So, I’m not going to MAX this year… The economy has made a lot of extra spending go away and conferences are no exception to this rule. I do plan on virtually attending the webcasts and keynotes this year, though, so I definitely am staying in the loop.

I’m not putting together a prediction list, but rather a wishlist… Will any of these happen? I dunno, but I do know they would make my life in the Adobe universe better and more productive.

1. AIR on iPhone – It’s unlikely that I am going to be learning Objective C anytime soon. And while I would love to take a stab at creating an app on the iPhone, this is really about the only way to do it. If I could compile an AIR app for the iPhone, this would help bridge that gap.
2. A release date for Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst – Believe it or not, I’ve been using these tools for some time on real work. Flash Builder a bit more, but I have been able to get some nice stuff out of Catalyst from time to time. I’d like a formalized release schedule and a price so I can put it in my budget ASAP and get it on my team’s desktops for real.
3. Some word on what the Omniture buyout means for Flash platform analytics – Is it going to be a LiveCycle product? A Flash Platform SaaS? What? How can I get integrating this into my experiences and RIAs?
4. A bit more concrete info on AIR 2.0’s deeper features – FOTB leaked that C++ and other API integration was coming, but what about Google Earth? Open GL? BYOAPI (Bring your own API)
5. More Hardware acceleration control and/or better threading/CPU support. – Building 1080P+ experiences on Flash sucks. There I said it. I’ve been burned enough over the last couple of years to know this. At The Iona Group we often build large HD resolution kiosks, presentations, installations etc. We prefer using Flash for our rich media development. These two things collide in unpleasant ways more often than they should. In many ways, Director is still more capable at performing in world class fashion at high high resolution. Processing is too. This could be for Flash Player 11, AIR 2.0 or whatever… Just the sooner, the better. Grant Skinner has made pleas to Adobe to improve CPU usage and performance, so maybe that will be enough.

So there you have it… not sure if any of these will happen, but it sure would be grand if they did. What are you putting on your MAX Wishlist?

As mentioned in my previous post, I’m making a list. Or in this case, two. The first list was a celebration of things that happened in 2008 that were perceived by me as being advancements in the Flash world. Well, in the interest of being a true pundit/critic, I have a list of the things that burn me when working in the Flash platform. I’d be interested in hearing what your thoughts are on this list and if you have some things you might want to add.

1. The Flash IDE wasn’t really improved – Now a thing of comic proportions, Flash CS4 Professional has all been but abandoned as a code editor by most professionals I know, respect and follow in Flash platform blog world. Flex Builder, FDT, Flash Develop and many others out there fill the function better. Adobe missed a huge boat by not enhancing this much begrudged part of the IDE. I mean, the autocomplete is dopey, the need or (un)need of import statements is erratic, and on and on. The language has evolved, with AS3 forcing you to write better structured code, but the editor itself is pretty much still a scripting sketchpad. It’s obvious this is an impediment to users learning AS3, as it seems to pop up as a topic on blogs a lot. Case in point (read the comments on Mike Chamber’s post).
2. The Flash Mobile Platform is still pretty much a mess – Now, I might take some heat for this view from some evangelists and others in the mobile trenches, but I don’t see a game changing strategy here. With Blackberry, iPhone and Android all out, all popular and not able to play Flash content yet (I hear Android is coming soon, though), it sure seems a bit disjointed to me. Some phones may use openscreen Flash players eventually, some Flash Lite, some Flash. It’s a bit of a mess, IMHO. Furthermore, when I visit Adobe’s Flash Platform page, I see no mention of Flash for Mobile, you have to dig a bit. I just think we need a concerted effort to put Flash mobile devevlopment front and center on Devnet, and make Flash part of mobile vendors lexicon in their sales pitches, i.e. “Did you know you can play Flash games and watch Youtube videos on this Phone because it has Flash?”, etc.
3. No standard animation syntax across Adobe products – Flash, Flex, After Effects, Spry Framework, Director, heck, even Photoshop are capable of producing animation. All use their own syntax. Some of it is due to mergers and tech acquisitions, some is just due to lack of a “motion czar” at Adobe. Sounds ludicrous, I know, but why should a CS4 user need to know so many syntaxes to make things dance around or produce transitions? Moses supposes propsed this over a year ago, and no movement has taken place on this AFAIK. Dont’ think its a big deal? Look at this diagram. Then look at this one. Which world do you want to work in?
4. Flash Player 9 never got it’s garbage collection issues patched – It’s a bit disconcerting that such a huge bug never got patched as a revision level thing and they waited to completely update the player to fix it. I’ve written about this in the past, and Grant Skinner has a great series of posts about it on his blog, but really when it comes down to it, the poor audio handling in Flash player 9 (also a well documented bug) and lack of a true unload and cleanup mechanism among other things illustrate to me that maybe a 12-18 month revision cycle is just madness. I’m sure it’s half marketing, “Well, Silverlight just bumped their number, so we have to do it for our player, too”, but that doesn’t make it right. Patch and update the software you have, save the revision number changes for big big revelations and allow your devs to sleep at night in stead of updating their code.
5. Ever Diverging APIs – I’ve mentioned this issue on this blog before as well… With a “platform”, it’s apparent that some features that Flash IDE can produce aren’t readily apparent in Flex and vice-versa. Add on top of that the AIR APIs and you start to get a LiveDoc soup. What can one do that the other can’t? What are the dependencies? Etc, etc. Flex’s Framework has some hot stuff in it, and, if you chance upon the docs from a Google search trying to do something in Flash, it may not be clear until you’ve read practically the entire class description and gotten your developer hopes dashed on the glacially slow LiveDocs frame based UI website.
6. Adobe still really doesn’t show the Mac much love at all. – Seriously. Not going to spend much time on this here, but Adobe products just run better on Windows. This pains me. I hate Windows and simply will not switch. Please
7. Death of Flash Paper with no successor in sight – This is a perplexing move by Adobe in my view. FlashPaper had it’s flaws, but it was a capable tech for replicating Acrobat Reader in a light and compact fashion. No more. End-of-Lifed this year and told not to let the door hit it’s backside bits on the way out, it left my team hanging, pretty much immediately after launch on a project. No IE7 support. Nothing. Not even a proposed replacement or simple way to write PDFs straight from the Flash player. Seems like it was killed on some sort of sacrificial altar of Adobe/Macromedia merger-y black magic. “One shall die to make the other stronger” crud like that. I’m sure I may be exaggerating, but c’mon… Where I am supposed to go after this? Print2Flash, AlivePDF, etc are all promising, but why no Adobe solution in CS4/Flash Player 10? The Flash API’s PrintJob class blows for much more than most simple jobs… Help us!
8. CS4 Installer not much better than CS3 installer – John Nack’s blog has been the hotspot of talk from the installer front, with several posts commenters lambasting the team and berating the children of the installer team’s developers. I won’t go that far, but wow. Just please please please make CS5’s better. Shock and awe us with its simplicity. Maybe even *gasp* use the OSes’ native installers (If Final Cut Studio can install simply on OSX and MS Office can do the same on Windows, Adobe can figure it out)! If nothing can be done here though, at least make Adobe Updater go away and stop making us quite all our apps while your yipping dog fails yet again.
9. SEO enhancements for Flash, but with no real documentation – Oh, how I wanted this to work out. This summer, it was announced that Adobe and Google would be working together to improve the searchability of Flex and Flash content. Ryan Stewart even ran a contest on it. Only real downside… no actual documentation. Or technotes. Or tutorials. Or, you get the idea. Just a simple little FAQ. C’mon! Peter Elst has a little more info on this at his blog.
10. Global Pricing for Adobe Products unfair as ever – The world definitely doesn’t seem flat when it comes to selling downloadable software packages. Take a look at this comparison of prices for CS4 across the world. Ouch. John Dowdell has a bit on this at his blog entitled CS4 painpoints, so it’s obviously a known issue there, but not sure what’s going on in this realm right now. I do know that it has to hurt to upgrade when the software costs twice as much if you live outside of the US. May as well fly to buy it, or just skip the revision and save the dough in this downtrodden global economy. I have a feeling alot of people may be doing just that.

So, there you go. My list of the ‘08 disappointments in the Flash platform. Any things I missed in your opinion… I’m interested in hearing from other designers and devs out there on this one.

Dan Florio, aka PolyGeek, dropped by my post on the Ten Website Design Tools I Can’t Live Without and dropped a good bomb on me in my comments. He recommended I try pixDif. pixDif is a tool he created to aid in rapid prototyping of website designs. It’s super cool! I highly recommend you download and try it out.

The description from his site:

I’ve created an AIR application to help developers and designers measure pixel distances on their screens. You tell if you need pixDIF if you answer yes to any of these questions:

1. Do you ever find that you need to measure the pixel distance/size of something when you’re not in Photoshop? Or, put another way: do you wish you could take the guides in Photoshop with you to the computer desktop?
2. Do you ever want to know what a graphical asset will look like in the context of a website or application. For instance, do you wish you could take an image and move it around over your website to see what it would like like in various places before you start writing the code to place it there?
3. Do you ever have a website or application design that you need to break up into pieces and build into a working site/app? And then as you write the code you need to see how close to the design you are?

If any of those answers are “yes” then jump over to the pixDIF page and check out the features and overview video tutorial.

Dan is a highly talented designer/developer and you really should check out his site.

About a year ago The Iona Group created a presentation viewer tool for the International Mission Board. I wrote a post on the tool and explained some of the key features in it. We were contacted by the client several months after the launch and asked to make some UI updates and some feature additions to the tool. We gladly obliged as the client was great to work with, the work was rewarding and the application is just really really cool. In it’s simplicity, it excels at providing a seamless well put together presentation and has some nice social/sharing features that allow the end users to really stretch the tool.the new codebase is live. Check it out here: http://commissionstories.org/

We owe alot of the success of the tool and the revision process to Flex. Honestly, the maintenance and the agile changes required to make it work would have been unnmanageable if developed without the Flex framework. We also use Degrafa in the app, too, so it really does have some nice things running under the hood, too.

It handles pictures, video, audio, SWFs, and the now defunct Flash Paper. It does Ken Burns effects, smooth dissolves and other types of transitions, too. It can go fullscreen, be embbedded in other peoples siites via the share code and can even be downloaded as an EXE or and Adobe Air app. All in all, a very cool ap and one we are proud to be part of.

At The Iona Group we have hundreds, probably thousands of videos that we have shot or somehow acquired from client asset libraries, etc. These videos are stored and logged in a pretty big legacy database (Don’t laugh, I think it’s Access). We also have some clients where stored their video assets in a big fat digital asset management system, (DAM) (One in Cumulus, the others proprietary, I believe). These tools make it easier to access the vast array of clips, tapes, etc. we have amassed over the years. Often though, all we have in the record or DAM is one lonely thumbnail image, some timecode info, the log notes about content, acquisition information (date, location, shooter, etc) and maybe, if we are lucky, a short preview clip. This makes selecting stuff for B-Roll or determining what archival footage might be needed a bit tough. Certainly time consuming, too. (more…)

I’ve just added my second application to the Adobe AIR Marketplace. You can check it out and download it here. For those that may have missed it, you can learn more about SWFShot in this post. Previously, I added my LOLCat Viewer application to the exchange. You can learn more about that app in my post here. You can download that here from the Adobe AIR Marketplace. That silly LOLCat application now has over 500 downloads, so I’m pretty happy that I put it on the exchange. I doubt it would have gotten that many people trying it out if it were on on my blog alone. That’s one of the main benefits of using that Exchange to get your stuff out there. It’s a great way to get some exposure for your extensions and applications past your blog. Many mainstream designers and developers that may not necessarily chance upon your application via your blog can see it there. So, the added visibility is just great! I highly recommend submitting your app there.

On top of that… Adobe is currently cosponsoring application signing certificates for developers that submit unsigned AIR apps to the marketplace. This means you can get one for free! These certificates from Thawte are worth about $300 if you wanted to buy one. If you have an app that is done or nearly done, my advice would be to finish it and submit it soon! The process of submitting to the exchange and¬† getting the certificate is pretty painless, and after that you get a nice cert that you can use to sign your app and get rid of those red X warnings on the install screens of your apps. A good way to put you users at ease when installing your shiny new apps. I’m pretty sure this is a limited time offer, so you better get compilin’!

I sometimes need big images out of my flash files. By big, I mean larger than the 2880×2880 maximum size allowed by the Flash player. It just so happens that Flex has a way around it, and so SWFShot was born. Read on to learn more and download it. (more…)

In the Chicago area? Interested in talking RIAs? Sounds like this might be up your alley. If you’re registering for the event, too, let me know. I’d like to get an idea of the level of interest for events and topics like this in the Midwest. If you are in Central Illinois (Peoria, Bloomington, Champaign) and attending, I especially would like to hear from you!

Followup to my post yesterday… I’m started wholeheartedly on my snapshot tool, tentatively called “SWFShot”. It’s to be an AIR app that allows the user to create high resolution output images of loaded Flash content from the users hard drive. I hope to have a functional prototype in the next few days. Time is tight these days, but I will continue to post my progress… It’s currently in a tab navigator and skinned with a slightly modified template from Scalenine. Here are some screenshots of the panel… Keep in mind the final app will be a full screen window less app, with the content loading in the background of the panel. Should be interesting anyway. If you have thoughts or suggestions… fire away, I’m all ears. Read on for screenshots and the app’s “read me” content.. (more…)

I don’t know if I really have a good post here, just want to know why a very useful, very powerful class that is in the Flex framework isn’t in Flash’s AS3 classes. For those of you who are Flash users but not Flex developers, you may not really know about this class (good explanation here, at Doug McCune’s blog.), but it acts as a shortcut/helper class to assist you when creating snapshots out of display objects or anything that implements IBitmapDrawable. It’s pretty nice.

One thing that this class does that is especially cool is let you get around the 2880×2880 pixel limit imposed on all Flash display objects, including our good friends Bitmap and BitmapData. I have been working around trying to get higher res images out of some of my comps lately and I have all but given up using Flash for it. Even when you run Flash through as an AIR app, and use sneaky tricks like employing AS3Corelib (which is a great selection of classes, I might add) to encode a container sprite as JPG or PNG and output them as files to your local machine you are still limited to the 2880 ceiling. Now, I have seen explanations on why the limit exists, and yes, it makes sense for web apps, but if you are already creating a signed or even an unsigned app for that matter that has to run as administrator on a machine, I see no reason why the 2880 ceiling exists. With monitors gaining pixels with every generation, I’m sure this will change someday, but hey… I’m impatient. No really, I am… ask my wife.

So then I was doing something like this linked example to get around it. You can use the numbers on your keyboard to move the canvas around. “C” toggles mouse visibility, “1″ moves the sprite back to it’s origin point, “2″ slides everything left by a bunch of pixels (I have a MacBook Pro, so it’s slightly less than 1440), “3″ moves everything to the right by the same amount, “4″ moves everything down by 600, “5″ moves up by 600… you see where I am going with this? I move the canvas, take the screenshot and then stitch them together in Photoshop. This allows me to get a pretty big canvas. But, it’s a pain. To get a 10k x 10k image (something that will give you a nice 2-3 foot size print) takes dozens of images. So I thought back to some stuff I have been playing with in Flex (more on that in an upcoming post) and want to do the same here. But that requires the ImageSnapshot class which is missing from Flash CS3… hmm. How vexing.

So, now, I’m currently planning on making a Flex developed app that will be deployed as AIR that will take an input SWF, allow you to set your dimensions and DPI and then use the imageSnapshot class to get a big fat uncompressed image out of it. ImageSnapshot supports up to 8192×8192 images of around 256meg. Has anyone seen an app like this around already? I certainly don’t like duplicating efforts as free time is at a premium. Thoughts?

Related to this post… I’m getting curiouser and curiouser as to why AIR doesn’t have a PDF encoder (especially since blazePDF is dead and is only AS2). I know I could find some uses for it. Postscript charts and elements from Flex or Flash anyone? Sounds nice. Especially with all the great work being done over at Degrafa, and the rumblings of the mx:Graphics stuff to come in Flex 4.