The Space For App Developers

You may remember one of my previous posts about LCDS Messaging on tablet devices, well I went further with porting these demos and this time I brought also: CRM, Inventory Management and Notes to tablets. Not only I ported these but I also published it to Android Market for anyone to give it a try.

The app that has all the demos is called “Adobe LCDS Samples” and is available here (be aware that I applied market filter to restrict it only to tablets, I managed to do this with <supports-screens /> Android specific tag in *-app.xml).

The hosted LCDS Samples service is located here and you may use it to play around with those samples (the service is thanks to Greg Wilson fellow Adobe Evangelist). UPDATE 2011-07-04: I moved the service to AWS Elastic Beanstalk serivce (blog post about will come soon) and it is now hosted here. The one I really like the most is a Dashboard app because it is easy to use and it shows nicely/visually the real-time capabilities of LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS).

Samples source code is available here in GitHub.

Below you can see few screenshots of the application running on my Motorola XOOM:

Ever wondered how you can make Flex 4.5 ActionBar buttons look like native buttons on iOS? This is actually very simple to achieve, what you need are just a few lines of CSS code. Checkout the snippet below:

/* CSS file */
@namespace s "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark";
 
@media(os-platform:"IOS")
{
	s|ActionBar
	{
		defaultButtonAppearance:beveled;
	}
 
	.backButton
	{
		skinClass:ClassReference("spark.skins.mobile.BeveledBackButtonSkin");
	}
}

As you can see in the code above I also used CSS media queries to have the proper style and skin class applied only when running on iOS devices. Below you can see the end result:

The code that implements the view above is as simple as this:

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:View xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
		xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" 
		title="iOS buttons">
 
	<s:navigationContent>
		<s:Button label="Back" styleName="backButton"/>
	</s:navigationContent>
 
	<s:actionContent>
		<s:Button label="Button"/>
	</s:actionContent>
 
</s:View>

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.