nothing yet | jason madsen

So originally my work was planning on sending me (and a few others) to MAX NA 08, in San Fran. Without sounding too bitter, they changed the plans on us. So we are left in Orlando reading blog posts, and news updates from the sessions. Hopefully Adobe will put the videos up on Adobe TV like they have been with some of the recent conferences.

Anyhow, in my readings about MAX, I have come across the Tour De Flex application that a few of the Adobe evangelists have put together. It’s an AIR application that gives you samples on using everything Flex, from the very basics, to some interesting third party components, and even some cloud API’s. It has working examples for everything. A great application. They even have a system in place to allow developers to showcase their own work through a submission process. I can see this application being helpful for people just getting into Flex, or as a reference for Flex developers for those ‘how does that component work again…’ moments.

There is also an Eclipse plug in. It allows you to search for components. It will bring up a list of search results, double clicking the result opens Tour De Flex and displays examples, and descriptions.

I’m going to put the install badge in the widgets bar to the right for a while. Feel free to install it directly from the badge, or visit the Tour De Flex page, where they have the same badge in effect.

So, later tonight I’ll be speaking at the Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando (adogo) user group on Adobe AIR. We’ll be looking into File I/O and SQLite as I had previously mentioned. I thought I would post up the Slides as well as a few example flex projects that I will be go through in the presentation so that people can follow along on their own machine. You can download the zipped materials here

Jason

I will be presenting at the next Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando meeting. The presentation is entitled “Adobe AIR File I/O and Embedded SQLite”. I have posted a primer at the user groups page. You can read the details there. I’m hoping to cover both the technical details of the classes involved, as well as putting together examples.

If you are free on November 3rd, and in Orlando, come check it out.

jason

Not to far back I built a small application for the University that I work for. I called it the HelpDesk. I wrote the technical end of an article for Adobe about the application, how Flex was involved and other details. I didn’t realize that the article had gone live at Adobe’s site until this morning when I got an email from a colleague who mentioned the article. The app is described pretty thoroughly in the article so I won’t go into details here. The article is live at Adobe’s site, you can check it out here.

So day two was pretty interesting. Jeffry Houser gave an interesting session on building Flex Components. He has a comfortable, interactive style of speaking that works well, and keeps you involved with the session.

I really enjoyed the introduction to fluint, the Flex Unit testing project by Jeff Taper. Unit testing is one of those things that I would like to incorporate more into projects, but have always balked at the time considerations involved. I think the fluint project is really come along.

I think my favorite session of the day was Christophe Coenraets (Adobe Evangelist). It was a pretty high level overview of LiveCycle Data Services, and using remote objects. It didn’t get into too much of the tech details, but I really enjoyed the session. He also showed an interesting Flex portal application that was using Modules and a Module Loader.

After talking with Jeffry Houser for a few minutes, he talked me into doing an quick interview for the Flex Show. I was really flattered to be a part of the show. We mostly talked about the conference sessions and my thoughts on them. I have been listening to the Flex Show for a while now, so it was nice to meet Jeffry, and be on the show. You can check out the latest show, episode # 56 to hear it from here.

I ended up having to leave just before the mixer at the end to catch a cab to the airport. I was disappointed at missing that.

All in all it was a great two day event. I’m glad I went. Thanks to 360 | Flex and the NJ Flex group for putting it together.

So I made it through day one of the 360 | Flex Camp today. Yakov Fain from Farata Systems gave a one day “Advanced Intro To Flex” training at Montclair University in New Jersey. It started with some pretty introductory topics, but it moved on quickly, and ended with some hands on use with BlazeDS. I was excited to get a local installation of Tomcat and BlazeDS running on my Mac. I have been using AMFPHP a lot on some of my latest projects. We’ll see how BlazeDS changes that for me in the future

Tomorrow features the guest speakers. Several interesting topics on deck.

I can’t end this post without thanking Danton Chin. I was stranded at the University, and he offered me a lift to my hotel. I would probably still be wandering around the University looking for an appropriate bus to catch right now if it had not been for his kind offer.

I’m heading to the Garden State this weekend to attend 360 | Flex Camp New Jersey, and the Farata Systems Flex training. I’m looking forward to the two day event. I missed out on going to San Jose this year, I figure this is the next best thing.

I’m looking forward to the sessions of Fluint, and also Drupal. Both of which I keep hearing about, but have yet to work with.

For more details visit http://www.360conferences.com/360flexcamp/

-jason

So it was bound to happen. I put out a version of the Badge Builder, and Adobe and Grant Skinner soon there after release a similar application.

It is called Badger, it has a cool flying badger icon, and does a few really cool things. For example when you select your AIR application it will pull your publisher ID, and application ID out of the AIR file itself. Very nice touch.

While I haven’t researched much further yet, it also appears that you can use various template badge SWF files. Doing so should allow you to build your own custom template for use with the application.

You can check out Grant’s post on Badger here

-jason

As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been putting together an Adobe AIR application that allows the user to quickly create a Badge Install HTML file by filling out a simple form. The aim of Badge Builder is to give access to all of the options available for utilizing the Badge Installer, while not drowning the user with parameters that they don’t wish to change.

You can toggle between the necessary, and optional parameters. It has a built in preview function that will open your browser and display the HTML file. Once you are satisfied with your settings, you simply build the file to the folder of your choice. All of the fields have tool-tips to get you up to speed quickly on the information that is needed. The application is just another way to be more productive.

I’ve set up a page with an Install Badge, screen shots, and a bit more by way of features here.

I have been testing it as I develop and use it. So far is has been pretty stable for me. If you find any issues, please let me know.

Lately I have developed several small AIR application for clients. Sometimes the apps are the actual project, sometimes they are a tool to allow the clients to do something with project. Either way I find myself building quite a few smaller AIR widget applications for clients lately. David Tucker’s 10 common mistakes when building AIR applications lists not using the badge install for your AIR app at number seven. I have been happy with the results of using the badge install to distribute apps to clients.

The Badge Install is a mechanism that allows the user to install you AIR application from a browser. If the user doesn’t have the necessary AIR runtime installed, it will first install the AIR runtime followed by your AIR application. If the user already has your AIR application installed, it allows the user to choose to re-install, or simply launch the already installed application.

While there are examples of using the latest install badge that Grant Skinner put together. I haven’t seen any examples that use the latest SWFObject (v2.1) and produce html results that validate. The process is actually quite simple. You can download a finished example here

Build your HTML file
Build a simple HTML file with your DOCTYPE, head and body.

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'>
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'lang='en' xml:lang='en'>
	<head>
		<title>Number Converter AIR application</title>
		<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' />
		<script type='text/javascript' src='js/swfobject.js'></script>
	</head>
	<body>
		<div id='badge_div'>
			    To install this application you will need the <a href='http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/'>Adobe Flash Player</a>
		</div>
	</body>
</html>

In the head I bring in the SWFObject with a relative path via the “js” directory. In the body I have created a div with an id of ‘badge_div’, this is the div that will get replaced with the Install Badge SWF file.

Set up the SWFObject
I usually like to place all my SWFObject JavaScript in an individual .js file. For this example I am using the following JavaScript in a file named ‘badgeInstall.js’.

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var flashvars = {};
flashvars.airversion = '1.1';
flashvars.appname = 'Number Converter';
flashvars.appurl = 'http://www.knomedia.com/air/numberConverter/NumberConverter.air';
flashvars.imageurl = 'assets/NumberConverter.jpg';
 
var params = {};
var attributes = {};
 
swfobject.embedSWF('install_swf/AIRInstallBadge.swf', 'badge_div', '205', '170', '9.0.115', 'install_swf/expressInstall.swf', flashvars, params, attributes);

These are the required flashvars parameters required to get the badge working:

• airversion is the AIR runtime version required to run your application
• appname is the name of your AIR application
• appurl is the absolute address of your .air file
• imageurl is the address (absolute or relative) of an image file to display in the badge. The image should be 205px by 170px.

The last line is simply using the SWFObject to replace the appropriate div with your Badge Install SWF file.

Back in the HTML head you need to include a reference to the badgeInstall.js which results in the following finalized HTML document:

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'lang='en' xml:lang='en'> <head> <title>Number Converter AIR application</title> <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' /> <script type='text/javascript' src='js/swfobject.js'></script> <script type='text/javascript' src='js/badgeInstall.js'></script> </head> <body> <div id='badge_div'> To install this application you will need the <a href='http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/'>Adobe Flash Player</a> </div> </body> </html>

There are lots of optional parameters that can be passed as a flashvar to the badge to customize the badge like changing the button label color, the application name color, etc. For a listing of all of these, see the demo included with the badge install swf.


Badge Builder
I’m actually finishing up a small AIR app called ‘Badge Builder’ that facilitates writing all the necessary HTML, JavaScript, etc to quickly create a Badge Install page. I’ll post it up as soon as I’m finished. Stay tuned.

jason