Happy Holidays!
Wishing you all a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. May 2012 be filled with love and nothing but good news.
Flex team looking for committers
One of the requirements for a proposal to incubate a new project in the Apache Software Foundation (like we are doing for Flex) is to have an initial set of committers.
The Flex SDK team is looking for committers and has just published a blog post with more information.
Let’s talk about Flex
Adobe is hosting a Flex Community Summit today and tomorrow where we invited a number of Flex community leaders and enterprise developers to participate in a discussion on a variety of topics. In the next coming hours and days we will be publishing videos and articles on the future of Flex and the discussions held at the Flex Community Summit. I’ll keep this blog post up to date with new videos and publications as they become available. Day 2 of this community summit will be streamed live tomorrow today! Stay tuned for more info on that.
Please note that these are unedited and raw recordingings of the actual summit and that audio levels may vary. More polished versions are coming to Adobe TV later this week.
UPDATE:
LIVE STREAM OF DAY 2: http://my.adobeconnect.com/flexsummit (log in as guest)
LIVE BLOG: http://www.spoon.as/2011/flex-summit-live-updates-day-2/
PODCAST: Nerd Radio interview with Deepa Subramaniam and Andrew Shorten
FROM MONDAY DECEMBER 12th:
VIDEO: Session on Falcon and FalconJS Compilers
VIDEO: Flash Platform changes and demos of future Flex contributors – part three
VIDEO: Flash Platform and Flex update session - part two
VIDEO: Q&A with Danny Winokur (VP at Adobe).
BLOG: The Flex team already posted an update last Friday.
TWITTER: Follow the #FlexSummit hashtag for live updates.
Flash Builder 4.6 & Flex SDK 4.6
Yeah… I know… You probably already know about this and yes… I am a bit late to the party but I promise to return to my normal blogging schedule soon. The last couple of weeks I’ve been mostly occupied with looking for a place to live and when I found it furnishing it and getting everything hooked up and getting all the paperwork done took just about all my time. But back to the topic of this blog post.
Flash Builder 4.6 and Flex SDK 4.6 are available now. The one thing you may have missed is that this is a FREE UPDATE for Flash Builder 4.5 owners! Quick note: The update is not delivered by the update manager so you must download the trial of Flash Builder 4.6 and then you can use your Flash Builder 4.5 serial number to activate. You also must uninstall your previous version of Flash Builder 4.5 or 4.5.1 before installing 4.6.
The biggest new features in the SDK are the new mobile components. For Flash Builder I’d say that the ability of adding native extensions to your AIR apps as well as the ability to compile your apps with captive runtime support are the biggest additions to Flash Builder 4.6. Michael Chaize has a great post describing the new Flex 4.6 components and how to use them. He also talks about the new features in Flash Builder 4.6.
Michael also just released The Game Of Flex. The Game Of Flex is a quiz with 16 questions, and it’s a real game, which means that if you correctly answer all the questions you get a chance to win a copy of Flash Builder 4.6!!!
You should also check out Holly Schinsky’s post on how to use the new MapQuest API in your Flex 4.6 applications. It’s pretty amazing to see how advanced MapQuest has become and how easy it is to implement this in your Flex or Flash applications.
Flash on!
The future of Flex
Q: Isn’t Adobe just abandoning Flex SDK and putting it out to Apache to die?
A: Absolutely not!
This and more on http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html (scroll down for the latest updates to the original post)
Back From MAX
Wow… I’m not sure where to start… I’ve been home for a week now and I’m still buzzing… Ok… So let’s start with the beginning. The keynote opening… Wow… That was absolutely mind-blowing. You could only do one thing after watching that and that was applaud as loud as you could. Seeing it on the massive 11.5 meter/38 feet tall screen was breathtaking.
The video really doesn’t do it justice but if you weren’t able to attend MAX this year it’s the next best thing.
There were plenty of exciting announcements in both keynotes. In day 1 we introduced our Creative Cloud offering and our new creative touch apps. Both will change the way you work! I’ve been playing around with our touch apps for a few weeks now (an employee privilege :D) and absolutely love them! My favorites are Proto and Photoshop Touch. Adobe TV has a bunch of videos introducing each one of the touch apps.
Another exciting announcement was the release of the Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition. Now everyone can use the power of the software behind tablet publications like Wired, Martha Stewart Living and 100s of other digital magazines.
And let’s not forget about the acquisition of TypeKit!
And that was just day 1!
Where day 1 was full of design oriented announcements, day 2 was all about developers. And not just Flash developers! If it wasn’t clear before that Adobe wants to support HTML5 developers AND keep innovating with the Flash Platform then I’m sure this keynote proved that point. The acquisition of PhoneGap and the release of Edge Preview 3 were just the starters. The CSS Regions and CSS Shaders entrees were delicious. But the dessert was definitely the highlight. 3D gaming in Flash Player looks absolutely amazing with Epic announcing support for the Unreal engine in Flash Player. The Nissan Juke website is a perfect example of how Flash Player keeps innovating and upgrading the web with every new release.
“But hey… You didn’t talk about Flash Builder in the keynotes.”
That’s true but that doesn’t mean that the Flash Builder team has been sitting around doing nothing! The Flex 4.6 SDK and Flash Builder 4.6 bring a ton of new components and features. Check out Jacob Surber’s article on what’s new in the Flex 4.6 SDK and Flash Builder 4.6 for more info. You can also sign up for the Flash Builder 4.6 prerelease.
Oh… And let’s not forget about the sneaks! I think Rainn Wilson was the best sneaks host to date but the engineers behind the sneaks were the stars of the evening. My favorite sneaks were “crowd sourced video” and “image deblurring” but really all of the sneaks were equally amazing! Oh… And you can view all of them online!
Is it weird that I’m already looking forward to MAX 2012? Mark your calendars: October 20th to 24th 2012, Los Angeles.
PS: If you’re in/near Paris, Berlin or London and would like to see some of this technology firsthand then make sure you sign up for the free Back From MAX events!
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