The Space For App Developers

The Merapi Project http://merapiproject.net was just released as Open Source. Merapi is a Java-to-AIR bridge framework, that brings power of Java API’s to AIR/Flex applications. I’m very excited to see this finally happen and looking forward for new applications with event tighter integration to underlying operating system.  With Java cross platform capabilities this is a perfect mix that will bring RIA’s to another level!

Congratulations to Merapi team!

You can find Merapi Project code on the Google Code Web site:
http://merapi.googlecode.com/

Example applications are located here:
http://merapi-examples.googlecode.com/

And to participate in the conversation with other Merapi project members and folks in the community, be sure to head over to the Google Group that was setup here:
http://groups.google.com/group/merapi-project

New product from Acrobat.com family was just released (its an early release so you can find it on labs at the moment)! Its an online presentation editor that allows its users to share, edit and collaborate presentations on Adobe hosted services. It is very similar to in concept, layout and of course technology to Buzzword – an online text editor. You can check it out here: http://labs.acrobat.com/

Tour de LiveCycle is a desktop application designed by the Adobe Evangelist team to serve as both an introduction to Adobe LiveCycle ES and an extensive reference tool. We have organized over 1,000 pages of content into a hierarchical tree that you can use to explore the areas most relevant to you. Whether you need to build a full application or you just plan to spend 10 minutes getting a feel for LiveCycle ES and the kinds of problems it can help you solve, Tour de LiveCycle can help.

You can find more info here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/tourdelivecycle/

Here is the badge that you can use to install Tour de LiveCycle:

You can also check Tour de Flex which is very powerful demo of Flex and AIR technologies:

Yesterday Amethyst Beta 5 was released. Amethyst is a Flex development environment for Visual Studio. With every release it becomes more and more feature complete. I think in the future it has a big chance of becoming the Flex IDE of many VS/.NET developers.

This release bring feature like:

Refactoring

• 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’

Organize imports

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

Configuration-dependent property pages

• Seven pages of categorized project properties
• Save properties as named configurations for easy re-use
• Option to select alternative Flex SDKs
• Options to define symbols for conditional compilation

Find all References

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

Run and debug on server

• Option to run or debug applications using a web server
• Supports WebDev, Apache, IIS

Join us at Adobe MAX 2009
October 4-7, 2009
Los Angeles, CA

Adobe MAX (max.adobe.com) is an experience unlike any other. It’s an opportunity to connect with thousands of Adobe users, expand your Adobe product skills, and learn the latest about Adobe AIR and the full benefits of the Adobe Flash Platform.

Early registration is now open, take advantage of Early Bird pricing and the best opportunity to secure a seat in popular preconference labs (limited to 50 attendees).

Mateusz Małczak one of our Polish Flash Platform gurus (an author of an awards winning Komixo http://komixo.com/ comics editor) has released an asynchronous JPEG encoder that is based on libjpeg and compiled into AS code with Alchemy. More info about his work you can find here: http://segfaultlabs.com/blog/post/asynchronous-jpeg-encoding

Here is also a preview where you can compare it with optimized JPEGEncoder. It not only is faster but it also produces smaller jpegs:

Today colleague of mine pointed me to very interesting resource on Adobe Blogs – http://blogs.adobe.com/flexdoc/. Actually this is an Adobe Flex Documentation Team blog where we can find updates, useful information and links to our documentation. Defenetly I will subscribe to it as Gumbo will bring us a lot of new features to study!

I just found there interesting documentation about Spark Containers http://blogs.adobe.com/flexdoc/pdf/sparkContainersAndRenderers.pdf

Couple of days ago The New York Times has released TimesReader 2.0 that uses Adobe AIR technology! This is a great technology prove of Text Layout Framework for Flex! Today I found interesting coverage about TimesReader in Polish newspaper: http://technologie.gazeta.pl/technologie/1,86564,6603910,Times_Reader___przyszlosc_prasy_.html

Application can be downloaded from here: https://timesreader.nytimes.com/

There is also video interview with Adobe XD team that was working together with NYT to bring it to live:

Yesterday new version of Swiz 0.6 was released. It brings couple of new features and some performance improvements:

• Support for mediating bubbled event
• Added view attribute in Mediate tag
• Autowire views with view attribute in Autowire tag
• Ignoring view classes with underscore for performance optimization
• Added viewPackages for performance optimization
• Added eventPackages for shorter notation in strict mode
• SwizConfig for Swiz MXML declaration
• Generic fault handler for executeServiceCall
• Autowire bean properties with new property attribute
• Prototype supports class reference and constructor arguments

Sonke Rohde published great post explaining all the new features: http://soenkerohde.com/2009/05/swiz-06-released/

Adobe AIR is a winner of Webware 2009!!! It was awarded in Infrastructure & Storage category biting other products like: BitTorrent, Carbonite, DropBox, Dropio, Facebook Connect, Mozy, OpenID, Windows Live SkyDrive and YouSendIt.

This is really great news and that means industry is recognizing incredible potential of Adobe AIR which brings true cross-platformability with developers productivity.

You can find more info here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10237765-29.html