Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

Actionscript 3 and Flash CS3 upcoming books

I've just finised to read the The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 by Charles Brown. It's a great book and we're evaluating if using it as learning material for our Flex 2 courses.

Then I went to FriendsOfED site to see if they announced some cool forthcoming book and I was surpised about how many books they are about to release :

Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!
The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP
Foundation Actionscript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex 2
Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers
Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0
The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

We have a lot to read and learn !!

All you want to know about news features of Adobe CS3 products and Apollo tutorials

AUGItaly blog opens a new section dedicated to Adobe CS3.
We have a lot of experts that post about new features of the CS 3 products and show you all you have to know about Flash CS3, Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3 ...

Moreover we published a guide to Adobe Apollo in italian you can read on the FlexGala user group.
In the next page you can see all the articles on Apollo we wrote, and more has to come !

Apollo runtime downloaded by 40.000 people

I was reading the Can Adobe Unbox? article published by Forbes where they talked about the Adobe CS3 revenues Adobe expect  this year.
At the end of the article they talked about Adobe Apollo writing that :

since Adobe released a preview version of Apollo last week, 40,000 people have downloaded the software and 30,000 people have downloaded its development tools, the company says.

It's a great result !

Update your own devices with the Nokia Software Update application

The Nokia Software Update application is now available from selected Nokia local support web pages and also www.nokia.com/softwareupdate.
After a successful trial run last year, Nokia is expanding the program to enable people to update their own mobile device software without having to visit a service point. Nokia Software Updater is a free application that enables people to update the device software on compatible Nokia devices, including many S60 devices such as the Nokia N70, Nokia N73, and Nokia E61. Initially available only in English, Nokia Software Updater is now available in almost 40 different langugages. (via Nokia S60 newsletter)

Presenting our first Flash Lite 2.1 enterprise prototype

Today we're supporting Adobe Italy to present a Flash Lite 2.1 prototype to a big company in Italy.
The application runs on PDAs with Windows Mobile OS (although we would present a version for Nokia S60 devices) and has a lot of form views which the user has to populate.
So in this kind of proto the usability was a serious issue and goal to reach.

The goals of this company were :

• improve the overall user experience
• improve the usability
• reduce the amount of time spent to populate the fields of the form
• work with web standard  for data exhanging (xml or webservices)

And of course Flash Lite is the best choice for reaching these purposes.
If the project will go on we'll face with our first Flash Lite 2.1 enterprise application !

Flash Lite development requests here in Italy seams to grow and in the last 3 months Comtaste, my company, received many training and consulting request.

Maybe 2007 will be the Flash Lite's year ?

Adobe Kuler runs now on the desktop with Adobe Apollo

This post is just to give you a grab of the Adobe Apollo version of Kuler runs on a Mac desktop, showed during the Adobe CS3 Live WebCast.

kuler is the first web-hosted application from Adobe Labs designed both to stand alone and to complement Adobe Creative Suite software. Built using Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3.0, kuler is all about color: color for exploration, inspiration, experimentation and sharing.

Waiting for the Adobe CS3 Live Webcast

The day has come. The Adobe CS3 has finally been announced by Adobe.
Now we're all waiting for the Adobe CS3 Live Webcast event that will start at 3.30 EST.

I just wanted to pointed out the post by Mike Downey about the new features of Flash Cs3 Professional:

Announcing Flash CS3 Professional

Mobile Device Profile Update #5

A new update of the Device Profile has been released by Adobe on the Mobile Device Profile  page.

This update contains new phones for Flash Lite 1.1, Flash Lite 2.0 and Flash Lite 2.1 profile.

Addition of the following new devices that support Flash Lite 1.1:

• Nokia 6151, Nokia 8800 , Nokia E62 , Nokia E70-1 , Nokia N70-1 , Nokia N71-1 , Nokia N75 ,Nokia N91-1 , Nokia N93i , Sony-Ericsson V600i , Sony-Ericsson W550c , Sony-Ericsson W600c , Sony-Ericsson W600i , Sony-Ericsson W710i , Sony-Ericsson W830a , Sony-Ericsson W830c , Sony-Ericsson W830i , Sony-Ericsson W850i , Sony-Ericsson Z712a , Sony-Ericsson Z800i

Addition of the following new devices that support Flash Lite 2.0:

• Nokia 5200 , Nokia 5300 , Nokia 6085 , Nokia 6300 , Nokia 7390

Addition of the following new devices that support Flash Lite 2.1:

• Verizon Motorola RAZR V3c ,Verizon Motorola RAZR V3m , Verizon LG VX9800 , Verizon Samsung SCH-A950

Converting an Actionscript object (data model) to an ArrayCollection

With Flex 2 you can declare data models using MXML or Actionscript. an Actionscript Data Model is an Actionscript class where you declare the properties that represent the data you want to carry into the application.
So it could often happen that you want to convert an Actionscript data model into an ArrayCollection to use it in data bindings with Flex 2 controls.

This code shows you how to populate an ArrayCollection using the addItem() method starting from an Actionscript data model populated by an external xml file.
This is the MXML data model that loads data from an external xml file :

<mx:Model id="myModel" source="myFile.xml" />

And this is the Actionscript code that populate an ArrayCollection using the ArrayUtil.toArray() method :

import com.Student;
import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
import mx.utils.ArrayUtil;

[Bindable] public var myAC:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection();
   
private function init():void
{
// The istance of the Student Actionscript Data Model
  var dmObj:Student;
// student is the repeating node of the data model
  var dmArr:Array = ArrayUtil.toArray( myModel.student );
   
    for( var i:int = 0; i < std.length; i++ )
    {
     dmObj = new Student();
     dmObj.address = dmArr[i].address;
     dmObj.firstname = dmArr[i].firstname;
     dmObj.lastname = dmArr[i].lastname;
    
     myAC.addItem( dmObj );
    }
}

Now you can use the myAC as data provider for your Flex 2 controls !
In the next page you have the code of the Student Actionscript class.

Flex for Java Developers eSeminar

UPDATE : Tomorrow Bruce Eckel and James Ward will present an eSeminar about :

Flex for Java Developers

After ten years of virtual hibernation, java developers have turned their attention to improving the user experience. With this change, we can expect the quality of web-user interfaces to improve at a very fast pace.
In "Hybridizing Java," an entry on recognized industry leader Bruce Eckel's blog, he writes, "While amazing things have been accomplished within the confines of JavaScript with technologies like Ajax, JSON, GWT etc., these are nonetheless confines. We bump up against their limits every day, and those limits are not going away.... I believe that to solve the user interface problem, we need the equivalent of a domain-specific language dedicated to the user experience. For me, Flash-based technologies like Flex are the best solution to this problem."