the market I work for) and I guees we'll have to wait more time in order to see the same penetration you're reporting in US.

Spring Certification Training in Rome

Comtaste, the italian Spring Training Center, is organizing and hosting a Spring Certification course in Rome.  This is a great opportunity to learn more and get certified on Spring framework that is now more integrated in BlazeDS and Livecycle DS.

In fact SpringSource and Adobe started a partnership with the goal of making easy the integration between Spring and BlazeDS. Child of this partnership is the Spring BlazeDS Integration project, which allows you to integrate BlazeDS with robust server-side Spring services.

In this 4-day bootcamp you learn how to use the Spring Framework to create well-designed, testable business applications in an agile manner.
Through our trainings, you benefit from the wide experience and architectural expertise of our team. We bring that experience to you in a 
highly interactive, intensely hands-on setting. The Core Spring course not only focuses on explaining Spring features and how to use them, 
but also on fundamental architectural issues.

Date: 16 - 19 June 2009
Time: 09:00 AM - 17:00 PM (4 days)
Location: Rome (language: English)
Price: € 1500,- (last minute offer, normal price € 1975,-)
Discount: Register 2 students (10%); Register 3 students (20%)

During the course you will learn how to:

• Work with the Spring Inversion of Control (IoC) Container
• Effectively use JDBC and Hibernate for data access
• Use JUnit, Spring, stubs and mocking frameworks to effectively implement automated unit and integration tests
• Take advantage of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) to keep code clean and maintainable
• Use Spring Security to secure web and standalone applications
• Manage live applications with ease using Spring's support for Java Management Extensions (JMX)
• Become a SpringSource Certified Spring Professional
• And much more

Learn more on Flash Catalyst, Flex 4 SDk and Flash Builder 4 with free eseminar

Adobe has planned three free online seminars next week that will walk through the new features of Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. (thanks to Mike Potter for the news)

Here's the schedule of the events:

Adobe® Flash Builder 4 Beta (formerly Flex Builder) for PHP developers  ›

  Tuesday, June 9, 2009

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM US/Pacific

Adobe Flash Catalyst Beta Features ›

  Wednesday, June 10, 2009

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta (formerly Flex Builder) Simplifies Flex for ColdFusion Developers  ›

  Thursday, June 11, 2009

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM US/Pacific

It's a great opportunity to learn more the new technologies from Adobe ! See you there.

Adobe's New Flex Presentation Tool: Acrobat Presentation

I've just discovered (don't know how old it is) this new presentation web tool released by Adobe on Acrobat.com Labs.

Acrobat Presentation is a Flex application that adds to Adobe's online collaborative offerings (with Buzzword).

Presentation allows you to create slides using the PowerPoint metaphor with the following features:

• Add images (JPGs, PNGs and GIFs) from your computer
• Add shapes, fills, Borders & Gradients
  Resize, rotate and align your images
  
• Add effects such as borders, shadows or reflections.
• Upload movies (FLV format) into a presentation in the same way you add images
• Double-click to view in the Editor. They automatically play on the designated slide in Slideshow.
• and many more ..

I did not try yet but it looks good.

Amethyst Beta 5 adds Flex refactoring in the last release

Amethyst Beta 5, the Visual Studio .NET IDE for Flex development, has been released. This new release adds some cool features for refactoring code such as:

 Rename variables, classes and methods 
 Encapsulate field (add getters and setters and update references) 
 Preview and edit (check or uncheck items) before renaming 
 Rename from ‘smart tags’

 Auto-add class to import list 
 Sort imports 
 Remove unused imports 
 Sort and remove imports in a single operation

 Highlight an ID such as a class, method or variable to navigate to all references in project

Numerous other improvements to code formatting and debugging, fixes to reported bugs (such as the ability to install onto a non-default drive) and auto-check for updated versions of Amethyst.

Pantaste, an open source library to create Flex/AIR-based customized start page

Comtaste has just released its second open source project named Pantaste. The library has been developed a couple of years ago, we've started working in Flex 2, but we did not find the time to make the final things, add the documentation, the ASDoc and so on.

PanTaste is an open source library to create ActionScript-based personalized start page or personal web portal much like  iGoogle, My Yahoo!, Netvibes etc.

The library gives you the ability to create multiple windows interface, with each window containing user-defined flex modules.

See an example of the library in action: http://www.comtaste.com/pantaste/PantasteExample.html

Documentation : http://www.comtaste.com/pantaste/docs/

Why the Flex Builder 4 renaming to Flash Builder is good to me

So I'm back from a trip to Tokyo and the first news I read is that Flex Builder 4 (codename Gumbo) will be renamed to Flash Builder !

Ryan have written an explanatory post (read the full "Flex Builder “Gumbo” is Being Renamed Flash Builder" article)about the motivations that drove Adobe to this change.

And I totally agree with him when he has said that it's now clearer that the tools for creating Flash content are independent of frameworks or other parts of the Flash Platform.

Moreover I trust Adobe's decision. It demonstrates us many times that it knows what it does.

But you know what it means to me ?

That my Flex Solutions book will immediately stop to sell :/

The positive thing is that I'm now forced to start writing the second edition faster ;)

So I'll soon publish a detailed table of contents for the Flex 4 Solutions: Essential Tecniques for Flex 4 developers

Flash on the Beach 09 ticket to the lowest price ever

Don't wait too long and take the lowest promotion ever for the Flash On The Beach 2009.

Flash on the Beach 09 tickets will go on sale on Monday at 10:00AM UK time.

We have reduced hundreds of tickets to the lowest price ever. The first 50 conference tickets will go out at an incredible £129! The first 50 student tickets at an unbelievable £59! New this year are 'Singles' - these are single day tickets. If you want to hear the latest news, offers, speaker additions and competitions, we broadcast in a couple of places: our newsletter and twitter.

Macromedia Flash's books revival (aka my first Flash's books)

While tidying up my library in the past days I've found some very old books I've used to study my first topics in the multimedia/web development filed.

I've discovered a book on Director 5, Perl, HTML 3 and the follwoing Macromedia Flash books: Flash 3 Web Animation (by Coriolis Press), Flash Web Design by Hillman Curtis, Flash 4 Magic (by New Riders), and Complete Flash Remoting (by Wiley).

Great old memories :)