Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

Accessing Skype through an AIR app using Merapi and creating different bindings based on different events

I just wanted to pint out two interesting posts on Comtaste's blog by our Flex engineers  in the latest days.
The first one regards AIR and Merapi :

How to enable communication between AIR and Skype through Merapi

The author, Emanuele Tatti, decided to start playing with Merapi creating a AIR client for the Skype chat; first of all I started searching for a Java implementation of the Skype communication API. I found this project "http://skype.sourceforge.jp/index.php?Skype%20API%20For%20Java%20(English)", officially supported by Skype https://developer.skype.com/wiki/Java_API
It's a well written and powerful library so it was very easy to understand.

In my application I used two message types:
- "skype" - for generic API commands
- "skypeChat" - for chat messages

The second post, written by Liviu Stoica, showed you how to create different bindings based on different events:

ChangeEvent vs Bindable, multiple change events for binding

Flash Media Server course updated to FMS 3.5

Comtaste has  just updated its Flash Media Server course to the latest version :

Flash Media Server 3.5 - Developing Rich Media Applications

The course Flash Media Server 3.5: Developing rich media applications provides for the acquisition of competences necessary for the creation of applications of high multimedia content. Through examples and real applications the participants will be accompanied through a gradual didactic path which will guide them until they arrive at the knowledge of the server and its management and programming.

You can read the complete outline of Flash Media Server 3.5 course on Comtaste site.

Amethyst Designer, the Flex IDE for Visual Studio.NET

I'm following with interest the Amethyst project, that is a Flex IDE for Visual Studio.NET.

Today I've received an email that pointed out the following news:
Have a first look at the ‘Amethyst Designer’ which is the drag-and-drop design environment for the forthcoming ‘Professional’ edition of Amethyst.
I’ve just recorded a short (4 minute) screencast showing a few of its capabilities. I’ve written a blog entry about this here: 

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Adobe-Flex-Visual-Designer

Here is the direct link to the screencast:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/static/movies/amethyst/designer-preview/amethyst-designer-preview1.html

Speak at the JavaDay Conference about using Java with Flex, LCDS, and BlazeDS

Tomorrow I'll present at JavaDay conference in Rome. JavaDay is the biggest event in Italy driven by the Sun community. Last year more that 1.000 people parteciped and I'm pretty sure this year it'll be a greater success.

Comtaste we'll be present at the conference (this year too) talking about the integration of Flex in Java and J2EE enviroment using Livecycle Data Services and BlazeDS.

If you live in Italy don't miss the event that is also totally free !

Using Amazon S3 with Adobe Flash and Flex

I just wanted to point it out an interesting article about using Amazon S3 with Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight (by Martin Streicher).

For the article the author used an excerpt from my book in the section "Connect to Amazon S3 in a Flash" to explain the fact that SWF file cannot read data from a "remote" host without explicit consent. (You can find the rationale for this mandate and a complete description of Flash security measures in the white paper, "Adobe Flash Player 9 Security.")

Read the complete using Amazon S3 with Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight article.

Working with AIR Application and Window menus (The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development Highlight)

The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development book is oriented to Flash developers interested in building desktop applications via Adobe AIR. You can order The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development  on Amazon or buy it on local bookstore.

This is the fourth part of the series dedicated to AIR menus (Chapter 6 of the Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development). You can read the previous articles here:

• Creating AIR submenus for a native menu with Flash CS4 - Part 2 (The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development Highlight)
• Creating AIR native menu with Flash CS4 - Part 1 (The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development Highlight)
• Using the menuItemSelected() method with Flash CS4

When you interact with a desktop application, you’re used to using general menus that guide you and introduce you to the functions you can choose from. For example, if you’re using a word-processing program and you want to know which formats you can save the document in, you will almost definitely look for the Save as command from the File menu, without even thinking about it. Likewise, if you need to copy the selected text, you’ll look for the Copy command from the Edit menu. These operations are strongly embedded in every user that has experience with modern computers. Regardless of any previous knowledge about the program you’re working on, the menu bar will always be a safe haven where you can look for the commands and functions you need.
Some modern software applications have interfaces that mimic the standards of many web applications. These applications don’t have traditional menus—they only provide icons in the application, and these are sometimes difficult to interpret. When users access one of these programs for the first time, they may feel disoriented, and may not even understand how to start using the application.
AIR puts users at ease by supporting a traditional menu bar that guides them through the features of your application. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, there are two types of menus  for AIR applications: application menus (on Mac OS X systems) and window menus (on Microsoft Windows systems).
To know which type of menu you can use in your application, AIR provides the supportsMenu property in the NativeApplication class as well as in the NativeWindow class . These are Boolean properties and they show whether the menus are supported at the application or window level. To check if application- level menus are supported, you can use the following  code:

If( NativeApplication.supportsMenu == true )
{
// code to manage application menu
}
To check if window menus are supported, you can use the following:
If( NativeWindow.supportsMenu == true )
{
// code to manage windows menu
}

The procedure to create application menus is identical to the procedure for window menus. The only thing that changes is the object you need to assign the menus to and how the end user will use them.

Get inspired by FITC Amsterdam 2009 before being sold out

Don't loose the occasion to get inspired by cool speakers at the FITC  2009.
FITC returns to Amsterdam, The Netherlands with two days of presentations and one day of workshops focused on all aspects of Interactive design and development, February 22-24, 2009 at the Felix Meritis European Centre for Arts and Sciences. 

The much acclaimed two-day event includes over 40 presentations covering business, creative and technical subjects, plus pre-festival workshops, and nightly parties as only FITC can deliver. This is the second year for FITC Amsterdam, which last year sold out over a month in advance.
See you there !

Flex plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio (Amethyst IDE Beta 2) is out

Huw Collingbourne sent me an mail to let me know that they have just released the second beta which now includes IntelliSense.
From the website:

This release has Flex IntelliSense, including syntax-sensitive code completion for both the ActionScript programming language and MXML formatting code. It also provides code completion for import statements and keywords. As we have previously announced, we shall release Amethyst in two editions: the free Personal Edition will include code completion for ActionScript; however, some IntelliSense features may be provided in the ‘Professional’ edition only. The current beta includes elements from both editions.

You can find more information here: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Adobe-Flex-IDE-Amethyst-Beta-2

Piquadro ecommerce store released

I'm very proud to announce that our first ecommerce initiative has been succesfully released and deployed. 
Studioarch.com, a Piquadro boutique in Rome, Italy, is the heir of the long Studioarch tradition, a historical sales point in the sector of graphics, fine arts and designer objects, founded in Rome back in 1968.
Piquadro is a  specialist producer of travel and business luggage, the company has always been characterised by a blend of traditional Italian craftsmanship, quality, design, innovation and technology.
For the backend we've used the open source platform Magento (after spent 2 weeks on evaluating different paltforms) and we're very happy about our decision.

This is a list of Pros and Cons of Magento we found:

Pro:
Free and opensource platform
Feature-rich solution
Based on Zend Framework
Good SEO
Good support for localization
Fast-growing community
Easy update
Easily manageable extensions
and much more...

Cons:
Not much documentation (there is a growing wiki and a nice forum, but it is still difficult to find the answer you are looking for)
Importing products not yet fully supported (import script needs some tricks and workarounds to be used)
European tax system not fully supported (VAT, B2B, B2C..., check first if what you need is supported)
Internationalization may not be complete (depending on your language)
Still many bugs (but development and bug fixing is on the go, the last release is from 1.1.8 November 26, 2008)
and maybe some more...

You can read the full article published on Comtaste's blog to learn some tips on Magento.

And if you need to buy some italian fashioned computer bags, organizers and notepad holders, backpacks you can now buy Piquadro online on our site. I garantuee ;)

Aptana IDE updated to AIR 1.5

Aptana is a great IDE to develop AIR applications using JavaScript.  I prefer it to Dreamweaver CS4.
I've just received the monthly newsletter where I've learned that they added the support to AIR 1.5 (as well as Mootools 1.2.1 and jQuery 1.3) :

Support for Mootools 1.2.1 is now available.  We've seen growing usage of Mootools in the Aptana Community and are excited to be working more closely with the Mootools team to make support for Mootools increasingly timely and coordinated.

The Adobe AIR Devleopment Plugin for Aptana Studio has also been updated.  The current beta release adds an extremely useful debugging utility in addition to generalized support for Adobe AIR 1.5.

Next up is jQuery 1.3 (hot on the heels of jQuery 1.2.6 that just came out about 2 months ago).