Sven Dens

Getting up at 4 in the morning… ouch! Does this ever not suck?

Well, today probably not as bad as any other day, since we’re going to the Web Flash Festival Paris at the Centre Pompidou. I’m expecting to see alot of nice creative work – web, video and audio – and of course to be having loads of fun with my colleagues Wim, Stefan, Jannes, Tom, Frederik and more guys you may not know yet, but should

And Paris, well… wouldn’t you go there even if there was no event at all? This city totally rocks!
Expect some live blogging coverage if I’ve got internet access there.

Bye for now (better start driving to get there in time )

Raf Vervink & Nicolas Lierman are doing a session on “Flex/Apollo RIA Goodness”.

They show us what is all possible with Flex & Apollo today.
The main point of interest in their session is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics hasn’t got a public API, so they wrote a GA ActionScript 3 API and a GA client in Flex running in Apollo, entitled “Google Analytics Reporting Suite“. With this Apollo app they want to bring Google Analytics to the desktop and provide powerful extra features the desktop has to offer.

The big deal about this is:

• 3+ million users will have instant access to GA from the desktop
• It will reduce Google’s bandwith cost
• It’s just too cool

They’ve shown us how to build a widget for the desktop with Flex and Apollo, using their GARS SWC component.
Which was pretty easy! And thus even cooler!
The widget will be available for download on their labs from tomorrow.

Nice work guys!

Dave is doing a session on “Designing with Sound”.

In design, there’s good design and bad design. Dave tries to teach us what to pay attention to to make sure that when it comes to sound design, yours is good.

There are 5 basic elements of sound design:

• Voice Over
• Sound Effects
• NavSounds
• Ambience
• Music

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Peter is doing a talk on OO in AS3.
Key points that will be discussed are:

• DisplayList API
• DOM3 Event Model
• E4X (ECMAScript for XML)

…and some others I wasn’t fast enough to copy from the screen

E4X must be one of the greatest additions to the language.
The ease of iterating through an XML document is a snap in AS3 in comparison to AS2!

This session was a quick drill-down of what AS3 is and how you’d best use it.
Peter briefly introduced some Design Patterns (Observer, Singleton, MVC, Decorator) and how you apply them in AS3.
For instance he demo’ed the implementation of the Singleton Pattern in AS3, which needs a workaround since AS3 doesn’t allow for private constructors. This clever workaround was conceived by the Big Mr. Grant Skinner.

Not many new things learned here I must say, but for those of you just getting to know your way around OOP and/or AS3, this is a nice and quick how-to to get you started.

Be sure to check out Peter’s blog from time to time, I’m pretty sure he’ll be posting his presentation there one of these days.

Mike Downey is talking about Apollo for Developers.

Apollo is a technology by Adobe that allows you to bring web applications to the desktop.
Web applications, as in HTML-pages, .NET webapps, but also Flex applications, using embedded Flash or not, or just 100% Flash apps that run entirely out of the browser and can access your local file system!

100% cross-platform, no more browser compatibility issues, no more hard work to make your app work on different OS’es.
As long as it can be shown in a browser, you can port it to the desktop in a snap using Apollo.

Currently, Apollo is available as an Aplha 1 release on Adobe Labs.

To render your app Apollo uses the WebKit browser rendering engine, so really that’s all you should check if you’re building your webapp. If it renders nicely in WebKit, you’re free from browser hassle!

A totally cool demo showing what you can do with Apollo is the Apollo Book.
You’re seeing live webpages HTML rendered in Flash, running in Apollo on your desktop.
100% interactive!
Did I hear you say WOW?

So, how do you start building your own Apollo apps?
Check out my other post: http://www.svendens.com/adobe-air/build-compile-as3-flex2-apollo-eclipse/

More on this day as it continues…

Just saw Aral Balkan’s session on “Rediscovering Fun”, which, as always, TOTALLY ROCKED!!

He mostly talked about his new remoting technology (gateway) SWX, and showed just how cool it is to really USE the web. Things like Twitter, Flickr, Upcoming, etc… all have public API’s which basically allow you to build your own stuff, just the way you like it, while using their technology.

A totally cool demo was when he used his Nokia N92 phone to read out a barcode, generated by web software and containing actual Twitter input. The phone read in the barcode, Flash Lite on the phone using SWX interpreted the input and displayed the output on screen. Now how cool is that?!

Lesson learned was: don’t be afraid to experiment! Use the web, discover all the fun things you can do with it, and don’t get put off if you need to try 1000 times before you build something really cool that lasts. JUST DO IT!

More on this day as it continues…

I just wrote 2 simple classes to validate email addresses and Belgian cell phone numbers in AS2 and AS3.
Might come in handy for you, they’re available for download here.

I included FLA’s for Flash8 and FlashCS3 for AS2 and AS3.
They show 2 TextInput components, one for an email address and one for a cell phone number.
The cell phone validation includes a “strip” function. Since people tend to enter their phone numbers in different ways, dots, blanks and slashes are removed from the input before validating the number.

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If ever you need to encrypt or decrypt something from in AS2 or AS3, this might come in handy for you.
I’ve started off with the great encryption classes written for AS2 by meychi.com (currently offline), but felt there had to be a more user-friendly way of using them, so I got to work on it last night and think I’ve come up with a pretty elegant solution.

You can download the ZIP-archive to try it out for yourself.
Please note that this release is still early alpha and there’s probably alot of room for improvement, I’ll post updated copies for the files here regularly. There’s also still little documentation in the files and there aren’t any unit tests yet.
Inside the ZIP you’ll find an FLA for AS2 and one for AS3. The AS2 FLA comes in a Flash8 and a FlashCS3 flavour.
The FLA’s contain a single MovieClip with a linkage to their respective .as source files.

Inside the package be.boulevart.as2.security are the wrapper classes I wrote for the original AS2 implementation by meychi.
What this does is provide you with an elegant way of using any encryption type with just a single line of code:

e = new Encryption(EncryptionTypes.RC4(), str , this.theKey, null, null, null);

See what I did with the EncryptionTypes there?
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So today I wanted to compile a simple “Hello World” app and package it as an .air-file for installation in Adobe Apollo on my Mac…

This can already be done in FlashDevelop – a great editor, but it only runs on Windows – but I couldn’t yet find a source telling me how to do it from Eclipse or any other editor that runs on OS X. So it was time to roll-up my sleeves and figure out a way to do it.
Didn’t turn out to be hard at all, using ANT and starting off from the nice Apollo ANT-template for FlashDevelop built by Ryan Taylor.

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