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Metadata and the Flash Platform

By Russ Ferguson
November 23, 2009

Readers of this site are familiar with the concept of metadata. Meta tags in websites for example, describe the site and the individual pages within. Files can also have meta data, this can be anything from where in the world that picture was taken and that kind of camera, to the track number of the mp3 your listening to.

Open for Business - Designing Social Interfaces

By Christian Crumlish
November 19, 2009

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

Using Flash Remoting for Authentication to your AFCS/Facebook AIR Application

By Russ Ferguson
November 3, 2009

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggest you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

Decorator Design Pattern

By Sean Moore
October 21, 2009

The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Decorator design pattern. The Decorator pattern is used to attach additional responsibilities to an object at run time dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing to extend the functionality of classes in a hierarchical relationship. The Decorator design pattern utilizes an important OOP concept known as the open closed principal. This means that classes are open to extension but closed for modification. The Decorator pattern also uses the concept of composition, another very powerful OOP concept.

Flash to iPhone

By Veronique Brossier
October 15, 2009

Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications, wanted to, once again, be an active participant. As part of the Open Screen Project, it collaborated with multiple partners and will soon release Flash Player 10.1 to run on a large selection of mobile devices' browser. You can watch the related announcement made at the MAX 2009 keynote or read the article on Adobe Labs.

AIR 2 Enhancements Complete Overview

By Elad Elrom
October 7, 2009

Adobe just released public information about AIR 2.0 and added new capabilities that better tie with the operation systems which gives your application more control while increasing performance. The new version will be deployed on Flash player 10 using Flex...

Preparing for Multi-touch in Flash - A Primer

By Kevin Suttle
October 6, 2009

WOW! Can you believe it?! Adobe MAX Day 1 is complete, and we have seen a ton of new and exciting announcements. It's hard to think we have more to go. Being a die-hard Flash developer, you can guess which...

Flash Catalyst Beta 2: New Features

By Chris Griffith
October 5, 2009

With the release of the Flash Catalyst Beta 2, the public gets its next look at Adobe’s rapid prototyping tool. The application has continued to mature since the last release. Here is a brief rundown of some of the features...

Welcome To The Dojo

By John Barlow
September 28, 2009

Welcome To The Dojo. That is how a friend of mine introduced me to this Javascript Framework. "The Dojo? Great, now he's going to act all mystic like and not directly answer any of my questions." I thought to myself. Turns out, he was talking about a framework that is truly awesome. I'll admit, the documentation is a bit to dig through, but hopefully my experience and previous digging will be of use to you. Don't worry, the only things being thrown around in this "Dojo" are Javascript and web programming ideas you may or may not have seen before.

A Flex Developer's Guide to User Experience Work Flows and Best Practices

By Tim Todish
September 13, 2009

UX is more than a buzz-word. It actually matters and is easier said that done. In this article we'll review some best practices you can use in your real-world apps.

50 Most Usable RIAs

By Theresa Neil
September 2, 2009

We applied two simple criteria to identify the 50 most usable RIAs: Number 1: Does it adhere to the 10 basic usability principles? Number 2: Is it really rich? Developing a product with Ajax, Flex, or Silverlight doesn't inherently make it rich. A usable RIA will embody these six principles: Make it Direct, Keep it Lightweight, Stay in the Page, Provide an Invitation, Use Transitions, React Immediately.

Flex + Force.com: A Powerful Combination for Building Great, Data-Driven Web Applications

By Michael Epstein
August 24, 2009

Flex and Force.com are a powerful combination for building data-driven web applications. As a faithful reader of InsideRIA, you’re probably already aware of Flex and its leading role in the evolution of rich Internet applications, but you may be less familiar with the Force.com platform. It is, in short, the same platform that underlies the well-known salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) and salesforce automation (SFA) software. These applications "run in the cloud," hosted on servers which are secured and maintained by salesforce.com, and accessed via the web on personal computers and mobile devices.

Facebook App Case Study: Additional elements and gotchas

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 14, 2009

Welcome back to the series and the concluding article of the exciting facebook series. So far we worked hard to implement features like the front end, administration, loading of YouTube videos etc. In the last article the application came finally to life. We implemented a database that contains 14 levels for the game.

Designer-developer workflow enhancements with Flash Catalyst

By Elad Elrom
August 14, 2009

Designer-developer workflow (D-D workflow) in conjunction with Rich Internet Applications (RIA) has become one of the most talked about buzzword in the Flash community in the last few years. It created a lot of debate and uncertainty on how designers and developers were going to work together. Now that Adobe Catalyst is public (since the release at the Adobe Max conference last year), and that we have had a chance to play around with the tool, I believe it’s time to open a discussion on how the direction the D-D workflow should be heading based on my experience. In this article I will talk about how Flash Catalyst (FC) should be used to allow designers and developers to work together.

Facebook App Case Study: Front-end Module

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 5, 2009

Welcome back to our exciting series. In the last article, we discussed about the administrative part of the application, where we implemented a background activity to allow every application user to upload their own videos and add mistakes. This time we will work on the front end that will be visible to everyone by default and where the main game play will take place. Before we start with the development, there are important things that need to be considered. First of all, there will be 14 levels to play, 14 levels means 14 video clips, 14 movie snippets.

Facebook App Case Study: Administration module

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 3, 2009

Last time we talked about the way how to work with YouTube videos and how to implement those into our app. We worked hard to implement typical features that can be found on most video sites like play, pause, seek etc. We even have the feature to seek through the video using the Seek Bar that we built from scratch. As we already know, there is one external library used in our application that allows us to load videos into the swf and manipulate the video using ActionScript 3.0. This is a huge advantage since the official YouTube library is written in AS2 and it does not fit our project requirements. Using the library, we were able to create video controls using pure ActionScript 3.0.

Getting started with Adobe Stratus

0 July 28, 2009

Peer to Peer (P2P) applications have been around for quite some time now. Adobe Stratus, a recently released service from Adobe in combination with Flash Player 10 provides developers all there is needed to create P2P applications today. In this article, we will cover the following

Facebook App Case Study: Integrating YouTube Videos

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 22, 2009

Welcome back to our series. In the previous article, we discussed the elements that are the necessary building blocks of the application MovieExpert (http://apps.facebook.com/movieexpert/). We created the main swf, we created the invite screen, we worked hard to make the invite screen actually work on our iFrame. Now that we have all those details done, we can move on and concentrate entirely on the application in the swf file. We know that the invite screen on facebook appears only when the use installs the application, the next time he logs in, he will be redirected directly to http://apps.facebook.com/movieexpert/.

FLARToolkit and FLARManager

By Eric Socolofsky
July 21, 2009

FLARManager is a lightweight framework that makes building FLARToolkit augmented reality applications easier. When I first came across FLARToolkit, I was simultaneously excited and stymied -- there seemed to be so much potential, but it was difficult to use and even harder to understand. Augmented reality is still a long way from maturity, and leveraging FLARToolkit on the ubiquity of Flash Player provides a great opportunity for further exploring its possibilities. FLARManager aims to provide quicker entry to the technology, to allow a focus on new forms of interaction via marker detection and augmented reality.

Facebook App Case Study: Preparing the Elements

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 8, 2009

Welcome back! Finally we will work on a real world application that will go live. The application that we will be creating will be named “Movie Expert”. One reason why I chose it is because I am an avid Movie fan and I will have lots of motivation to work on it in detail. The other reason is because it is really a sample that has the potential to utilize the facebook actionscript 3 library the proper way.

Send Gifts Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 8, 2009

Sending gifts and items are one of the favorite actions among the millions of facebook users. Friends send items to friends, "buy" gifts, "sell" virtual items etc. Honestly I am not engaged in this activity a lot on facebook, but the number of people willing to send virtual gifts, buy virtual goods is shockingly high! So this article might be underestimated on the first sight, but because I am aware of the trend of sending and receiving gifts, it is worth writing a complete article that covers the trend in actionscript. The number of possible implementations for this component is really countless and in this article we will be able to show only few of them.

Search Friends Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 6, 2009

Welcome back to the series. In the previous articles we discussed topics like publishing of news, sending notifications to specific friends etc. The articles covered topics that are not only bound to the user interface in the facebook application development. This time, we are going to play around with the already existing (but complex) MultiFriend component. The component from the article 11 was quite good, but it really had the potential to be a kick ass component for facebook. There were things I wanted to implement, but was not able to because the whole article covered the basic construction of the component.

Building a 3D album with FIVe3D and TweenLite

By The Tech Labs
July 3, 2009

In this tutorial I will show you how to build a simple 3D photo album in AS3. We will build an application similar to this one. I will use two AS3 libraries: FIVe3D and TweenLite, both open source. Five3D is a lightweight 3D library written by Mathieu Badimon. TweenLite is one of the many libraries available for script based animation in AS3. It was created by Jack Doyle from Greensock. It's principal characteristic is that it's small (hence it's name) and simple to use. FIVe3D and TweenLite work very well together!

Axiis - An Introduction and Tutorial

By Tom Gonzalez
July 3, 2009

This purpose of this article is to introduce developers and data visualization specialists to Axiis, which is an open source data visualization project based on Adobe Flex and Actionscript 3. While you do not have to be an expert in Flex Builder or ActionScript 3, having experience in both will make understanding this tutorial easier. Throughout the article I will assume you are comfortable with the fundamentals of building an application with Flex, and understand some of the primary language constructs embodied within ActionScript 3 and the Flex SDK, primarily MXML and Binding.

Intruction to Adobe Flash Collaborative Services

0 June 30, 2009

AFCS (Adobe Flash Collaboration Service) previously known as 'Cocomo' is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that that allows Flex developers to address a class of applications known as collaborative applications. Collaborative Applications have progressed from a nice cool thing into serious applications. Almost all of us would have participated in an online chat or a web meeting, which allows a group of users to chat, share files, do screen sharing, take polls, ask questions and receive answers, etc. AFCS aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers to bring such collaborative features into their applications.

Utilizing Flash Text Layout Framework using MXML tags

By Elad Elrom
June 25, 2009

Flash Text Layout Framework (TLF) Created by the InDesign team (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/), TLF is Adobe’s new Flash framework for dealing with text. The TLF can be used in Flash CS4, Flex 3.2 and Flex 4 SDK The new framework consists of...

User Info Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
June 17, 2009

Welcome back to the series. This time we are goings to build a really exciting component that will be used to simply display information about the user. Well, you might say why to we need such a component, is there are real purpose behind that? Well, in my opinion, yes. There are a lot of facebook applications out there done in Flash where we see information about the friends etc. During the process of facebook application development, there will always be a need to quickly display information about the specific friend. The information that is contained inside the component could be every bit of information that was entered by the user.

Publish News Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
June 17, 2009

Welcome back to our exciting Facebook ActionScript series. In this article we will discuss one of most important (and most exciting) features of the FB platform, it's the publishing of news. We all know when we log in to facebook, we see plenty of news about our friends. Some were sent by the users, some where sent by applications. In lots of cases, the action is initiated by applications. We see stuff like "FriendX has just completed level 5", "FriendY just left the building" or "John just sent something to his friends", I'm sure you saw a lot of news similar to this on FB. News are an integral part of application because it's one of the ways that the virality of applications is ensured. Suppose we have the fanciest application on FB, what value we have out of this application if we do not publish any news, if we dont make sure the friends are not notified about the action don't in the application? The application simply needs to "talk" and publish news if the application user performed some action. We need to make sure everybody knows that we just topped the high score of the player from Nigeria.

Dojo Tips and Tricks

By Matthew Russell
June 17, 2009

This article provides 10 tips and best practices (in no particular order) for maximizing the benefits that Dojo can bring to your next project. For a more thorough introduction to Dojo, see the article Dojo: The JavaScript Toolkit with Industrial Strength Mojo or pick up a copy of Dojo: The Definitive Guide.

Writing the Pac-Man Game in JavaFX - Part 5

By Haining Henry Zhang
June 12, 2009

In previous articles, we finished writing most of the code of the Pac-Man game. In article 3, we implemented a simple algorithm for the ghosts to catch the Pac-Man. The ghosts randomly decides in which direction they move. They do not chase the Pac-Man even they are very close to him. This makes the game less challenging. In fact, the behavior of the ghosts are the most tricky part of the game. According to Iwatani, the author of the original arcade game, he had designed each ghost with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming too difficult or boring to play. ( More info) However, there is generally no conclusion on what behavior of the ghosts are good for the players.

Notification Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
June 10, 2009

The notifications are one of the most interesting (and important) parts of the facebook area. In order to completely understand the Flash side of it, we need to understand the basics of the facebook notification, what it is and how...

Writing the Pac-Man Game in JavaFX - Part 4

By Haining Henry Zhang
June 2, 2009

In the last article, we developed a preliminary version of the Pac-Man game. Four ghosts are randomly roaming the maze and a Pac-Man character can be controlled by a player. Now, we write some more code for the interaction between ghosts and the Pac-Man: Pac-Man eats a ghost after he gobbles a magic dot. A ghost eats the Pac-Man when it touches him.

Overview of Flex 4 (Gumbo)

By Sean Moore
May 28, 2009

The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the stimulating new features and improvements that will be available in Flex 4, code named “Gumbo.” Exciting changes are being made to the Flex framework that: enable sophisticated and powerful skinning capabilities, increase productivity for developers and harness the myriad of new features available in Flash Player 10. Example source code is included with the article to demonstrate the new skinning features coming in Flex 4.

Flash Catalyst Beta 1 [Top Branch Demo Part 2]

By Garth Braithwaite
May 28, 2009

In the second half of this two part screencast I demonstrate some of the more advanced features of Flash Catalyst Beta 1. Specifically I show how to import images and artwork into an existing project, how to create a data list component, and how to import and export a fxpl library.

Flash Catalyst Beta 1 [Top Branch Demo Part 1]

By Garth Braithwaite
May 28, 2009

In this two part screencast I show some of the neat new features of the Flash Catalyst Beta 1 available on labs.adobe.com. I also demonstrate some good practices for preparing a file in Adobe Illustrator and how to keep yourself organized in Catalyst.

Chapter 4. Meet the Twitter API - Twitter API: Up and Running

By Kevin Makice
May 27, 2009

This excerpt is from Twitter API: Up and Running. This groundbreaking book provides you with the skills and resources you need to build web applications for Twitter. Perfect for new and casual programmers intrigued by the microblogging, Twitter API:...

Chapter 1. Hello Twitter - Twitter API: Up and Running

By Kevin Makice
May 27, 2009

FlashBuilder 4 will support FlexUnit 4 - tutorials and feature overview

By Elad Elrom
May 27, 2009

We don’t need to be jealous of Java developers anymore. The new version of FlexUnit 4 just got closer in similarity to the JUnit (http://www.junit.org/) project and supports many of the features JUnit has, and more! FlexUnit4 combines features from...

Multifriend Selection Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 26, 2009

Welcome back to our series. We will continue to work on components that will help us develop facebook applications faster and with less bugs. There is one quite useful component that will will be used throughout the facebook development and that's the MultiFriend Selection Component. There is already one developed by facebook and is displayed when using standard FBML.

Enhanced status component

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 26, 2009

In the last article we worked extensively with the ProfilePic component and showed how the component can be used in real time scenarios. We had an interesting example of a real word application with the "Would you..." application clone. I really had a lot of fun working on it and hope you too. For us it's important that we were able to work with components that where previously build based on the previous articles. The goal is not to hurt the "DRY“ principle, which means "Don't repeat your self". Every component that was created needs to reused again so no development time will be spent on them anymore, except when extending it. This tutorial will deal mostly with text. The idea of the application is the following: We need to create some sort of "Mood Checker", an application that will allow us to browse through the statuses of users.

Enter Builder

By Garth Braithwaite
May 26, 2009

In this screencast I show how to import an FXP from Flash Catalyst into Flex Builder Gumbo. I also discuss the Flex Builder name change and show off some cool new features in the Gubmo Framework and the Builder itself.

Writing the Pac-Man Game in JavaFX - Part 3

By Haining Henry Zhang
May 25, 2009

We are now ready to create the ghosts in our game. The four ghosts, namely Blinky(red), Pinky(pink), Inky(cyan) and Clyde(orange), are trapped inside a cage when a game starts. After some time, they get out of the cage one by one and start roaming the maze. Their goal is to catch the Pac-Man. The Pac-Man dies if he is touched by one of the ghosts. If the Pac-Man swallows a magic dot, he has the power to eat ghosts for a while. During this time, the ghosts turn hollow and move more slowly.

Building an Enterprise Framework - Enterprise Development with Flex, Part 3

By Yakov Fain
May 20, 2009

Note: This is excerpted from Chapter 3 of the Rough Cuts version of Enterprise Development with Flex. This book is still in progress, and you can get access to it now. Get the Enterprise Development with Flex Rough Cut Rough...

Writing the Pac-Man Game in JavaFX - Part 2

By Haining Henry Zhang
May 14, 2009

In last article, we designed a data model and drew a maze with dots spread into the maze. Now we are ready to create the Pac-Man character. The Pac-Man character is controlled by the game player to move around the maze. While he is moving, he keeps gobbling dots along the path. To implement the Pac-Man character, we divide the coding into a few tasks so that we can create it bit by bit:

Building an Enterprise Framework - Enterprise Development with Flex, Part 2

By Yakov Fain
May 13, 2009

Writing the Pac-Man Game in JavaFX - Part 1

By Haining Henry Zhang
May 10, 2009

When I was young I was fascinated by arcade games. One of my favorites was the Pac-Man game.� Recently, when I was learning the JavaFX language, I decided to write the game in JavaFX.� Based on my experience in other programming languages, I assumed there would be some amount of work in building a game such as Pac-Man, giving me a good feel for RIA development in JavaFX.

Extended ProfilePic Component with Effects

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 8, 2009

In this article we will extend the ProfilePic component from the last article and show example of how we can use it in real world scenarios. We will create a facebook application that asks the user a question about the displayed friend. Yes, it is in fact a copy of an existing application (I don’t remember the name and I don’t want to make advertising). The application simply switches from one question to another and associates the displayed friend with the question. Like, for ex., the question appears “Would you ever like to date Monica?" and the application user can simply select between “Yes” of “No”. On the other side, you can choose if you want that the answer is send to the user as a notification. Personally I enjoyed the application and will use it as reference to make a flash version out of it. On the other side, we will use the component and add features to it so the sample will demonstrate how useful the component can be in the development process. We will have the freedom to create our own questions. They can be stored either in the database or XML, but in our case it will be stored in a flat XML file.

ProfilePic Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 8, 2009

In the last article we discussed how components are built with the facebook api in mind. Now it's the time to do something more with it. We know how things need to be set up in order for the components to work. We learned about sessions, about the tow frame time line structure of the components and we talked about the inheritance of the UIComponent class. The previous example leveraged just a small potion of the methods that UIComponent provides. In this article we will take more advantange of the UIComponent class in order to create a component for the profile pic.

Component Architecture for Facebook Applications

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 8, 2009

In the last tutorial we discussed the new library that was released by Adobe. The new library from Adobe fits much more naturally into the whole architecture of facebook applications that are built using the Flash platform. We need to know that the previous approach using the PHP library is not useless. In order to create stable and useful Facebook applications we need to know about many ways how to achieve the same goal. If you followed the series from the start then you are on a good way to be able to create truly cutting edge Facebook apps as we have discussed have to grab results from DB and we also make use of the ActionScript library.

Getting Started with Flash Catalyst

By Russ Ferguson
May 7, 2009

At the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco, Adobe passed out DVD’s of both Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo) and Flex Builder 4 (code name Gumbo). These products together hope to bridge the gap between designers and developers, by giving designers the ability to control the look of the application and then handing off a project ready to be coded by a developer. This tutorial has been created with the version of Flash Catalyst that was distributed during the MAX conference last November. Since this is an early build of the software some features may change and others added before the final release.

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