Flash files can now be found and indexed. - Fantastic!

Update: More info and objectives.

Tags: adobe flash, yooba studio, flash content, google, search, index, seo

I was attending the on AIR Tour Europe in Stockholm with one of my colleagues in the begining of the week. Mike Chambers, Ryan Stewart, and the rest of the gang of Adobe AIR talked about developing for their new cross-plaform runtime. Very interesting and releaxed happening. Of course we got some nice swag too, including a t-shirt, a print of Actionscript Reference and O'Reilly's pocket guide "Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers" to mention a few. The stickers we got I put on one of our Guitar Hero controllers; nice red touch.

Tags: on air, air, stockholm, flash, flex, guitar hero, mike chambers, ryan stewart

Last time I spoke a bit about the three probably largest RIA technologies: Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX.
This time, we're going to take a short introductionary look at Mozilla Labs Prism.

As described at the Mozillas Developer Center, Prism is a "simple XULRunner-based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface". So, what exactly does that mean? Prism allows you to run web applications (built using XUL) from the desktop, without the need to fire up your regular browser.

XUL is a markup language, used to describe applications made for Prism (or any other XULRunner) and works very much like MXML or XAML. Together with XUL, JavaScript is used to write the application logic, and CSS is used to style the applications. There's a lot Prism has in common with other RIA technologies and I think it's good that we have several options to choose from, even though considering the actual choosing can be a tricky part.

What could speak for Prism is the possibility that applications using XUL could be launched either from the desktop or from within a browser (such as Firefox 3) supporting it. With the Firefox market share growin, more and more users will be able to run these applications.

Marco Casario made a good presentation where you can find more on the different RIA technologies.

As with the prevoius mentioned RIA technologies, I think it's worth keeping an eye on Prism. And, they have a pretty icon.

Tags: mozilla, prism, xul, firefox

As with every development project, there's a decision to be made what technology you're going to use to build it and with Yooba Studio things were no different. Since we were building a RIA, the options narrowed down a bit. Having years of experience developing with Flash, the choice for us was Adobe Flex.

That was quite some time ago. Since then other technologies have shown up, and I'm guessing making the decision today can be quite hard for a lot of developers. Inside RIA recently compared the three big ones: Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX.

Silverlight has the advantage of a very mature developing platform (Visual Studio) and a huge developer community. Sun is offering an interesting thing with JavaFX, building on well known technology and with the recent announcement of it being used in the Blu-Ray specification making it even more interesting. One thing that speaks for Flex is the fact that applications made with it can be used by alot of people, without them having to download and install another plugin. Also, the recent release of Flex Builder 3 presents developers with a great tool for design as well as coding.

The choice we made of Adobe Flex as 'our' RIA technology still stands today, but it's going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft and Suns RIA offerings can bring in the future.

Tags: adobe, flex, microsoft, silverlight, sun, javafx

One of the problems we encountered when developing Yooba Studio was getting access to a small but crucial part of a Flex Component: the CheckBox check icon.  In many cases, most of the parts of a component is accessible via relatively easy means, making it easy for developers to modify its behaviour and appearance. But the CheckBox (and the RadioButton) was a different story. We wanted to change the check mark color at runtime and after doing some digging, I found the hard coded color value in CheckBoxIcon.as. Creating my own version of the file (thanks Alex!) we were able to do just what we wanted with the icon.

An example of how to go about it can be found here.

This is an example of when the open code in the Flex SDK is of great value - without it things would have been much more difficult in the every-day coding.

Tags: as, actionscript, source, code

Our Gallery for displaying and selecting graphical objects includes vector images as well as bitmap images. The vector images are SWF files containing the actual artwork. When one of our graphical designers began adding his artwork to the Gallery he simply imported the Illustrator files into Flas and published an SWF. We didn't bother settings the stage dimensions to fit the artwork, since we've learned from before that it's the content of the Flash that counts - not the actual stage dimensions.

This turned out to be a false assumption...

The thumbnail included an mx:Image that simply had its source property set to the SWF URL. When the Gallery thumbnails loaded the artwork, the whole area of the SWF stage was included. Since we obviously only wanted to show the actual artwork in the thumb this had to be fixed. Adjusting each file from within Flash would be too time consuming so we had to come up with something else. In the end we loaded the SWF files using a Loader, adding its content to a Sprite and finally setting the Sprite as the Image source. This meant that we had to fix loading effects, since the loading now took place in the Loader and not the Image. So, how come the Sprite doesn't include the whole stage area but the Loader does? I haven't figured that out just yet, but this is one way to get the desired result. 

Tags: development, gui, adobe, flex builder

While developing our latest project we needed to display a quite large set of thumbnails. I started out by using the mx:TileList component for this, but soon discovered that scrolling a whole row at a time could be disorienting. I turned to another (set of) components: mx:Tile and mx:Repeater and got smooth scrolling. This presented me with another problem though: all thumbnails in the mx:Tile loaded at once - even if the ones not visible. This behavior differs from the mx:TileList which only loads what's needed (i.e. visible). So, which one is the best choice? On one hand we have the scrolling and one the other we have loading issues. We ended up using mx:Tile and a repeater, controlling the loading behavior ourselves, simply because we needed a really smooth experience scrolling though the thumbnails. This meant more work, but we have to remember that we're designing for the user, not the developer.

Tags: adobe, gui, flex builder