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Disable the auto-update capability in Adobe AIR using the SettingManager application

If you want to update the Adobe AIR runtime manually you have to disable the  auto-update capability. Using the AIR SettingsManager you can disable it.
AIR SettingsManager is a small application that use a toggle button to Enable or Disable auto-updates as desired.

Download AIR SettingsManager application.

i2 technologia featured on Forum Nokia with Anina's Flash Lite DressUp game

I'm very happy to spread the word for this news. Guys behind i2 technologia (Felipe and Luciano) were featured on Forum Nokia as a FN Success Story:

"French supermodel Anina and Brazil’s i2 technologia teamed up to create Anina Dress Up, a fashion-memory game created using Flash Lite from Adobe. It is available for S60 3rd Edition and S40 devices."

Ehi guys Congrats.
I can't wait to meet you again ;)

Continue reading "i2 technologia featured on Forum Nokia with Anina's Flash Lite DressUp game" »

Flex and AJAX Quality Assurance automated testing with Borland Silk 2008

Testing Flex and AJAX applications is challenging because the nature of the application itself can communicate between the client and the server in a different ways. We're not anymore in a context where the standard web application submits via GET or POST requests with an easy-to-understand format.
Flex 3 for example supports Mercury QuickTest Professional that allows developers to create  applications that are tested by Quality Control (QC) professionals.

Now we have a new tool. In fact, Borland released then new Borland Silk 2008, an automated testing tool for Flex and AJAX applications:

Borland Silk 2008 consists of three parts. The first is SilkTest 2008, the functional and regression-testing product designed to support Web 2.0 applications and built on Adobe Flex. With this version, Borland replaced the custom object oriented language it used to develop automated tests in favor of the Java.

The second part is SilkPerformer 2008, the enterprise-class load and performance testing solution. This new version supports testing the scalability of Web 2.0 applications in Flex and AJAX (define).

Finally there is SilkCentral Test Manager 2008, which is designed to act as the test management console, handling test assets, security, and providing assistance to manual testers. It's been upgraded to greater scalability and performance over a distributed network.

Borland said it chose to emphasize Flex in this release because it's the best choice for RIA development in the enterprise. "The reason is you have a vendor to go to who is in control of the spec and will answer the calls. We're not neglecting AJAX, but there are 200 flavors of it. We went deep and complete with Flex, but we're working with an existing customer base for AJAX testing," he said.

Continue reading "Flex and AJAX Quality Assurance automated testing with Borland Silk 2008" »

Waiting for the Nokia N96 I'm enjoying my N95 8GB with Flash Lite 3

I'm a Nokia N95 8GB (with Flash Lite 3 installed) owner since November 2007 and I'm totally satisfied.  When the Nokia N95 8GB software version 15.0.015 was  released, the Flash Lite 3 support was added (other improvements include WLAN and browser stability, email viewing and Nokia Maps startup) and a lot of N95 Flash Lite (and non flash lite) applications come out.  Moreover thanks to the WiFi support you can watch YouTube videos, write email and browse the web.

Even though I'm pretty sure I won't switch to a new mobile device soon,  I can't ignore the upcoming Nokia N96. The Nokia N96 is a Nokia S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and a Flash Lite 3.0 enabled phone.
See this N96 video from AllAboutSymbian.

Continue reading "Waiting for the Nokia N96 I'm enjoying my N95 8GB with Flash Lite 3" »

Hydra changed its name: Pixel Bender

Just to let you know that Hydra, the bitmap effect scripting language,  will be renamed to Pixel Bender. Reading the Kevin Goldsmith blog this is the reason :

The problem is that it's a great name for any kind of technology that does multiple things, so it is pretty popular. We didn't want to confuse folks, so we worked with the Adobe branding team to come up with a new name that we could use moving forward. That name is Pixel Bender (tm).

NetBeans 6.1 adds new features for developing AJAX Web 2.0 apps (JavaScript and PHP support)

Netbeans During NetBeans Day at JavaOne it has been announced that NetBeans 6.1 IDE will be more oriented to AJAX and Web 2.0 application development. In fact the new NetBeans will add the support for PHP scripting language, support for embedded CSS, HTML and JavaScript technologies.

See the features list of NetBeans 6.1 IDE to learn more.

How long to extend NetBeans IDE to support the Flex DSK ? :)

I'll speak at Multi-Mania conference.Registrations are now open

Multimania Multi-Mania is totally free event dedicated to multimedia topics that happen in Belgium.  The speaker list has been published on the site and it keeps getting great.
I'm glad to be one of the speaker for the Multi-Mania conference and I'll present a session about Flex and AJAX. In this session I'll introduce different approaches to communicate AJAX and Flex together to create better RIAs. Showing lessons we've learned in Comtaste during real world projects development, you'll learn :

* how to send and receive objects from Flex and the AJAX page
* how to use the Flex AJAX Bridge
* understand the benefits of the AJAX Data Services
* how to create a desktop application with AJAX and AIR

You can read more about the conference on Koen's blog.
So , what are you for. Multi-Mani reagistrations are open and it's free.

Calculating the ROI for enterprise applications that use Flex 3

Raffaele Mannella, my business partner at Comtaste, has published the slides of his presentation at 360Flex. The topic was very interesting because he showed the benefits achieved as a consequence of adopting Flex to re-design an enterprise application.  The benefit was measured in terms of the time saved to execute an ordinary operation (cashing a check) by using the Flex re-designed application respect the time that was formerly necessary to execute the same operation by using a "common" Oracle form-based application (simple html using the "traditional" logic of 1 click=1 page).

You can read the entire post on the Comtaste's blog entry :  Measuring the ROI of choosing Flex for Enterprise RIAs

Garbage Collector in ActionScript 3

The garbage collector of actionscript 3 works in 2 different ways to know which object should be deleted from memory: the reference counting method and the mark&sweep.

Emanuele, one of our senior developer at Comtaste,  wrote an interesting article on our company's blog about the Garbage Collector in Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3.

Considering the byte order mark (UTF-BOM) when reading a text file using the readUTF() method in AIR

Working with Adobe AIR's d ead and write methods, we encountered  some strange behaviors when using the readUTF() method to read text files (TXT or RTF).
In fact if the text file we're opening has not been created by Adobe AIR,  we got a runtime error (number #2030 line ending ....) from the Flash Player. Investigating we discovered that the readUTF() method won't find a couple of bytes embedded into the file that it needs.

From the Adobe AIR  documentation :

The readUTF() and the writeUTF() methods (not to be confused with readUTFBytes() and writeUTFBytes()) also read and write the text data to a file, but they assume that the text data is preceded by data specifying the length of the text data, which is not a common practice in standard text files.

Some UTF-encoded text files begin with a "UTF-BOM" (byte order mark) character that defines the endianness as well as the encoding format (such as UTF-16 or UTF-32).

Instead, reading the file using the writeUTFBytes() everything works well.
I'm trying to understand if the IDataInput and IDataOutput objects are responsible for the serialization/deserialization.

Anyone had the same problem ?

Continue reading "Considering the byte order mark (UTF-BOM) when reading a text file using the readUTF() method in AIR" »

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