June 09, 2008

Upcoming Flex 3.1 Feature: Marshall Plan

I'm sure based on the activity you've seen in the Flex 3 branch you'd think not much is going on, however you'd actually be wrong. Alex has been leading an effort on a feature we call the Marshall Plan. This is a play on words but is meant to solve a problem that we think folks building big pieces of software may face: the fact that sometimes you can't recompile everything to be on the most recent version of Flex. Additionally it is meant to solve a common use-case we hear about with AIR apps especially, the desire to act as a portal where SWF content can be loaded from multiple domains.

You can learn more about this in abundant detail over on the Marshall Plan Spec page. And if you want, Alex will be presenting on this very topic at 360Flex in August!

ETA: I forgot, I've done some small updates on the Flex 3 page to reflect upcoming dates.

Posted by mchotin at 09:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 02, 2008

Acrobat.com announced today

I'm very excited about Acrobat.com now that it has officially launched. I use Buzzword all the time as we put articles for the Dev Center on there which I need to write or review. And ConnectNow is fantastic as a web conferencing solution, everyone should be using it.

And of course much of this is built with Flex, so I can't help but take some pride in seeing our framework used to build such an ambitious set of products. The lessons we learn from the Acrobat.com development teams go back into the product which benefits everyone.

Make sure to check things out and stay tuned over time as we add even more!

Posted by mchotin at 04:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 21, 2008

Create Flash Player 10 (Astro) content with the Flex SDK

I'll write this up now since I was on vacation last week.

As you probably know, last week we released the beta of Flash Player 10, code named Astro. While we're waiting for Flex 4 to take full advantage of Player 10, we wanted to make sure that developers had some options to try out the new features. Therefore we have a nightly build of the SDK that can output to run in Player 10.

The following pages should be useful:
Lee Brimelow's video showing what to do
Flex SDK instructions
FP10 ASDoc

Note that the best resource is still the page on Labs since as more demos come online we'll link them there.

Also, Flex Builder code hinting will not work for some of the new properties on existing classes (new classes should be OK). We're going to figure out the right way to solve this and it will obviously work in Flex Builder 4, but we're not sure if we'll address it in a Flex Builder 3 patch.

Posted by mchotin at 10:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 07, 2008

More testing support for Flex from Borland

The number of vendors supporting Flex for testing continues to grow. Borland today is releasing SilkTest 2008 which can perform functional testing for Flex apps and SilkPerformer 2008 which can do load testing with AMF.

Good news for everyone!

Posted by mchotin at 09:07 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 24, 2008

360Flex Europe is soon!

A little birdie has provided us a discount code for 360Flex Europe. Go register and use the code "adobelove" and you'll get 10% off!

I've attended all 360Flex conferences in the US and they just keep getting better. There's a ton of great things going on in Milan, so if you're able to I'd go check it out!

Posted by mchotin at 04:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2008

Please take the Flex and ColdFusion Developer Survey

We're trying to get some substantial statistical data about Flex and ColdFusion developers and how you use our products. This helps us prioritize future development, understand our demographics, and highlight our strengths and shortcomings. We'd really appreciate it if you could take a few moments and fill out the survey (I think it will take you maybe 10 mins).

Note that for US and Canada (excluding Quebec) there is an optional sweepstakes you can join. I'm not actively promoting it as the reason to fill out the survey because it's admittedly unfair to our many international developers, some of us actually voted against a sweepstakes to begin with, but since it exists, don't want to hide from it.

You can take the survey here.

Posted by mchotin at 04:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 13, 2008

Do you have the Adobe Developer Desktop?

One application that we put out around the same time AIR launched is the Developer Desktop that's part of the Adobe Developer Connection. It's a great app that has different modules of functionality including a personalized view of of our JIRA bug system, a component exchange, and RSS reader.

We're hoping to continue adding cool things to it, but it's got some pretty exciting stuff now. Check out the ADC and go get the Developer Desktop!

Posted by mchotin at 06:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 12, 2008

Build cool Flex-based Sprouts

Sprout is one of the companies that came out of stealth at DEMO recently and they have now introduced their public beta. Check out their site and you'll see all sorts of cool examples of the kinds of widgets (or Sprouts) that folks are building. What's especially cool to me is that the Builder is built in Flex and the Sprouts also are Flex-based (though I'm not sure how much of the framework the Sprouts themselves use).

And with Flex 3 being free and open source, Sprout is able to build this kind of hosted service that generates tons of Flex apps for free (though I think they chose to buy a few Flex Builder licenses to make it easier). Pretty sweet!

Posted by mchotin at 09:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 11, 2008

Cool March Madness Mashup Contest -- Flex Entries Needed

I was informed about a cool contest being run by the folks over at StrikeIron where they will provide a ton of real-time data about NCAA Men's Basketball and you can provide cool applications using that data. All sorts of things like live scores, standings and schedules, stats, etc. are available.

The Adobe Technology Platform provides the ultimate set of tools for building cool apps that leverage data like this. I hope some folks will rise to the challenge!

Sorry non-U.S. folks, looks like a standard U.S. only contest :-(

Posted by mchotin at 10:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 10, 2008

Please review the Flash Player Security article

Does your Flex app rely on a crossdomain file anywhere? Are you using sockets? Do you call out to JavaScript? If any of these hold, please make sure to review the Player 9 Security Update article which explains some upcoming changes that you may need to take into consideration. We try not to break existing content, but in this case there may be some changes you'll need to make, primarily in your crossdomain settings.

Read the article for more info.

Posted by mchotin at 04:46 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 05, 2008

Adobe needs solid Flash/Flex developers

We are constantly on the lookout for developers who can contribute to the ever-growing product line at Adobe, especially folks who are experts at building on top of our own platforms like the Flash Player, Flex, Flash Media Server, etc. Make sure to keep an eye our on jobs site, and check out one current opening we have looking for help developing media components (e.g., super-cool video playback).

Posted by mchotin at 02:23 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

February 27, 2008

New Flex Blog from Graphics Guru Chet Haase

A few weeks ago Chet Haase joined the Flex team and is going to be focused most likely on our graphics and animation pieces. Very exciting for us. He's already started blogging about his Flex experiences. For now he's focusing on getting up and running, but expect to see the more advanced topics coming soon!

Check it out!

Posted by mchotin at 06:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 25, 2008

Flex Behind the Scenes Video

Today at 360Flex I premiered the video Flex: Behind the Scenes. It is a view onto the Flex team like you've never seen before. I have now made the video available on YouTube in 2 parts (because it's 17 mins total). We're hoping to make it available in higher-res on the onair site sometime in the future, as I think it's useful to be able to read some of it up close.

If you're in Atlanta we'll show the video in its high-def glory again tonight!

Posted by mchotin at 11:14 AM | Comments (24) | TrackBack

February 24, 2008

Flex 3 and AIR 1 are a GO!

Mike wrote up a post on the Flexteam blog that says it all so I won't say more here.

But woohoo!

Definitely check out the new Open Source Flex SDK site!

Posted by mchotin at 09:30 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Countdown to 360Flex

Less than 24 hours and I'll be giving the keynote at 360Flex. I wonder what Flex news I might have to share. I wonder why I think this keynote might be the best keynote ever even without some of that news.

Curious? Maybe there's a cheap airline ticket to at least get you there for Monday. This conference is going to rock!

Posted by mchotin at 08:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 20, 2008

Share your story at 30onair!

Everyone is going to blog about this, but just want to throw my $.02 in and give props to Ted for setting this site up. Want to see some great videos with quick explanations of why Flex, Flash, AIR, ColdFusion, and the other Adobe technologies rock? You can spend 30 seconds there or an hour! Enjoy!

http://www.30onair.com/

Posted by mchotin at 07:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 06, 2008

Flex 4 SDK Feature Planning Begins

As everyone should hopefully know by now we have a public bug and feature request system located at http://bugs.adobe.com/flex. Over the last few months we've had a number of feature requests filed, and it is becoming time to evaluate them for Flex 4. I wanted to let folks know that I and the rest of the Flex team will begin scrubbing through the Flex SDK feature request list starting this week, in a process that will definitely end up taking a few months. You can expect to see lots of the following:


Voting on feature requests will continue to work, and we'll absolutely be taking the voting into account. If we decide as a management team that we do not want to implement a FR (or a bug fix) despite a high number of votes, we will try to be good about putting an explanation in the comments.

We don't yet have a forum for asking questions about the actual process of examining these issues, but you can ask about general process in the comments. Please do not ask about individual FRs or bugs, we'll have a forum for that in a few weeks (and I'll simply ignore those kinds of questions for now).

Doing the actual examination in a completely open manner is pretty new to us, and I'm sure we'll ruffle some feathers and make some mistakes. We hope that you'll take this opportunity to work with us and help make the process as smooth as possible.

We should also note that while the Flex Builder does have a public bug system, the process for making decisions about what's in FB and what's not is going to be a little more behind-the-scenes. It is a commercial product with associated revenue and we do need to be more careful about what is seen as a commitment related to this kind of product.

Posted by mchotin at 11:40 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 31, 2008

Vote for Flex Bugs and Feature Requests on Super Tuesday

Tuesday February 5th is Super Tuesday in the U.S., when over 20 states go to the polls to select their candidate for President of the United States. That's all well and good, but what if you don't live in the U.S.? What if your state already voted? What if your state doesn't vote yet? What if you're not 18? What if you don't care? Don't you still want to have the voting experience?

For this reason we offer Tuesday as a special day to vote on Flex Feature Requests and Bugs.

1. Go to http://bugs.adobe.com/flex
2. Register or login
3. Click on the link for "Find Issues"
4. On the left column, under, "project", select "Flex Builder" and the "Flex SDK" .
5. Under "type", select "Feature Request".
6. Click the button to "View". This will bring up a list of all of the Flex feature requests that we are considering. Peruse the list and select ones that you feel passionate about.
7. When viewing a bug, you can click on the "view" link next to the "Votes" label (on the left hand column) of the bug.
8. From this screen, you can "add" your vote to this bug. It also helps our team if you add comments to bugs describing why this bug is important to you.

Early voting is available, so, you can vote today!

Also, please file any new Feature Requests that have not been recorded in the bugbase. By Tuesday, you may also be able to vote for the bugs that are currently "Deferred". However, this isn't allowed yet, and we don't know if this will be available by then but we hope it will.

I'm Matt Chotin, a member of the Flex SDK team, and I approved this message.

Posted by mchotin at 10:22 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Beta 2 expiring, Beta 3 watermarks, the world is ending!

Today I'm getting a nice bit of evidence in the difficulty of having a long-running public beta. Turns out there's a lot of folks who did not upgrade from beta 2 to beta 3 even though beta 3 came out well over a month ago and Flex Builder indicates that it's going to expire (ETA: looks like maybe we have a bug here since numerous folks are saying they had 44 days left according to FB. We're investigating). This expiration date is hard-coded, there's no way to extend it because guess what... we really want you to move to the new beta because feedback on an old beta is pretty useless to us.

OK, fair enough, but what if you were using the charting and ADG and were doing more than experimenting? You purchased Flex Builder 2 and Charting to make sure you had no watermarks, and now beta 3 is showing them and your FB2 serial doesn't work. Yes, this was an unfortunate side-effect of our scheduling where we had to implement a new serialization scheme. This was originally supposed to happen after our last public beta so that we wouldn't run into this, but then life happened and we had to put it in earlier. If you have a valid use-case for removing the watermark you can mail me (mchotin at you can guess where.com) and I can get you a serial that will get you through beta 3.

Sorry for the inconvenience! Despite the fact that this is clearly beta software, it's pretty interesting to see how many folks are already doing production-worthy things with it.

Posted by mchotin at 08:35 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 30, 2008

Speaking at 360Flex Atlanta

Tom beat me to the punch with a description of what we're hoping to talk about at the 360Flex Atlanta keynote. Now that Ted can't make it (it's a lie, I totally stole this keynote from him) the plan is to rock the audience with tales of the development of Flex 3, secrets about team members, and whatever else might interest folks. Interested in any inside scoop info on the Flex team or our development process? Want to see what a particular team member actually looks like? Ask in the comments and I'll see if I can get the answers into the presentation.

In addition to the Monday keynote the Flex Team is presenting two sessions that I think will be fantastic. Deepa is going to talk about the Future of Flex and Pete Farland is going to give you a tour of the Open Source Flex SDK. This means 360Flex is going to be your first opportunity to see the internals of the compiler, and how can that not be exciting?!?

If you haven't registered yet you really have no excuse.

Posted by mchotin at 01:55 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 16, 2008

Addressing Bugs in Flex

One of my primary functions as a Product Manager is to interact with the Flex community to make sure that the current product is meeting its needs and find out things we can be doing in the future to meet those needs even better. As we've moved Flex towards open source we've introduced additional infrastructure to help facilitate these kinds of interactions, most importantly the public bugbase. This has been a great mechanism for everyone to let us know what problems they're facing as well as keep folks informed of what fixes are becoming available. I think it's worked pretty well, but there are certainly some things that can be improved.

One difficulty for the community is finding a way to let Flex management know that the resolution of a bug is unsatisfactory. E.g., you cannot currently vote on deferred bugs, or if a bug is marked Not a Bug you have little recourse to have the bug re-opened. We do have plans to make sure you can vote on deferred bugs (in fact the implementation is waiting on a staging server, due to release timing we need to wait a little). We also need to implement some queries that will allow us to find bugs that have been commented on after their latest status change, which may indicate the need to revisit.

You may recognize why I bring this up, Doug McCune had a pretty strongly-worded criticism on the behavior of the Panel class when its borderStyle was set to a non-default value. I think there are a few reasons why this ended up being frustrating and want to explore that a little.

From the Adobe side, our attitude was that we never intended the behavior to work. However, this was not called out in Flex 2, so folks began to take advantage of untested behavior. When we formalized the lack of support in Flex 3 (and removed some hacks that we didn't like), folks who were using what we considered unsupported behavior ran into issues. We marked the issue as Not a Bug and explained that we didn't support those additional borderStyles. This may be fair enough if we're working on something new right? The problem was that regardless of our own internal understanding of whether the behavior was supported, the fact of the matter was that it used to work and therefore reasonable people were relying on the behavior. What we internally might have considered a bug (Panel not rejecting unsupported styles) had become a feature for developers. We made a mistake in failing to recognize that the same bug was being filed multiple times by different people and therefore it was a behavior that multiple folks cared about having back. Folks might have understood (grudgingly) if we had marked the bug as Will Not Fix (because we're mean, or out of time, or whatever). The Not a Bug status was being taken as an insult. So we needed to reconsider.

We are at a point in Flex 3 where we do not consider fixes lightly and generally are now trying to avoid checking in more code. We admittedly only considered evaluating this situation because of the number of folks who seemed to make a statement on it (a bug that doesn't affect a large number of people has very little chance of being addressed in the 3.0.0 release at this point). We also looked at what the fix would actually be. If we could have put a fix entirely in PanelSkin we probably would have posted the code on Doug's blog, said "use this new skin" and been done with it. However we found that we did need to make a change in the Panel class which meant that a workaround was much harder for developers. After evaluating the risk of hurting other code we decided to check the fix in. So there you go, PanelSkin will support some of the non-default borderStyles now (and we'll have to decide if this is now behavior that we need to support forever).

So what recourse do you have if you think we're dropping the ball on other issues? I mentioned a few things above about having voting on deferred issues and better querying that the management team can use to make sure we are paying attention to the community. Additionally when the open source infrastructure is live we will have a development list that can occasionally be used to make sure that the SDK developers are aware of an issue where it seems like it may be lost in the bug system. The final option of course is to contact a Product Manager (like me). My job is about making sure we're doing the right thing. If you think things are messed up, let's discuss (mchotin AT adobe DOT com).

Posted by mchotin at 09:51 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 11, 2008

What would you like to hear about from the Flex team at 360Flex?

If you haven't checked out what's going on at 360Flex in Atlanta you really should, it looks like it's going to be great! As you look at the schedule you'll see that there is a ton of great content planned, along with two open slots for the Flex team. What would you like to see us talk about? Are you looking to understand a particular feature better (either in the SDK or Flex Builder)? Want to learn more about future plans? Popular topics in the past have been about Flex Builder secrets, and understanding more about the framework architecture. We can certainly repeat those if you're a new attendee, but if you've seen these online maybe you're looking for something new. What can the Flex Team offer you that you can't get elsewhere (talk-wise)?

Posted by mchotin at 02:23 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

December 19, 2007

ILOG Elixir Beta Updated

If you haven't checked out the Elixir components from ILOG you really should. The beta has been updated and should work with Flex Builder 3 Beta 3 just fine. Changes include:

- New gauges, dials & knobs
- 3D charts: Column and Bar Cylinder rendering
- Maps: tool set to import custom maps to create dashboards, ability to position any element by its position in lat/lon
- Enhancements to the other charts and documentation, including resource charts, org charts, radar charts and treemaps

Go check it out!

Posted by mchotin at 04:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 07, 2007

Play with BRIO, built with Flex!

The Acrobat Connect team has just pushed out a public beta of BRIO, the next version of Acrobat Connect. It was built with Flex 2.0.1 and is a great demo of the sorts of things folks can build with the Cocomo components that will be coming out soon hopefully. Everyone can play with this for free, you'll be able to host a fully functional web meeting with up to 3 people (which frankly covers a lot of my meetings, and I'm in a ton of them)!

Posted by mchotin at 01:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 13, 2007

Have you monkey patched the Flex framework?

Have you modified the framework source for your own purposes on a production Flex application? If so I'd like to hear from you as we're currently trying to understand where folks are making changes and the kind of impact they could have on applications with relation to our new cached framework strategy.

Please let me know the following:
1) What files (or at least what areas) have you patched
2) Is SWF size an important consideration for your app
3) Was patching really the only solution available to you
4) Are you comfortable creating RSLs

You can comment here or mail me: mchotin AT adobe DOT com.

Posted by mchotin at 08:55 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

November 01, 2007

Mixing Flex 2.0.1 and Flex 3 SWFs

For most of our customers the general expectation is that all SWFs in your Flex application (including modules, runtime CSS and sub-applications) are all compiled against the same version of Flex. When you upgrade your 2.0.1 application to 3.0, all SWFs used in the application should be upgraded at the same time.

Technically it is possible, in certain circumstances, to allow a 3.0 application to load modules, runtime CSS and sub-applications that were compiled in 2.0.1. We are interested in getting feedback from developers for whom recompilation of existing 2.0.1 SWFs is impossible or impractical and must try to use these 2.0.1 SWFs in their 3.0 applications. There will likely be many rules and restrictions on how both the 2.0.1 SWFs and 3.0 SWFs should be designed and written.

If you fall into this latter category please contact me ASAP (mchotin AT adobe DOT com) so we can gather your requirements. We are making some last-minute decisions as to how this can work.

Posted by mchotin at 10:26 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 30, 2007

We need help testing web services!

Over the last year we've received a lot of feedback on our Web Service support and have worked hard to address these issues. With Flex 2.0.1 Hotfix 2 we rebuilt the underlying mechanism which helped a number of customers but also introduced some issues that we've needed to subsequently address. We now believe that we have a build that has addressed our most important issues and would like to ask for your help in testing this out on your own web services. Please download the Flex 3 SDK build 186039 from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/sdk/flex3sdk.html and use it to test against any web service you use with Flex. This may be a service that supports an existing Flex application, or perhaps a test service that you used to help us with bugs. We know that not all of your apps may have been built with Flex 3, but anything you can do to help us validate our fixes in a real-world scenarios would be greatly appreciated. Note: at this time we are looking for tests that use the mx:WebService (or mx.rpc.soap.WebService), not the Flex Builder WSDL wizard.

Please send us any and all feedback as soon as possible, as we are reaching the end of our development cycle and want to make sure we have addressed as much as we can. Bugs can be filed at http://bugs.adobe.com/flex and it will be helpful if you can include the WSDL, a small example of how to call the service, and best if you can include a sniffed version of the SOAP traffic. See below for an example MXML testcase. 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">

    <mx:Script>
    <![CDATA[

    import mx.controls.Alert;
    import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent;
    import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
    import mx.utils.ObjectUtil;

    private function makeCall():void
    {
        var myArgument:String = "foo";
        ws.myMethod(myArgument);
    }

    private function resultHandler(event:ResultEvent):void
    {
        trace(event.result);
        output.text += "\n" + ObjectUtil.toString(event.result);
    }

    private function faultHandler(event:FaultEvent):void
    {
         Alert.show("Fault", event.fault.toString());
    }

    ]]>
    </mx:Script>

    <!--
        If you need to demonstrate an issue with SOAP decoding, or wish to test
        a complete round-trip and cannot make your web service endpoint
        available, please capture the SOAP response XML with an HTTP sniffer
        and add a response.xml file to the bug description.

        This will help us mimic a live response as we can set the SOAP
        address location in the sample.wsdl to the response.xml file.
    -->
    <mx:WebService id="ws" wsdl="sample.wsdl"
        fault="faultHandler(event)"
        result="resultHandler(event)" />

    <mx:Button label="Make Call" click="makeCall()" />
    <mx:TextArea id="output" width="100%" height="100%" />

</mx:Application>

Posted by mchotin at 11:56 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 17, 2007

Why is my Flex Beta 2 SWF bigger?

We've seen a number of concerns raised about the size of the SWF in Beta 2. We may not have been vocal enough about some workflow changes that we made to make debugging better and build times faster: the fact that we now produce debug SWFs normally in Flex Builder and use the new Export Release wizard for producing an optimized SWF (instead of creating two SWFs, the normal one and -debug). Tim Buntel, our new Flex Builder Product Manager (but longtime Adobe co-worker) has written up more of an explanation on his blog.

Posted by mchotin at 02:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 09, 2007

Flex Developers in Amsterdam this Friday?

I'll be in Amsterdam this Friday October 12th and my existing meetings have fallen through. If you'll be around and would be interested in sharing your experiences, please drop me a line: mchotin AT adobe DOT com. Maybe we'll be able to meet up!

Posted by mchotin at 08:17 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 08, 2007

Want a Moxie t-shirt, just like the Flex team's?

When Heidi (dev manager for Flex Builder) was on vacation in Maine she spotted a store with a t-shirt that said Moxie (our Flex 3 codename) with a cool junkyard dog on it: a design she knew our team would appreciate. As she bought the shirt she talked to the owners (Cindy and Christopher) and found that they are avid Adobe customers, using Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash. Well clearly this was fate! After consultation with the team, Heidi ordered 60 shirts to send to MAX, and Cindy and Christopher worked all weekend silk-screening by hand to make sure we'd have them in time. Let me tell you that our team really appreciated this effort!

So, would you like to wear this cool shirt yourself? Go to http://at-the-beachgallery.com/moxie_dog_page.html to see the shirt that we have (note the colors on the web site don't quite do the shirts justice). Then go ahead and contact Cindy and Christopher (via the contact link) and place your order including size (for men you might want one size smaller than normal, for women one size larger) and color. Each shirt is about $28 + S/H. It's a very nice quality t-shirt, hand silk-screened, and Cindy and Christopher are good people, so show your Flex spirit and pick up a few (tell them we sent you)!

Posted by mchotin at 01:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 17, 2007

Chat with us on Tuesday!

A number of us will be hosting a chat via this fancy banner chat that will be hosted on OSDN (sites like Slashdot and Sourceforge). Topics include AIR, Flex, Open Source, and Adobe in general. Go check out the banner via the OSDN sites or direct via this link. 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT, 9pm GMT.

Posted by mchotin at 11:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 13, 2007

See Colin Moock on the AS3 Tour

Probably most of the folks who read my blog know AS3 at this point. But if you don't, or if you know people who don't, what could be better than free training from the man who's written the book on AS3? Find out more info here.

Posted by mchotin at 10:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 03, 2007

Flex really taking off in India

Raghu, a Flex engineer in our Bangalore office has some great stats on how Flex is getting bigger and bigger in India.

Posted by mchotin at 11:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 29, 2007

Work on a cool new Flex project at Adobe

Interested in working at Adobe on a cool new project, built with Flex? We've got positions available, especially for folks with real user interface experience. Check out the opportunity here! (job id CC080731 in case the link doesn't work).

Posted by mchotin at 03:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 07, 2007

Flex Camp Video now available

Want to see what the experience of Flex Camp was like and hear from top developers who attended? Check out the latest video on the Flex Developer Center!

Posted by mchotin at 06:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 06, 2007

One more week till 360Flex

Should be a ton of fun with lots of good information. If you haven't decided whether you're going I think you should!

Register here.

Posted by mchotin at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 31, 2007

RIA Motivators Series by Matt Voerman

Matt has been a Flash developer for a very long time and joined Adobe as a senior consultant a few months ago. He's started a great series on his blog called RIA Motivators, explaining how different areas serve as drivers towards a new application experience. The first post talks about User Experience and the second is on Web 2.0 and SOA. Definitely worth checking out!

Posted by mchotin at 11:41 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 12, 2007

Flex Derby in Brazil

For those of you who know Portuguese :-) http://www.flexbrasil.org/desafio/

Posted by mchotin at 08:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 02, 2007

Have you registered yet for 360Flex?

If you haven't registered for 360Flex yet I think you probably should. It's looking like there's going to be a whole lot of interesting stuff going on there. I just got back from FlexManiacs and CFUnited which were jam-packed with Flex goodness, and have every reason to believe 360Flex will live up to their excellence or even exceed! Plus, where else will you find a session called "Harass the Flex PM?"

Posted by mchotin at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 27, 2007

Slides and Samples from Flex Maniacs

Here are the slides and sample code from my various talks at Flex Maniacs. Enjoy!

Keynote: Slides

MXML Inside Out: Slides Code

ActionScript 3 Performance: Slides Code

Posted by mchotin at 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 25, 2007

Flex Code Hinting Component

Andrew Brindamour is an intern on our team and has written a new component for doing simple hinting (similar to Auto Complete, but different). He has a thorough explanation of what he's done as well. Check it out!

Posted by mchotin at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2007

Adobe Digital Editions now available

Check out our latest release of Adobe Digital Editions. It was built using Flex 2! Right now it isn't an Adobe AIR application, but we imagine once AIR hits 1.0 Digital Editions might move to be that. For now it uses custom build of the Flash Player, but the install experience is easy-peasy.

Posted by mchotin at 09:55 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 12, 2007

Chat me up on The Flex Show

In case you hadn't heard I'll be doing a live interview with The Flex Show on Wednesday June 13 at 4pm PDT, 7pm EDT. Please join us on the Skypecast and we'll talk about the recent Flex 3 launch, open source, and whatever else comes up!

Posted by mchotin at 09:44 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Flex Developers needed for user research

Adobe User Research would like to talk to Flex developers next week in our historic San Francisco office. We know your time is valuable, so in exchange for your coming to our office on Townsend Street (at 7th Street) for about an hour, we would be happy to give you $100.

To see if you qualify for this research, please take a minute to answer the short survey we have posted here.

And remember, we hate spam as much as you do, so we never share your information outside of Adobe User Research.

If you are not a Flex user but would like to participate in other paid user research conducted by Adobe, please register at http://www.adobe.com/survey.

And thanks! We couldn't do it without our fantastic and opinionated customers!

Posted by mchotin at 09:38 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 11, 2007

New Adobe AIR App: MediaWiki Uploader

As part of the Flex 3 launch I needed to upload about 70 images for the feature introductions. Those of you who use MediaWiki (the wiki system on Labs) may know that it doesn't support uploading multiple files at once. Each upload to the Labs wiki requires choosing the image via the file chooser and checking a box saying that you own copyright. Rather than do this work myself I decided to see if I still remembered how to code and wrote up a quick app using Adobe AIR so that I could upload lots of images at once. I'm making the app available to you all under the MIT license to do with what you please.

Download the AIR (requires Adobe AIR Beta 1)
Download the source (in theory you should be able to import this as a project into Flex Builder)

This app was interesting to build as it had a few interesting challenges.

1. Don't you need to be logged in to upload?

Yes! And since this is an AIR application it wasn't sharing my session with Firefox. So I wrote a login service (HTTPService) to execute the login for me (against my staging server). Easy enough except that it was difficult to tell when things were going wrong due to not wanting to add lots of debugging code to the app. So I used my trusty network sniffer (I used the one that comes with JRun but lots of folks use Wireshark or Charles) to figure out where I was going wrong and got the login working. One thing I noticed was that the response on a successful login (and also upload) to my testing wiki was a 302 redirection which the Player did not follow. However it treated the call as a success, and since I wasn't going for solid code I let it be.

2. How do you go about uploading the image?

I went to the upload page and looked at the source to figure out the parameters that were needed. Believe it or not, this is my first Flex app where I've done file uploading. Fortunately the docs for FileReference.upload were pretty easy to understand. I was able to see most of the variables that I needed to set by looking at the form items and filled in the URLVariables to be sent along with the upload request. I created a DataGrid where you can edit the display name, but I didn't actually want to change the names so I didn't even test to see if my changes would have worked.

So now I could upload multiple images to my staging server (I actually did two different staging servers because I didn't want to corrupt the real staging server). This allowed me to shake out a minor difference between the two so now my system could upload to both. But then I faced my final challenge...

3. The Labs wiki doesn't use MediaWiki's account management, it uses adobe.com's!

Oops! I thought I might have just wasted a few hours of coding since I wouldn't be able to do my real uploads with my fancy new tool. Then I had a thought...the http session information and cookies are shared between HTML and Flash in AIR. All I need to do is use an HTML control, navigate to the wiki and sign in there, then I don't need to use my custom login stuff for this particular wiki. So I created a new Window, put an HTML control in there (nice job Gordon!), threw in a TextInput so I could quickly change the location, and away we went. Final complication though is that login on adobe.com is through https but all of the other urls were http. The HTML control didn't seem to like moving back and forth. So I simply used the TextInput to change to some urls that I knew would work, and despite the fact that sometimes the redirections didn't work, when I then went to the Labs page I could see I was logged in. Tried to upload a file, and voila!

My new HTML window gave me an extra bonus, I could now check the wiki's recently added images special page to ensure that everything was getting up there OK.

Note that this was really written as a utility for me, so I made no usability fixes. The wiki url must basically be the root of the wiki with no trailing slash: e.g., http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php. I don't do any corrections if the url is invalid. And there is no error handling whatsoever. If someone was interested in making it more robust I'd be happy to link to your verision (or repost it).

Posted by mchotin at 09:00 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 01, 2007

Flex Early Evaluation Guide Now Available

Have you ever been told to take a day and learn about a new technology and figure out if it's right for your project? Time to start surfing the web and trying to find different resources, right? Well the guys at effectiveUI have written a new O'Reilly Shortcut: Flex Early Evaluation: Assessing Flex and Your Project Needs. It includes a breakdown of what Flex is all about including a high-level summary of its features and a brief example to demonstrate its capabilities.

I assume that most of my readers already have and love Flex :-) But if you need a single document which provides a lot of information to give to colleagues or managers or friends, this shortcut might be perfect!

Posted by mchotin at 09:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Flex 3 Details Coming Soon

Ted's announced that he's going to be sharing details of what's in Flex 3 starting next week. Ted's sneaky. He's going to blog all this cool stuff and everyone's going to love him for it. Then someone's going to ask for a feature that Flex 3 isn't supporting. What's Ted going to do? I bet he'll tell them to complain to me. I hate being the bad guy! Why can't I reveal all the cool stuff and get the Flex love?

Posted by mchotin at 08:51 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 24, 2007

Bi-directional text in Flash Platform

Emmy has provided some more details on what kind of bi-di support you can expect from the Flash Platform in the next major release.

Posted by mchotin at 03:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 16, 2007

360Flex sessions and speakers

The rough session/speaker list is now posted on the 360Flex blog. I'll be available for harassment throughout the conference and we'll have a session where you can ask anything and get answers to some things :-) Time to start registering!

Posted by mchotin at 08:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 11, 2007

New Flex Tree Component

The Flex framework team is hard at work on our latest Tree component.  It took multiple engineers to come up with the latest and greatest, however we were supported by pre-existing work.  Please check it out below and tell us if you'd find it useful.

Glenn Ruehle demonstrates the size of the new Flex Tree component.
Glenn Ruehle shows the size of the new Flex Tree while Alex Harui and Mike Schiff debate its architecture.


The Flex team always reuses as much as possible for its components
The Flex team always re-uses as much as possible when creating new components.

Posted by mchotin at 04:05 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

May 01, 2007

Solaris Player 9 Beta Refresh

Did you know there was a beta going on for the Solaris version of Player 9? Check it out and test your Flex apps.

Posted by mchotin at 09:55 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 24, 2007

New eval API on Exchange

I think the new D.eval library that was just posted on the Exchange will be pretty cool. Check it out and send the author your feedback!

Posted by mchotin at 08:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 19, 2007

360Flex will be great!

I got a briefing last night on some of the plans for 360Flex in August. Unfortunately I won't have as much of the Flex team with me as last time (a certain release will be in full force) but I'm expecting some high quality presentations and a very good time. Start talking to your managers and get yourself registered!

Posted by mchotin at 04:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 16, 2007

Flex Patch for upgraded Flash Player 9

If you get the upgraded Flash Player that went out last week you'll probably want to install a quick patch for Flex and Flex Builder so that you can continue debugging without annoying messages. Instructions are here. This patch is also meant to ensure compatibility with Flash CS3.

Posted by mchotin at 02:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 15, 2007

Tradeoffs of a Product Manager

Mordy Golding is a former Product Manager for Illustrator and has written a nifty post calling out some of the tradeoffs that we all have to make when working on a product used by a diverse group of users. You can imagine how it applies to a product like Flex or Flex Builder where we target developers coming from a variety of backgrounds attempting to build applications for a variety of use-cases. Definitely a worthwhile read.

Posted by mchotin at 04:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2007

Adobe Developer Programs

Jonathan Wall is a great guy and one of the folks in charge of Adobe Developer Relations. He's started a blog and will be sharing news on what's to come from Adobe as far as Developer Programs as well as requesting feedback from the community. This is one of the best channels for getting your suggestions in, so head on over!

Posted by mchotin at 12:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 09, 2007

Scrapblog Hiring

The team over at Scrapblog is hiring. They've gotten good buzz in the community and are building one of the coolest Flex apps I've seen. If you think you've got the skills go talk to them. Plus, working in Miami doesn't sound all that bad :-) More info here.

Posted by mchotin at 02:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 06, 2007

ColdFusion Team on Tour

Even before the release of the highly successful ColdFusion MX 7 two years ago, the ColdFusion team was already hard at work scheming, experimenting, planning, building, creating ... and the result is "Scorpio", the highly anticipated 8th major ColdFusion edition. Building on top of the powerful platform introduced in ColdFusion MX, and the solid feature set of ColdFusion MX 7, "Scorpio" piles on new features and technologies for developers, administrators, technical decision makers, and more. The official "Scorpio" release is scheduled for mid-2007, but you don't have to wait until then to see it for yourself. Ben Forta and several other members of the CF team will be demoing lots of Scorpio throughout an extended user group tour in the spring, where attendees will get to see "Scorpio" in action, as well as gain access to the pre-release beta, and get the chance to win Adobe software.

To check if the Scorpio pre-release tour is coming to an Adobe user group near you, please check the comprehensive listing of events at: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/events/.

Posted by mchotin at 05:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 03, 2007

Flex User Study

Adobe's Learning Resources and Web Teams are conducting interviews of Flex users to understand how people get up to speed in Flex and how we can facilitate that learning, what gaps exist in content or in the access to this content. The interviews last about an hour.

At this time, we are looking for Flex developers with these backgrounds:

PHP/Web developers
Java/Object-oriented back-middle enders
Asp/.net RIA developers

If you are interested in participating in these interviews, please email Laura Smith (lausmith) at adobe.com.

Pass it on!

Posted by mchotin at 10:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 13, 2007

Want to learn nitty-gritty details about the Flash Player and Tamarin?

Rick Reitmaier is an engineer on the Flash Player team (formerly of the Flex team) and gave a talk at Stanford a few months ago about the virtual machine used by Flash Player 9 (AVM2). This is the stuff that we've contributed to the Tamarin project. The first 20 minutes or so are getting the folks in the room up to speed on Adobe/Flex, etc, but he begins getting deeper after that.

Check it out! ETA: (unfortunately this is Windows Media)

Posted by mchotin at 10:41 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack