Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

Ready to learn the new FXG to create basic vector and bitmap shapes?

I'm planned to spend this weekend to study the new FXG 1.0 specification released by Adobe on the Open Source site. As you probably know, FXG will be used by the next Flex 4 to improve the  designer/developer workflow for skinning elements.
In Flex 4 in fact there is a brand new  graphics tag library that uses FXG and that  follows very closely the Flash Player 10 rendering model.
As you can imaging FXG will be an important part of the new Flex 4 (codenamed Gumbo) component architecture.

Adobe Photoshop.com goes on mobile,a Flash Lite application for Windows Mobile devices

Adobe has announced the mobile version for Photoshop.com . Photoshop mobile will allow users to upload, view, and share  photos online from your mobile devices with Windows Mobile system.
It seems that Symbian Flash Lite devices will be supported :( It's a shame that the first consumer-oriented mobile application developed by Adobe won't support Nokia (Symbian) Flash Lite enabled mobile devices but only Palm devices.  I don't want to buy a Palm :)

The Photoshop.com Mobile beta application is expected to be initially released on 6 Windows Mobile mobile devices in the U.S. at the end of September 2008 (Bill Perry source):

Samsung Blackjack I
Samsung Blackjack II
Motorola MOTO Q 9h
Motorola MOTO Q Music 9m
Palm Treo 700 w/wx
Palm Treo 750

Information on the Adobe site:
http://www.adobe.com/products/pscom/mobile/

Early Bird seats: Save £250 for Meet the Guru courses

Meet the Guru course events are now in the Early Bird discount. Get your seat now.
Comtaste has openend the Early Bird seats for the “Meet the Guru” training initiative, a series of training courses held by internationally well known expert of the Adobe community on top cool subjects. Peter Elst, Marco Casario and Koen de Weggheleire will teach ActionScript 3, Flex 3 and AIR in full time  3-4 day courses in London next October 2008.

Early Bird Price: £ 950.
The £250 early bird discount for the course expires 3 weeks before the beginning of the course. Don’t wait! Register now to reserve your seat at the lowest price.
Standard price  was £ 1200.00.

Speak at FlexCamp London about Flex and AIR SQLite best practices

I'm glad to announce that I'll be part of the FlexCamp London next week (28th August) as a speaker.
The agenda of the event looks damned cool and the speakers are a  a warrantee of quality: Andrew Shorten, Mike Jones, Peter Elst and many others.
Peter and I will have a speech talking about SQLite support in AIR and some best practices to optimize Flex development for local data storaging.

Flex Camp London 08 is a FREE, community-run event for everyone interested in Adobe Flex! Whether you're just getting started with Flex or you're an expert, Flex Camp aims to provide something for you. We've lined up some of the most experienced Flex developers in the UK who will share their knowledge on everything from creating your first application, connecting to data, creating components and development best practices through to selecting an application framework for larger projects.

The event is free but you to register. Don't miss this opportunity !
See you at the FlexCamp London.

Are you a Flex Gangsta ?

This is my contribute to your excellent and funny job Jeremy ;)

Have a look at this cool Flex Gangsta Rap ! I'm sure you're having fun at 360Flex San Jose ;)

How to get AIR applications running on Linux with Adobe AIR for Linux

If you've missed it find the time to have a look at this video tutorial on AIR development with Linux by Mike Chambers:

Getting Started With AIR on Linux - In this tutorial Mike Chambers explains the basics of how to get setup with AIR on Linux.

Mike gave us an overview on how to install Adobe AIR on Linux system and how to install and unistall AIR applications under Linux.

Meet the Guru training courses in London: learn Flex 3, AIR and ActionScript 3 from the experts

I'm glad to announce that I'll be one of the trainer for the Meet The Guru Training Courses (about Flex 3, Actionscript 3 and AIR) that Comtaste organized.

The importance of the guru role for the general knowledge progression does not need to be explained or highlighted any further.
Unfortunately enough, the chances to meet and interact with  expert people in specific fields are pretty limited; normally you have to search the information you need on his/her blog (but rarely you find "that exact piece of information"), or you can assist a one hour speech at a conference (maybe not exactly dealing with the subject of your interest).
Seldom if ever you can take the benefit of the interaction with  a Guru for training purposes, the only capable to  transfer you an actual understanding of how to go beyond what tools are designed to do, how the experts push the boundaries of the ordinary to achieve the extraordinary.

That is why Comtaste has launched the “Meet the Guru” training initiative: a series of training courses held by internationally recognised Gurus of the Adobe community on top cool subjects. Peter Elst, Marco Casario and Koen de Weggheleire will teach ActionScript 3, Flex 3 and AIR in full time  3-4 day courses in London next October.

Join a unique opportunity to get inspired: learn ActionScript 3, Flex 3, and AIR from the most awarded, best selling authors and most influential trainers in the Adobe community. Learn how to go beyond what tools are designed to do, how the experts push the boundaries of the ordinary to achieve the extraordinary.

Flex 3 and Flex Builder 3 - Developing Rich Internet Applications with the new Flex 3 SDKs
Guru: Marco Casario
Where and When: London, 20-23 October 2008
Location: London, Lafone House, The Leathermarket - Weston Street

Hours: 4 Consecutive lessons, from Monday to Thursday. Each lesson has a duration of 6 hours and takes place between 9:30am and 16:30pm (with a break of 1 hour for lunch)

The course will provide each student the following  text book:

Flex Solutions: Essential Techniques for Flex 2 and 3 Developers (a value of 54 USD)
Editor: Friends of Ed
Pages: 904

Register to the Flex 3 course with a 5%  of discount using the word "Marco"  in the discount field !

Other Meet the Guru Training Course in Europe (London):

Cairngorm Flex MVC architecture goes open source

Adobe is putting  more and more attention to the open source. And now it's the turn of the Cairngorm micro architecture for Flex development. I'm a user of Cairngorm since the beginning so it's great to see that Cairngorm's source code is available in a subversion repository and with a JIRA bugbase.

If you don't know what Cairngorm is, it's a lightweight MVC architectural framework around which to build Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex or Adobe AIR (Alister McLeod gave a perfect definition for that). So if you are a Flex developer and you like to follow best practice in Flex development, make your code easier to read, more robust and reusable, Cairngorm is one of the choice (I'm also liking PureMVC very much these days). We spend an entire day to teach how to use Cairngorm in  enterprise Flex development  in our two Enterprise Flex 3 courses:

• Using LiveCycle Data Services and J2EE (Java EE)
• Enterprise Flex 3 applications with BlazeDS and Java (Java EE)

Grat job Adobe Consulting and thank you !
Read the Alister and Steve's blog post about Cairngorm Open Source

Flex 4 (codename Gumbo) next plan

Googling I found this interesting presentation about Flex 4 (aka Gumbo) next plan :

Flex 4 SDK next plan by Matt Chotin
Flex 4 SDK presentation in PDF

These are the 3 Primary Themes for Flex 4 SDK release:

Design in Mind
Developer Productivity
Framework Evolution

Flex 4 - Design in Mind

Adjust the MXML language to support more toolability and make it easier to
describe experience-oriented features such as states and transitions (MXML
2009)
Create a format that promotes the features available in the Flash Player and
is usable by tools to describe various graphic assets, including skins (FXG)
Provide a component and skinning architecture that invites easy tool
participation (code name Gumbo)
Improve existing experience-oriented features such as states, effects, and
layout

Integrate new functionality (Gumbo) into existing component model (Halo)
Create new design-friendly components
Initial set of ~10 required by new target use-cases
Additional set to prove out architecture
Size of resulting applications within same order of magnitude as Flex 3
Low-hanging size and performance improvements
Alternative approach considered: Lightweight, design-friendly framework
built ground-up
Customer research indicated a near-term requirement for either functional parity or interop
with Halo, and even then much harder to adopt incrementally
Unable to deliver in desired timeframe
Much harder on the tools

Flex 4 - Target Application

All apps supported in Flex 3; e.g.,
Data visualization
Line of business
Simple event-driven site, e.g., portfolio
Selector / Simple Item Browser
Interface for medium-complexity RIA/product selector
Interactive widget

Mash-up widgets with Adobe AIR at Flash on the Beach

I've decided the title and content of my session that I'll present at Flash on The Beach :

Mash-up widgets with Adobe AIR

The "mash up" term was initially referred to the music field and represented the act of producing a new sound  by mixing two or more existing pieces together.
In the web field, a mash up is an application that combines data from two or more sources into a single integrated tool.
A mash-up application traditionally runs in a client web browser. By using Adobe AIR you can now easily port your mash up applications outside the web browser and the sandbox security restrictions onto the desktop.
A simple mash-up application can leverage the Adobe AIR APIs to save your Flickr's favourite images locally, capture a frame image from a YouTube video, or storing the history of your Twitter messages in a local database .

In this session you'll learn how to set up your application to consume some of the most popular web services to make your AIR desktop applications sexy and to provide useful functionalities to end users.
See you there !