The Space For App Developers

I just thought I will share some of my findings around drag and drop support in WebKit, HTML5 and PhoneGap apps running on iOS and Android devices.

To make the story short drag and drop is NOT support out of the box in the current versions of WebKit that run on iOS or Android devices although you can simulate it using mousedown, mousemove and mouseup events.

When I clean the code a bit you can expect and update to this post

This time in the video below you will find a quick review of PhpStorm/WebStorm IDEs. As I mention in my recording this is one of those tools that I will stick with at least for now

It has really great debugging support (IMHO Firebug or WebInspector can’t even compete). Also because it is built on top of IntelliJ IDEA platform it has great code completion, rich set of refactoring features, and many others. Check out the video for more.

Below is the third episode of my HTML5 for App Developers series. In this episode, I cover how you can debug your JavaScript applications inside of Eclipse.

Debugging is available through a set of plugins that are available for Eclipse from the ChromeDevTools project on Google Code. So, you will need either Google Chrome or Chromium to make it all work.

Below you will find the second episode of my HTML5 for App Developers series. In this episode, I cover how you can use Eclipse, which is a free and open source IDE, to do your HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS work.

In the video, I point out a small bug that comes with Mac version of Eclipse. To download the patch you can use this link. You can find Eclipse itself here; I encourage you to download the Eclipse IDE for JavaScript Web Developers version.

Below you will find a recording with a tutorial of my as3c2dm ANE. Since I published this lib I have received tons of messages and comments with help requests so I hope this will work

BTW this is the first video tutorial I’ve recorded from my new home studio. I still need to work a bit on some light and audio presets in Premiere Pro but I think in general it’s starting to look and sound as I imagined. You can expect a short walkthrough around my studio in some of my next posts

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.

In this short video recording you will see my new and first AIR native extension (ANE) that I created for C2DM (Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework).

C2DM allows you to push notifications to your Android applications. The cool thing about it is that your application doesn’t have to run in the background in order to receive messages. In this case, my ANE creates a notification with a specified ticker, title and text. When the user taps on the notification it runs an AIR application and passes the sent message text that is displayed in the app. Check out the magic for yourself in the video below.

The source code is available here. You can also download the packaged ANE and the C2DM Messanger app from here and here.

Check out some more already built ANE’s here.

Recently I wanted to try the LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) messaging feature on tablet devices. LCDS is a platform that lets you easily integrate Flash/Flex/AIR RIAs with JEE back ends, giving your applications full real-time capabilities on the web.

In order to run my tests I ported one of the LCDS demo apps that is included in the package to Flex 4.5 and published it to Motorola XOOM (running Android 3.1), BlackBerry PlayBook and the iPad. You can watch the results in the video below.

Below you will find links to my two video tutorials about OAuth authorization with Flash and Flex apps:

1) Introduction to OAuth for secure user and application authorization

2) OAuth in Adobe AIR applications built with Flash or Flex

You can also download example code from here.