Flash Catalyst in the Wild!

Adobe released a 'MAX Preview' of the anxiously awaited Flash Catalyst (Thermo) this year at the MAX conference. Catalyst is a design centric application that allows a designer to work in tools they are graphically comfortable in - Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator - and import them into Catalyst to add expressive functionality all the while creating a working Flex application.

The preview is well executed but does have a 'raw' feel to it. The full application is not expected for a year... or at least that was the general statement from Adobe folks. There are a limited number of components available at this time but when the application reaches a public beta, I would expect quite a few more to be added.

The one thing that Catalyst does seem to be ready for right now is it's use as a wireframing tool! In fact, Catalyst might be THE wireframing tool of choice for experience design professionals. On the flight home from San Francisco, I was able to make 5 or 6 different versions of an application that Christian, Joe, and I have been kicking around! These are fully immersive wireframe models with clickable areas and transitions from state to state. They give the very lo-fidelity prototype 'teeth' that can be evaluated and iterated upon. It's exciting to see the potential! I'll post screen shots and some samples soon.

Working with XML Namespaces in Flash

Today I was having some issues with parsing RSS/ATOM feeds in Flash. I forgot to factor in the fact that both use namespaces in the XML. Here's a simple block of code I used to handle the namespaces and parse the XML into Value Objects:

public function xmlLoaded(event:Event):void

{

trace("done loading");

theXML = XML(myLoader.data);

var ns:Namespace = theXML.namespace();


for each (var property:XML in theXML..item)

{

var atom:Namespace = property.namespace("atom");


var fVO:FeatureVO = new FeatureVO();

fVO.pubDate = property.pubDate;

fVO.updated = property.atom::updated;

fVO.category = property.category;

fVO.title = property.title;

fVO.summary = property.atom::summary;

fVO.link = property.link;

fVO.enclosure = property.enclosure.@url;

fVO.xmlData = property;

model.featuresArray.push(fVO);


trace("creating featureVO "+fVO.enclosure);

}

This is what the sample xml looked like from Blogger's RSS/ATOM feed:

<rss xmlns:atom='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/' version='2.0'>

<channel>

<atom:id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-</atom:id>

<lastBuildDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:07:53 +0000</lastBuildDate>

<title></title>

<description></description>

<link>asdfasdf.com/</link>

<managingEditor>noreply@blogger.com (Erik Loehfelm)</managingEditor>

<generator>Blogger</generator>

<openSearch:totalResults>9</openSearch:totalResults>

<openSearch:startIndex>1</openSearch:startIndex>

<openSearch:itemsPerPage>25</openSearch:itemsPerPage>

<item>

<guid isPermaLink='false'>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-</guid>

<pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:07:00 +0000</pubDate>

<atom:updated>2008-09-10T15:07:53.696-04:00</atom:updated>

<category domain='http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#'>feature</category>

<title>People Singing</title>

<atom:summary>This is going to be a feature for the portal.v/atom:summary>

<link>asdfasdfasdf.html</link>

<enclosure type='image/jpeg' url='http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Slideshows/_production/ss-080522-idolfinale/ss-080522-idolfinale-09.hmedium.jpg' length='0'/>

<author>noreply@blogger.com (Erik Loehfelm)</author>

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

You can see the syntax to be used on the 2 lines highlighted in bold above. The first defines the namespace (atom) and the second shows how you access elements in the xml that have the atom namespace applied to them.

Flash Heat Mapping

I've been working on a widget-like application at the office for about a month now, creating an application that collects data from users and displays it as a heat map.

We're expecting this to be a part of a great portal we're currently designing. This will be one of the 'sticky' parts of the portal contents that allows our readers to take a stab at where the market is going to be in the future. It displays the current Foreign Exchange pair pricing and will allow you to guess what tomorrow's high and low will be. Then, it will map the answers as a heat map on the interface to display the accuracy.

Here's some preliminary screen shots:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

iPhone Application Development

Today was the opening day of the WWDC (worldwide developer's conference) for Apple and Stevie boy announced that 3rd party application development would be supported on the iPhone in the form of Web 2.0/AJAX applications running in Safari. They also announced the release of Safari for Windows.

All that I have heard in response to this news is how badly it sucks. I don't get it? May be I'm biased since that's mostly what we build - rich-internet applications and web 2.0 stuff - but I think this is a great step! What exactly do the nay sayers plan on creating for a phone anyway? Halo 5 mobile? Let's be real for a second. Probably the most valuable applications that you'll find on a phone are going to be data mashup type applications that a user can get a bit of info on, make a quick - and small - reaction to and get out. I never thought I would want to be editing excel spreadsheets on my phone. Anyone that does, I've got an idea for your portable spreadsheet work, it's called a laptop.

The form factor of a phone sized device must be strongly considered in the type of application that you build. I've had a Palm for as long as they've been around and I think I opened a Word document all of once on it. Never edited it. I think I was just seeing if it worked, actually. Same goes for my Blackberry. Can I open and edit documents - yes. Have I ever, no. May be I'm in the minority, but I don't think I am. The ability to send and receive email and attachments that are images and sound files seems to be more important for a phone device.

Lets make a few assumptions for a moment. Let's assume that it truly is a full version of Safari that is running on the iPhone. It has been stated that the OS is a FULL version of OS X on the device. Obviously, the interface elements that are in the desktop version are not on the phone nor are they required but the core kernel is - at least, that's what Steve Jobs said at the D:All things digital conference a few weeks ago. So, if it's a full version of Safari running on the Apple WebKit, then it should support plug-ins. If it supports plug-ins, it should support Flash. If that's the case, we can develop applications in Flash and Flex and deploy them to the iPhone! That's all we needed to hear. To extend that a bit, I read a lot of complaints about developing games for the phone. If it supports Flash, your golden. There's plenty of game content developed in Flash. If it truly supports all types of plug-ins, you could develop a game in Director or Unity and deploy it to those plug-ins as well.

Now, it would be nice to have a little icon on the phone like the other applications, but that's not going to keep us from developing for it. If a user has to bookmark my app to get to it, so be it. Maybe Apple can extend the concept they're starting with by embracing their own Widget model of development. The existing apps that come on the phone look as though they are identical to the Widget versions of applications on the desktop OS so it doesn't seem like it would be too far off to support that. Again, it would be leveraging AJAX and the Safari WebKit to do so.

This morning there was a lot of buzz on the announcements from Adobe and Apple. The Adobe boards were buzzing with 'wait till you hear the news from Apple' chatter. We were kind of thinking that the iPhone would somehow support installed applications with Adobe's new AIR (Apollo). It seemed like the timing on it was right and knowing how the .air files install into the AIR framework, it seemed like a possibility. There was no announcement from either Apple or Adobe though, so I guess that's not going to happen. But, it seems like if the assumptions from above hold true, it could possibly happen in the future. Now that would be cool! They could keep the iPhone system hooks to a minimum for security reasons and have an installation option for applications on the phone. That would probably be a really nice way to satisfy a decent amount of people and protect the phone's stability. We'll have to see I guess.

So, if the assumptions above hold true, and developing an application in Flex (or AJAX or Flash) and deploying it to an iPhone through Safari on the phone is possible, it sounds like it's time to scheme up a few nice little apps for the end of June!

New Flex3 features

Ted Patrick is releasing some info on the upcoming Flex3 release on his blog this week. The first covers some of the integration points for graphic skinning in Flex using Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, ect.

I was just telling Joe this morning (www.merhl.com) about what a pain in the ass it is sometimes to have to compile Flex apps to see the exact positioning of dynamic elements... Someones ears must have been ringing at Adobe :)

technorati tags: flex