If you’ve been following Flex over the last year or so, you might have heard of a related effort, code-named “Slider”, which was going to be a separate version of the framework that would be specifically optimized for mobile devices. What we’ve found over the past year is that vast improvements in Flash and AIR runtime performance on mobile devices, as well as the rapidly increasing power of modern touchscreen smartphones, have made it unnecessary for us to split off a separate framework. So going forward, we’ll have a unified framework for both desktop and mobile development, and “Hero” will be the first fruit of this approach.

For a good overview of our plans for mobile development, take a look at the Flex and Mobile whitepaper, FAQ, and Adobe Labs page. We’ve also started to post draft specs for the mobile features (as well as the rest of Hero) to the Flex Open Source site, and we’ll be rolling out more over time.

I’m excited that we’ve started talking about our mobile Flex efforts publicly, and look forward to revealing more over the next few months. Watch this space!

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!

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…)

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!

• 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!

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.

Snackr is written in Flex 3 (and, of course, AIR). I hadn’t done any AIR development when I started writing it, and it’s a testament to how well AIR is designed that I got the basic thing up and running in a weekend. Of course, most of that was due to my familiarity with Flex, but the fact that AIR makes it trivially easy to package up a normal Flex app as a desktop app is easy to take for granted. With almost no work, I went from being a Flex developer to a cross-platform desktop app developer.

Once I got the basic ticker UI up and running, I started exercising more AIR-specific functionality. Initially, I kept all the feed items in memory, but decided to try out AIR’s local database capability to improve Snackr’s memory footprint. Like a lot of other things in AIR, it was dead easy to set this up; I’m not a database/SQL guru, but it was very straightforward to build out the database code. (I used synchronous mode for simplicity; it would have been much more complex had I tried to do it in asynchronous mode—as with all other Flash/Flex/AJAX programming, asynchronicity is one of the toughest things to manage cleanly, especially if you have a chain of things you want to happen in sequence.)

The next thing I did was build the animation for the popup windows. I ran into a couple of little snags here. I started by trying to just animate the Flex Window component using standard Flex effects, but that didn’t seem to work, probably because setting (say) the x and y of the window component doesn’t actually set the position of the underlying AIR NativeWindow. So, to get it to work correctly, I directly animated the “bounds” property of the underlying AIR NativeWindow class. In order to keep both the position and size of the bounds in sync as I animated, I wrote my own AnimateBounds effect—this was easy to achieve by subclassing TweenEffect and just converting the bounds property of NativeWindow to an array of numbers as TweenEffect expects.

I also had to be careful when drawing the “bubble” background in my popup window’s updateDisplayList() function. Before I added the animation, the background drew fine, but I found that during the animation it didn’t seem to redraw at the right size at each step. I discovered that I had to ignore the standard unscaledWidth/unscaledHeight being passed into updateDisplayList(), and (once again) just look directly at the AIR NativeWindow bounds to get the width and height to use. I’m guessing that during fast animations, the bounds of the Flex Window component don’t update synchronously with the NativeWindow bounds.

Around the time I was finishing up the animation stuff, we released the alpha version of AIR for Linux. Just for grins, I installed Ubuntu in VMWare on my Mac and tried it out—and amazingly enough, it worked! Well, with one snag. As Linux folks know, window transparency is something that’s only recently been supported in Linux, and not all window managers have it. I couldn’t figure out how to get a transparency-supporting window manager set up, so I just punted; the popups look okay without it (though they look like rectangles rather than bubbles).

There was a bigger issue, though. I noticed that unlike on Mac OS X and Windows XP, the popup animation was really jittery on Linux. Later on, when I tried Snackr out on Windows Vista, I noticed some jitter there too (although it’s not nearly as bad as on Linux). I haven’t yet figured out exactly what causes this—I filed a bug with the AIR team—but I’m guessing that on Vista and Linux, even when I set both the position and size of the popup at the same time, the OS either (1) processes them separately, so they get out of sync, or (2) processes the move immediately by directly blitting the window at its current size before I get a chance to redraw it on the resize event. (This mostly comes into play because I’m actually animating the popups upwards, so both the position and size have to change at the same time. It wouldn’t be an issue if you’re just growing a window larger or smaller but keeping it at the same position.)

The final issue, and probably the biggest one, is that there’s no way currently to have Snackr act like a true docking window—it can’t tell the OS to reduce the available space of the desktop, so if you maximize a window, the window will overlap Snackr. There isn’t currently an API for this in AIR, so there’s no real way to work around this for now. To compensate, I’ve added a bunch of convenient ways to get Snackr out of your way; you can toss it around the screen to different sides, put it on a second monitor, or collapse it temporarily.

Other than that, all the functionality I’ve put in Snackr has been really easy to implement. AIR makes it really simple to support multiple monitors, for example. And it’s also pretty easy to implement auto-update—you have to set up whatever logic you want to figure out when a new version is available (e.g. by downloading an XML file from a website), but once you retrieve a newer installer it’s a single function call to run the updater to install it.

I’m planning to put up the source somewhere eventually, but I want to clean it up a bit first (yes, my coding habits are sloppier at home than at work). I definitely plan to continue to add features to it—since I’m using it myself, I have a lot of incentive to keep it up. Also, my colleague Rob Adams (who was the first person to use Snackr besides myself, and has given me lots of great feedback) is planning to add some features to it as well—notably, making it synchronize the feed list and read items with Google Reader, so you can use it as an adjunct to your normal blog reading habits instead of a replacement. (Please feel free to bug him if you want this feature.)

Enjoy Snackr—I’d love to get your feedback!

]]> http://www.rictus.com/muchado/2008/05/12/snackr-an-rss-ticker-built-using-air-and-flex/feed/ 23 http://www.rictus.com/muchado/2008/04/23/video-interview-with-me-about-thermo/ http://www.rictus.com/muchado/2008/04/23/video-interview-with-me-about-thermo/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:01:07 +0000 nj http://www.rictus.com/muchado/?p=38 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.)

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!

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!