The Space For App Developers

With the holiday season just around the corner you may be wondering what and how you are going to cook (or maybe your mom or wife does ). Well here comes help: a really great looking and innovative app called Cooklet for tablets  (of course built with Adobe AIR). This app is a great addition to the Cooklet.com portal.

My favorite feature is the way you can navigate between the steps of the recipe. It is actually controlled via a front-facing camera and your hand gestures; this way your precious tab can stay clean Another great thing is that the cooking steps are actually read for you so you can keep your tab at a safe distance from your stove. Also the steps’ text is presented with a much larger font so again it can be read from further away. The Cooklet team did really amazing job on the UI and UX of the app!

So go ahead and download it from Android Market or BlackBerry App World (hopefully the iPad version will come soon). You can also check it out in action in the video below.

OK, I finally found some time to give HTML5 a try. Since Adobe (my employer) is actively participating in its development, I wanted to learn more about the actual state of the technology, understand what all the hype is about, and really not fall behind.

I have to be frank here. That the first three days were really hard for me I cursed a lot and pulled my hair out of my head. Well IMHO the learning curve is a bit steep, especially when you are coming from an OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) world like Flex/AS3, Java, or .NET. What I’m trying to say here is that things are just different and you need some patience to get used to it. But after those first few days I actually started enjoying it and I’m sure you will too if you give it a try.

So, to alleviate the pain for others that are taking their first steps with HTML5 I decided to record a series of short tutorials that should help The series will be titled “HTML5 for App Developers” and I will concentrate mostly on app development aspects – so things like tooling/IDEs, debugging, HTML layouts, JavaScript frameworks, architectural and design patterns, and much, much more.

The first video, which you can find below, is about Adobe Dreamweaver and how you can customize it to make it a more developer-centric tool/IDE. The next one will also cover tooling and it will be about Eclipse (the free and open source IDE). I think it is extremely important that when starting with a new technology to have the whole environment set up comfortably so it doesn’t get in your way. So go ahead and enjoy the video below.

To celebrate the best ever release of Flex SDK marked with 4.6 version number I decided to publish source code of my little tablet demo app called BlueChips. The video below demonstrates BlueChips in action together with an overview of new Flex 4.6 components that target tablet development. You can go ahead and download the source code from github and do whatever you want with it

If you prefer vimeo over youtube you can watch the same recording here.