June 30th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: flash, flex, javascript, ria, rna
I had an excellent discussion with my coworker Susan today about refining certain internal processes, and one of the tangents of the conversation went off on what the actual definition of a Rich Internet Application actually was. As we know, anything from a banner ad to a product configurator can be considered an RIA, and the only common element seemed to be that an RIA retains its functionality within the context of what the user is interacting with. In other words, if you click on button in an RIA, the resulting action does not significantly change the page or window the user is interacting with; Clicking to go to a new page loses context, using an animated accordion to display different content does not.
The similarities, though, end there. Implementation varies, technology varies, scope and location and functionality varies, and all in all it ends up being a pretty difficult convoluted mess to describe. At best you can group them via complexity, and after a brief exercise of that nature we realized that a new breed of networked application was emerging. Well, alright, perhaps not emerging, but instead gaining momentum and acceptance in the mainstream. Here’s the scale, see if you agree with our reasoning.
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June 13th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: News
Tags: flex, ruby
I’ve been invited to speak at the Columbus Ruby Brigade on AIR and Ruby integration. Given the expert nature of my audience I’m not going to dwell too much on Ruby and Rails, but will focus instead on how to integrate Flex & Air into a Ruby based service layer. This will be a highly technical presentation- I will be covering the following topics:
- The internet ecosystem: Ruby, Rails, AIR, Flex, and where do they all fit
- Cost: What is it going to take?
- Installing and using RubyAMF
- Overview of MXML, Actionscript, Eclipse and the SDK
- Consuming data services with Flex & Air
- Building a simple call/response architecture
The presentation was on Monday, June 16th. The files are below:
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May 3rd, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: air, desktop, drunken coding, flash, flex, pandora
So there I was, hacking away at AIR, and my iPod runs out of batteries. I was in that rare coding zen where you really need the audio to lock you out from the rest of the world, so I was fairly annoyed that the random conversation here at Apropos suddenly started to interfere with my productivity. No worries though, I could always resort to Pandora, right?
Now, I’m not a big fan of Pandora. Don’t get me wrong, I love what they’re doing and have found some phenomenal music there, but the fact that I always have to keep a browser window open to make use of their service has kindof annoyed me, and now was no different. I could deal with it though for the sake of productivity…. until I realized that AIR came with its own embedded WebKit browser.
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April 18th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Libraries
Tags: actionscript, flex, localization
One of my many and varied tools from my localization sandbox, the StringsProxy is a generic object proxy container intended to simplify the management of large sets of application strings with little investment from the developer. It’s effectively an implementation of the Proxy object that includes propertyChange event dispatching so that Data Binding works properly.
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April 5th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Libraries
Tags: actionscript, air, flex, seamlessinstallbadge
One of the nicest features of AIR is the seamless install provided by the installer badge available from Adobe. Unfortunately, it takes a little digging to pull out exactly how it works, and I’m not someone who wants to rewrite things on a regular basis. Additionally, the seamless installer badge is build in Flash, something us hard-boiled Flex developers find hard to swallow.
The goal of this particular package is to provide a simple reusable component that handles all the seamless install features, and gives the developer skinning control over the entire component.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This control requires Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115 or later.
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