…he says, belatedly. If you’re wondering why this blog and Snackr haven’t been updated lately, this is mostly why

On Monday, we released betas of:

• Flash Catalyst — This is the new product I’ve been primarily working on for the last couple of years: the interaction design tool formerly codenamed “Thermo”. It allows you to take artwork created in the Creative Suite tools and turn it into a working Flash interface. You can publish it as a standalone piece, or give it to a developer to add functionality in…
• Flash Builder 4 — This is the next version of Flex Builder, with a slightly new name and a whole bunch of new features for developer productivity and easy data access. We renamed it Flash Builder in order to emphasize that it’s a tool for building all kinds of Flash applications (including pure-ActionScript apps), aligning it better with our other Flash Platform tools, and reserving the name Flex for…
• Flex 4 SDK — the open-source framework that’s the foundation of both Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4. The biggest feature is the new Spark component architecture, which completely separates the presentation of components from their underlying logic. Without Spark, Flash Catalyst wouldn’t be able to make it so easy to turn artwork into skinned components.

If you do try out Flash Catalyst, check out the great documentation, tutorials and videos page. In addition to content from our Learning Resources team, there are videos from some of the developers on the FC team, and from other folks on our prerelease group. It’ll really help you get up to speed quickly.

As someone who helped start this and this, I can say it’s always a little nerve-wracking to release the first public beta version of a new 1.0 product. You wince at every bug you knew someone was going to run into (and the ones you didn’t know about), and you wish you could just tell everyone “we’re planning to get to it, really!” for all the features that didn’t make the beta, or that you know aren’t even going to make the 1.0 release. But that’s dwarfed by the excitement of having people encounter it for the first time and seeing what they can actually make with it despite its limitations. I’ve already been amazed by what we’ve seen our prerelease group do with Catalyst, and I’m looking forward to see what you can do with it!

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I haven’t had much time to post to this blog (or work on Snackr) because our team has been really busy getting ready to show off an early version of Thermo at MAX 2008. In fact, we’re doing better than showing it–we’re also going to give a very early preview release to MAX attendees!

If you’re going to MAX, and you want to be one of the first to get your hands on it, you should sign up for the Introduction to Thermo session, where we’ll be giving out the first DVDs. The first session is full, but there’s some room left in the 5-6 pm session.

This MAX preview version is going to be Mac-only, and only available to MAX attendees. If you’re on Windows or can’t make it to MAX, don’t despair–watch this space for more info.

I’ll also be running a hands-on lab at MAX where I’ll walk attendees through using the Thermo preview build to turn an imported Photoshop comp into a working interactive design. I think the lab sessions are already full, but give it a shot if you’re interested.

Hope to see you at MAX! (And hopefully after MAX I can get back to working on Snackr…)

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The flood of Snackr downloads has finally slowed down to about 150 a day. Over 13,000 people have downloaded it so far; it looks like maybe about 500-600 people are running it daily–not bad for a little side project

Various people have requested the source code, so I’ve decided to host it on Google Code at http://snackr.googlecode.com/. You can file bugs/enhancement requests on the Issues tab there (the issues and wish list items from snackr.net have been migrated there), and check out the source anonymously using Subversion (instructions are on the Source tab).

The source is currently in an interim state–there are a couple of half-implemented features (the ability to “star” items to read later, and the Google Reader integration that Rob is working on)–but you should be able to run what’s there (the GR stuff isn’t hooked up at all to the UI yet, and the “star” functionality works but the UI is slightly broken). I’m planning to post interim test builds there once in awhile as well.

The source also probably isn’t the prettiest code ever , and I haven’t finished commenting it, but I’m hoping to continue cleaning it up and refactoring over time. Feel free to check it out, and let me know if you have suggestions–or, better yet, patches you’d like to submit!

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Wow–nearly 600 people have downloaded Snackr in the last two days! Thanks to everyone who’s sent mail or posted comments; it’s great to know people like it. The most common requests so far seem to be:

• Allow multiple selection in the feed list, so you can delete a bunch of feeds at once. It seems like a lot of people imported large feed lists from their existing blog readers, then realized they didn’t want to actually see all of those feeds in Snackr.
• Support Asian language characters. Currently, Snackr uses Myriad Web, and the font is embedded in order to make fade animations work properly for text, but that font only has Latin characters. I’ll either need to add an option to use the system font (and turn off fade animations), or maybe build a version that embeds a font with Asian characters in it (though that would probably lead to a huge installer).
• Ability to keep a list of items to read later (e.g. by starring them). I’ve been wanting this for awhile but haven’t gotten around to implementing it yet–now I have some incentive!
• Posting the source. I do really want to do this, but I need to set aside some time to make the code slightly less embarrassing

I also noticed today as I was using it on my machine that for some short posts, the popup seems to “bobble around” a bit and end up at a very thin size (it’s different from the jittery animation on Vista/Linux; this is happening even on OS X). It’s intermittent, but it reproduces pretty regularly on certain kinds of posts. Has anybody else seen this? I’ll have to look into it–it must be a recent injection, as I never noticed it before.

I’m planning to make regular updates to Snackr, though things are pretty busy; I’m hoping I can carve out enough time to release a new version in a couple of weeks. Snackr should automatically notify you when an update is available.

Keep those cards and letters coming!

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I realized a few months ago that, unlike pretty much everyone else I know, I don’t regularly use an RSS reader. Not that I haven’t tried—I used FeedDemon early on, and more recently tried out Google Reader—but never managed to form the habit of checking them regularly. Both of them are fine apps; the problem was with me. Every time I sat down and saw that I had a gazillion unread items in my hundreds of feeds, I didn’t know where to start. Eventually I just gave up trying to keep up.

Around the same time I came to this realization, Adobe AIR 1.0 was publicly released. I wanted to try to write an AIR app just for fun, and it occurred to me that I might be able to make something that would solve my RSS problem.

The result is Snackr, a ticker-like widget that lives on the bottom (or side) of your screen and scrolls random items from your RSS feeds. (It’s called “Snackr” because it lets you nibble on your feeds. Guffaw.) Here’s what it looks like on my desktop:

I’m actually finding Snackr really useful—it helps me keep up with blogs I want to keep up with, and also gives me a great smattering of items from sources I wouldn’t normally read regularly. Please try it out and let me know if you like it! (Of course, it’s still an alpha, so please expect bugs; there’s a list of known issues on the Snackr website.)

Snackr has also been really fun to write, and along the way I figured out some tips and tricks for doing various things with Flex and AIR. Some notes on that after the jump.

(more…)

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It’s been busy here in Thermo-land, as we work furiously (no really! we’re furious people!) to turn our vision into reality. I have a fun side project that I’m going to post about in a little bit once I get a few bugs worked out. In the meantime, here’s a video interview that Ryan Stewart, Thermo evangelist extraordinaire, did with me about designer/developer workflow in Thermo and Flex 4. It was our first video, so it’s a little blurry and off-center, but just pretend it’s artsy and edgy and you’ll be fine. (We did edit out the part where the siren went off when someone went out the wrong door in the cafeteria.)

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I’ve been so busy that I completely forgot to mention that my article on designing Flex 3 skins and styles using Creative Suite 3 and Flex Builder 3 went live on the Flex Developer Center when we launched Flex 3. Check it out for information on how to use CS3 with Flex Builder, as well as the new CSS Design View in Flex Builder.

Also, Juan Sanchez of ScaleNine, who built the CS3 Flex skin templates, has just posted some great tips and tricks for using the skin templates. Thanks Juan!

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The big day is finally here! Flex Builder 3 is shipping, and the Flex 3 SDK and AIR 1.0 runtime are available for free download. I actually hadn’t been keeping up with all the latest AIR stuff, so it’s been fun checking out all the great AIR apps that have already been posted.

We’ve also just launched the Adobe Open Source portal, a one-stop shop for all Adobe open source technologies, including Flex, BlazeDS, and Tamarin.

Download, design, develop, and enjoy!

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A number of people have written me over the past few months to mention that they’ve had trouble getting the Reflection component to work in various cases. I haven’t had time to look at each of the problems, but I do have an updated version of Reflector.as that may work better. If you’ve been having trouble with the original Reflector code, try this one out and let me know if it fixes your problem.

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A new face in the Flex blogosphere: Ethan Eismann. Ethan is on the Experience Design (XD) team at Adobe, working on the design of Thermo, and I’m sure he’ll have all sorts of interesting thoughts on design. Welcome Ethan!

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