The Space For App Developers

Hooray! My Adobe LCDS Samples application was successfully reviewed and accepted in BlackBerry App World! If you have your PlayBook you can install it directly from here.

My experience of publishing to the App World was really straightforward although it took about 8 working days to have my app reviewed and accepted. In advance of that I had to register as a RIM vendor, which took an additional two working days (the good thing is that this registration is free of charge at least for now).

So if you are planning to publish anything to App World be prepared for at least 10 working days for the whole process. I guess this can be a bit annoying for developers, especially those who are used to Android Market instant publishing. I guess with App World the process is more human-centric, so hopefully the end customers receive only high quality and secure apps. With Android Market that may not always be true.

During this year’s MAX I will be doing a presentation about things that are very useful but for some reason little known and rarely used in everyday Flex and AS3 development. The name of my session is “Discover the Unknown Flex 4.5”. This session is for you if you wants to learn new Flex/AS3 tips & tricks, check if you really know everything about Flex, and/or share your knowledge with others.

One of my goals is also to let anyone share their own tips & tricks so I’m expecting to initiate a free form discussion during the session. If you will not be attending this year’s MAX, I encourage to send me your input in advance. I will include most interesting proposals in my presentation, of course giving attribution to their authors

You can use this contact form or use comments below to send me your input.

So see you at MAX 2011…

Last night when I was working on my pet project (very soon to be released ) I finally got annoyed enough to take 15 minutes off to create this simple utility tool called Resicon. It is an icon batch resizing utility application. It allows you to resize icon images into a predefined set of sizes like: 16×16, 32×32, 36×36, 48×48, 72×72 and 128×128 or use a custom one.

This is a very handy tool because whenever you build an AIR application either a desktop or a mobile one you have to specify a set of its icons in different sizes. Usually this is done by downscaling a single high resolution image to the required sizes. This repetitive task is really annoying and that is why Resicon was brought to life.

Below is an install badge for the Resicon application, the source code is available in GitHub here.

Before I go to my family for Christmas Eve I just wanted to share with everyone that I released a new version of the Adobe Evangelists Blogroll application that comes with a nice seasonal theme Also I created this simplistic microsite for the AEB app so that you can easily navigate to Android Market or use QR Code to get it downloaded. So I wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

Today I’m officially announcing my new mobile application called Adobe Evangelists Blogroll. This is a simple RSS reader type of application that aggregates blog feeds from my fellow Adobe Evangelists. I’ve developed it with a preview release of Flex Hero SDK and it works on all Android devices that can handle AIR runtime. The app is available in Android Market if you look for “Adobe Evangelists Blogroll“.

What I’m also really excited about is that I managed to repackage it into a bar file and run it on BlackBerry PlayBook emulator without doing even single change to the codebase. In the video below you can see it in action running on different devices and also on PlayBook emulator.

As I already mentioned it was built with preview release of Flex SDK and also the app itself is in beta so it may have some quirks here and there. If you have any suggestions, comments or found some bugs you can contact me through this form.

Few screens of the application (running in landscape & portrait orientation and on playbook):

Today I passed Flex 4 ACE exam. I made a very decent score of 93% with following distribution in the exam sections:

• Creating a User Interface (UI) 85%
• Flex system architecture and design 100%
• Programming Flex applications with ActionScript 100%
• Interacting with data sources and servers 87%
• Using Flex in Adobe AIR 100%

To prepare for the exam I used Attest3, I went through the mock tests 3 or 4 times and at the same time I used Flex 4 help and ActionScript 3 docs as a reference. I encourage anyone to take the exam as it gives you a good overview of your Flex/AIR knowledge.

Adobe MAX 2010 is over and I’m heading back to Poland. Before I get on the plane I wanted to post my presentation deck and the source code of a demo app that I used to cover the DI frameworks. I also hope to post the session recording as soon as it gets to Adobe TV. BTW this years MAX was really awesome!

I’m very pleased to announce the release of as3term 2.0.0. For those who don’t know it, as3term is a terminal-like application that lets you compile and execute simple snippets of AS3 code. It was built with Flex/AIR 2.0 and it uses the NativeProcess API to launch the fcsh compiler, which is part of the Flex SDK. You can check out one of my previous post with the screen cast showing it in action.

This release includes several important changes and improvements:

• AS3 syntax coloring based on AS3TextArea (another open source project that I released recently)
• Using the fcsh.jar compiler from the Flex SDK instead of mxmlc, which provides an enormous improvement in compilation time.
• Added window resize gripper
• Window centering
• Updated Swiz to version 1.0 RC2

You can download as3term from here. If you have it already installed you just need to run it and it should update itself using the NativeApplicationUpdater.

This is really great news for all the Visual Studio fans that want to do Flash/Flex development with their favorite IDE. Amethyst IDE brings the really incredible feature set of Visual Studio to the Flash/Flex world. I really love how it handles component AS3 in a separate file. I wish something similar was available out of the box with Flash Builder! Really, really incredible!

Key Features of Amethyst Professional:

• Powerful editor with code coloring (76 options) and code folding
• Customizable code formatting
• IntelliSense with code completion and auto-expanding snippets
• Drag-and-drop Designer for Flex and AIR
• Designer integrates with Property panels, Event panels and Layout toolbar
• Multi-level undo/redo in editor and Designer
• Fast ‘Cylon’ debugger with breakpoints and call stack
• Step into/over/out in Debugger
• Conditional breakpoints and break-on-hitcount
• Expression evaluation in Immediate and Watch windows
• Hover and drill-down debugging in editor and Watch windows
• Debug multiple SWFs concurrently
• Find All References/Go To Definition
• Quick-find ToDo comments and User Tasks
• Auto-generate getter/setter ‘property’ methods
• Sophisticated refactoring with rename, move to package and refactoring previewer
• Source control support (TeamServer etc.)
• Import FLA to edit and debug Flash IDE projects
• Convert existing Flex or Flash Builder projects

All that is available at $249.

Check out this video of the Amethyst IDE in action:

Very recently I was speaking at a press conference of a new culinary service called Cooklet.com. Okay, you may be wondering what my role at that event. So first of all, the Cooklet team is located out of Wroclaw/Poland, but this obviously isn’t the primary reason What really brought me there is the fact that Cooklet is using a lot of Adobe technology, specifically our Platform technologies. Cooklet.com itself is a standard HTML based website but at the same time it has a desktop version that runs with Adobe AIR. There is also Cooklet Mobile built with Flash Lite and hosted as an application in the Nokia OVI store. Another very important fact is that this project was funded by the Open Screen Project initiative; you can find more details here as well a registration form to apply yourself.

The service itself has some unique and interesting features. What I really like is in-browser drag-and-drop capability that you can use to add new recipes to your cookbook or shopping list. The really cool thing here is that when you drag the recipe to the cooking list you instantly get access to it from your mobile phone. Another really cool thing is that the recipes get automatically translated into different languages. In the future this may give its users access to really tasty recipes from different cuisine.

Additionally the desktop version gives you offline access to your recipes that you may need in your kitchen. Also it has a great user experience and interactions that mimic reading real printed version of a cookbook.

Obviously Cooklet.com has much more interesting features and I encourage you to give it a try.

Check out the Cooklet Lite demo video below. Now I’m just waiting for the Cooklet team to provide an AIR for Mobile version that I can run on my Nexus One phone ;)