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Are Coders Nice?

By Amy Blankenship
November 22, 2009

A few months ago, the team my husband works on was hiring a new developer, and I overheard my husband talking to a friend he was considering recommending for the position. I surprised myself by my gut reaction which was,...

Work Flow Optimizations for Short Development Cycle Team

By Tom Barker
November 22, 2009

One of the responsibilities of being a technical manager is to optimize work flows and create self sustaining systems for the teams that you manage. One of my teams operates on an extremely short development cycle. They begin coding in...

Validation in Flex with Hamcrest-AS3

By Joel Hooks
November 20, 2009

Hamcrest? No, it isn't a fancy sandwich topping. Hamcrest is a framework for creating matchers, allowing matching rules to be defined declaratively (from Wikipedia). Hamcrest has been used by many popular unit testing frameworks including JUnit and FlexUnit 4. Hamcrest-AS3...

Google Closure: a new way of developing in JavaScript

By Davide Zanotti
November 19, 2009

Preface Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an...

Using Google Analytics With AJAX

By John Barlow
November 19, 2009

A couple months ago I wrote an article on how to use Dojo to create a rich UI for websites. One of the key points of the article was how to support all users -- those with JavaScript enabled and those without. The purpose of this was to enable basic browsers like search engine spiders to go through your site without JavaScript, while enabling the rich interface for your regular users.

Using UDP socket connections for low-latency and loss-tolerant scenarios in AIR 2 (Part 3)

By Ian McLean
November 19, 2009

Now that we have a client built that will send and receive packets we need a server for it to communicate with. Lets walk through a quick implementation of a basic Java UDP socket server. Some familiarity with Java is...

Using UDP socket connections for low-latency and loss-tolerant scenarios in AIR 2 (Part 2)

By Ian McLean
November 17, 2009

So now that we understand the usage of UDP lets jump right into building a basic UDP client and server. We'll use the DatagramSocket class to send packets to a specific port at a specific address. We'll also bind our...

Microsoft DRM part 3

By Tom Barker
November 17, 2009

Next in my series describing my implementation of Microsoft DRM I will detail how I refined the work flow to a single process. This process is portable, can be run on any machine, so it negates the need to...

Using UDP socket connections for low-latency and loss-tolerant scenarios in AIR 2 (Part 1)

By Ian McLean
November 17, 2009

Flash player has supported socket connections for some time but has lacked UDP specific support. Although there was the recent addition of RTMFP (a protocol utilizing UDP to enable low latency data transfer and P2P connections) it doesn't provide direct...

Flex 101: Customize Scrollbars

By Andrew Trice
November 17, 2009

Customizing scrollbars in Flex is something that I see requested all the time, and it's actually really easy to do. I see requests for things like getting rid of the buttons, or making the scroll bar less intrusive to the UI. In this post, we'll walk through some simple css style changes to customize scrollbar appearance.

URI Manager Utility

By Jesse Freeman
November 16, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - URI Manager Utility. In the past I have talked about using RegEx to create a utility for replacing tokens in a string. My uri manager utility follows the same concept but helps you organize all of your URIs in a external file. Not only that but when you request them when, you can customize their values on the fly. Whether you are keeping track of 1 or 100+ URIs this simple utility will help make your life way easier.</p

Flex Template Components Rock

By Amy Blankenship
November 15, 2009

Flex comes with a full spectrum of components, but once in a while you get hit with a request to do something that is difficult to shoehorn into what already exists, but seems even more difficult to do as...

How to run a creative business

By RJ Owen
November 13, 2009

Since moving into a quasi-management role at my current employer, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to continue fostering creativity and innovation while growing. It's a tough challenge - one that many companies get wrong and one that many people suffer because of. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings summarizes the situation and Netflix's response in this amazing slide deck. I consider it a must read for anyone who's involved in running a growing business. The Netflix approach is that sort of sheer genius that makes things so clear, concise, obvious, and simple that it seems easy, and you wonder why everyone isn't doing this. Hint: nothing valuable is ever easy.

RIA Radio Episode 2 - Jonnie Hallman

By Garth Braithwaite
November 12, 2009

Jonnie Hallman (Destroy Today) joins us to talk about his new position at Adobe on the XDCE team and his involvement with the MAX Twitter app. We also were able to hear the back story to DestroyFlickr and DestroyTwitter, and some news about upcoming features.

"Eager Loading" in Actionscript 3

By Amy Blankenship
November 11, 2009

Last week, I wrote about the Lazy Loading design pattern. There's not much written about its opposite, Eager Loading, in ActionScript 3. The reason for this is simple–true eager loading can't be done in AS3 itself, it has to be...

QOW: What would you build?

By Rich Tretola
November 10, 2009

Question of the week: Time to dream a little. If you had an unlimited budget and unlimited resources what application would you build and why would you build it? Please leave comments....

Why the Adobe/RIM announcement is important

By RJ Owen
November 9, 2009

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen was at RIM's annual BlackBerry developer convention today with some exciting news about the ways that Adobe and RIM are working together to bring great experiences to the BlackBerry. In this entry we'll discuss what the announcement contained and why it's important to you.

5 Tips For Flash Unit Testing

By Jesse Freeman
November 9, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward. Lets quickly talk about what TDD is:

RIA Radio MAX Interviews - Chuck Freedman, Mike Chambers, Craig Goodman, and Greg Wilson

By Garth Braithwaite
November 6, 2009

At Adobe MAX, the RIA Radio crew sat down with Chuck Freedman, Mike Chambers, Craig Goodman, and Greg Wilson.

Flex 101: Creating an Interactive Chart

By Andrew Trice
November 6, 2009

In this post, we will walk through the steps to create an interactive chart with a Google-Finance-esque interaction.

Barcode Scanner Support for Flex

By Jan Poehland
November 5, 2009

I recently came across an interesting problem when we had to access barcode scanners from Flex applications. The scanners came in different models but all were connected to the computer via serial port or USB (Serial2USB). Now, how do you...

jQuery and AIR - Moving from web page to application (3)

By Raymond Camden
November 5, 2009

The third part of my series on creating a jQuery AIR game - Hangman. In this entry I discuss some architecture changes I made to the JavaScript and some new database support.

5 Tips For Documenting Code

By Jesse Freeman
November 2, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - 5 Tips for Documenting Code. Documenting code is not high on many people's lists of things todo. Most of the time it is boring, repetitive, and time consuming. If you want to get better at documenting your own code then this is the post for you. I have 5 simple rules to follow while coding to make the process easier.

Advantages of Lazy Loading

By Amy Blankenship
October 30, 2009

Wikipedia defines Lazy Loading as "a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed." Typically, we do this to make an RIA application more responsive–since we're not...

Unity 3D is Now Free

By Andrew Trice
October 30, 2009

I read today that a new version of Unity, a 3D Platform for the web, was released yesterday. It is full of new features, but most importantly, it is now free.

Microsoft DRM part 2

By Tom Barker
October 28, 2009

In my previous article I talked about setting up an installation of Microsoft DRM, and some of the pitfalls encountered with the base set up. In this article I will detail how I refined that process. As I described previously,...

The Bluffer's Guide to JavaFX, part 2

By Simon Morris
October 28, 2009

Text plays a big part in user interfaces, yet string manipulation is remarkably primitive in popular programming languages. JavaFX Script, the new DSL for the JavaFX platform, has a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to playing with text.

Interfaces and Dynamic Class Instantiation

By Amy Blankenship
October 27, 2009

I always enjoy Jesse Freeman's Flash Art of War column, and this week's, "Dynamically Creating(/Instantiating) Classes from XML," was especially intriguing. The thing that stuck out to me about that post is that if you are creating objects dymanically, you...

The Kano Model and the Importance of User Experience

By RJ Owen
October 27, 2009

“Quality Function Deployment,” or “QFD,” is a way of modeling business processes for good customer experiences. Sound like a lot of business jargon? Maybe it is, but it’s also very similar to something we in the interactive space are reinventing and rediscovering as “User Experience Design.” QFD was developed in the ’70’s and ’80s and continues to be refined today. In this entry we'll focus on requirements, and how QFD justifies the role of UX professionals in finding ways to wow users.

Microsoft DRM part 1

By Tom Barker
October 26, 2009

When I worked at Music Choice - almost five years ago - one of my responsibilities was to architect our implementation of Microsoft DRM. In fact my very first day with the company my boss, Stu who was and still...

Create cleaner ActionScript with conditional compiling

By Tyler Larson
October 26, 2009

A large part of any ActionScript project is code dedicated to testing and debugging. These parts of your application may be needed while in development, but usually not needed within a production environment. You might think that making a...

RIA Radio Episode 1 - Mike Downey

By Garth Braithwaite
October 23, 2009

Mike Downey joins us to discuss the competition between Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. Prior to working for Microsoft as a Silverlight Evangelist he worked for Adobe for 9 years with the Flash Platform. Joining us on the panel...

RIA Radio MAX Interviews - Mark Anders, Ed Sullivan, Jesse Freeman, and Julie Campagna

By Garth Braithwaite
October 23, 2009

At Adobe MAX, we sat down with Mark Anders, Ed Sullivan, Jesse Freeman, and Julie Campagna.

Creating a comboBox in Flash Catalyst Beta 2

By Chris Griffith
October 23, 2009

The latest release of Flash Catalyst Beta 2 has brought us a lot closer to having a shipping application. We now have the ability to set a host of properties for each object, easier access to skin the wireframe components, and support for video and 3D rotation. Unfortunately, we do not have a full component set available to us. The reason behind not having all the components in Flash Catalyst is due to the different component architecture used in the Flex 4 framework (Spark) versus the Halo components used in the Flex 3 framework. Until a component has been rewritten in the Spark framework, Flash Catalyst cannot use it. The most notable absence is the comboBox. In this article I will show you a simple method to recreate one by creating a custom component. It is not perfect, but it just might be able to tide you over until we have an official component from Adobe.

The importance of ubiquity

By Scott Barnes
October 23, 2009

I've spent a few years studying the behavioral pattern associated with ubiquity, and I'm surprised at what I've learned along the way. Here right now, I'm going to unload my findings, and it's up to you to keep an open...

Adobe WorkflowLab for Planning RIA Projects

By Andrew Trice
October 23, 2009

I just happened to browse over to Adobe Labs, and stumbled across WorflowLab, a workflow planning and sharing tool for building applications. I found it interesting, and decided to share it here. Read on for more detail.

A Treatise on Social Networks

By Tom Barker
October 19, 2009

Maybe I'm just an aging curmudgeon, or a classic DiSC C-type personality but I'm not a fan of social networks. I've tried to get into them, I gave them a chance. Years ago I tried MySpace and Xanga and just...

Growing the RIA Community

By Amy Blankenship
October 19, 2009

I didn't get a chance to go to MAX this year, unfortunately. But since my husband did make it, and he is both a Community Expert and a User Group Manager, you can probably imagine that I got an earful...

The Aftermath of Adobe MAX 2009

By Yakov Fain
October 19, 2009

This was my second MAX and, let me tell you, I enjoyed it a lot more than the last year’s one. This was an intriguing event with lots of interesting news, and promises of new releases. Being in Los Angeles...

Dynamically Creating Classes From XML

By Jesse Freeman
October 18, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Dynamically Creating Classes From XML.

jQuery FTW (October 17)

By Raymond Camden
October 17, 2009

Yet another entry in my jQuery FTW series, highlighting interesting and cool jQuery-related links.

MAX 2009 Session Videos: Flex Frameworks, AR, & Best RIAs

By Rich Tretola
October 16, 2009

InsideRIA had three sessions at Adobe MAX this year: The Battle of the Flex Frameworks Returns, with Greg Owen; Augmented Reality within the Flash Player, with Jesse Freeman; and InsideRIA's Secrets of the Best Rich Internet Apps of 2009 (So...

Could Adobe potentially harm the iPhone AppStore

By Scott Barnes
October 15, 2009

Adobe have spent a lot of cycles / years nudging Apple that Flash should be on the iPhone. Apple have firmly just said no, and despite the answer, Adobe keep expecting them to cave due to public demand. The problem with this logic is that Apple wont' give in.

Photoshop For Developers

By Jesse Freeman
October 14, 2009

Multi-touch and the Flash Platform

By Andrew Trice
October 14, 2009

One of the big announcements at MAX this year was Flash on devices. As the capabilities of devices change, so do the capabilities of the platforms we use to build our applications. One of the latest trends is Multi-touch. In this post, I'll try to shed some light on the upcoming multitouch capabilities in AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1.