Archive for the ‘Flash’ Category

Incubator News Roundup (Molehill)

Sunday, February 27th, 2011

NOTE: this post was last updated with new links on March 9, 2011

New and truly revolutionary versions of Flash Player and Adobe AIR named “Incubator” (formerly Molehill APIs) were made available on Adobe Labs. To those who are unfamiliar with the new release, it features hardware accelerated 3D graphics support.

As Adobe puts it: “The Adobe® AIR® and Adobe Flash® Player Incubator is a technology preview program for more adventurous developers who are willing to experiment with Flash Platform runtime features that are in early development stages.”

New Incubator builds of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR available here:
Download Incubator Builds and check Wiki

If you are keen on exploring 3D capabilities right away, you can use one of the pre-release versions of the popular 3D frameworks that also announced Incubator support. To see a list of all features that are included in the Incubator builds, check out this post.

3D frameworks supporting Molehill:

Here are some LIVE demos:

(make sure you have Flash Player Incubator installed first)

Added on March 9:

Added on March 8:

Added on Feb 27:

Videos (only new stuff):

Just Source Code:

Tutorials and Articles:

Related News:

Now, let’s change the web!
Follow me on twitter @pauliusuza for more news and updates on #flash and #molehill

54 CommentsPosted in Actionscript 3, AIR, CS5, Flash, General

MAX 2010: 3D in Flash, AIR for Android and TVs, Controller Support!

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Day one of Adobe MAX 2010 announcements brought some pretty amazing things, and the conference is just getting started!

3D support in Flash

First of, the most important announcement in my mind, full 3D support in Flash Player. While there’s no details about the technology itself, we have seen Kevin Lynch demo a 3D racing game which looked nowhere far from stunning and the processor was hovering around 0-1% of CPU. This is HUGE! With the current adoption rate of Flash Player (73% in 3 months) it will be the most popular 3D gaming platform once released to the wild, surpassing Unity3D and other smaller competitors in no time.

Game Controller Support

This is epic as well – Kevin Lynch demoed controlling a game running inside a browser using mouse and then switching to a steering wheel and a PS3/XBOX type controller. By itself it means that Flash will finally be able to use a whole new range of game controller devices. However I think that this might be a hint to a whole bigger announcement Adobe could make in the next few days – PS3 support? Xbox? Who knows… ;)

AIR for Android and TVs

AIR for Android SDK is now publicly available for download. Any developer building an app in AIR can now package their app for sale in the Android Market. Also it is now possible to build an app for Google TV, which runs Android. Adobe blog has more info.

Stage Video

Native performance for video running inside Flash on tabled devices, mobiles and desktop. Again, awesome!

You can experience MAX conference streaming live using new Flash Player P2P technology:
http://max.adobe.com/online/

Let’s see what day 2 of MAX 2010 brings us!

3 CommentsPosted in Actionscript 3, AIR, android, Applications, Apps, Flash, General, MAX 2010

IDev.tv plugin store is now live!

Friday, August 13th, 2010

We have just added a plugin store to IDev.tv where you can purchase (and sell, please contact me for details) all kinds of goodies for IDev.tv platform. Go check it out!

Every account now also comes with affiliate program where you can earn money by sharing IDev.tv with your friends. To start using it, just sign up and check out “Affiliate Settings” section inside your IDev Account!

No CommentsPosted in Actionscript 3, Applications, Apps, Flash, General

Beta Testers Wanted – www.IDev.tv

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

For a while now, we at InRuntime have been working on a new product for Flash Platform and just couple of days ago we have released a public beta to the wild (woohoo!)

It’s called IDev and it’s an advanced XML based template system for building fully functional Flash websites. It comes in three parts: a ready to use website (SWF + XML), a SWC library for developers and a set of online tools located at www.idev.tv.

You should be interested in IDev if:

- You are a freelancer making Flash websites for a living (IDev serves as a perfect base for freelance development, allowing you to mix and re-use components to create unique online experiences)

- You are an Actionscript 3 developer making standalone Flash components and you would like to earn some cash (You will be able to easily port and sell your components as IDev plugins)

- You are a person / company who wants to set up their website without putting your hands in the code or hiring a programmer (IDev is fully customizable through XML, so you don’t have to know how to program)

Sign Up, Talk, Share!

We think that IDev is a great product and we would like to ask your assistance in getting it off the ground. Go to www.idev.tv and SIGN UP, test it out by downloading your own copy from Launchpad and let us know what you think about it. To make the visit worthwhile, we are giving away all our existing IDev plugins for FREE for every new user.

If you like IDev as much as we do, please SHARE IDev.tv with your friends!

No CommentsPosted in Actionscript 3, Applications, Apps, Flash, General

Gianduia vs. Flash

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Today, internet is full of stories about the Apple's secret weapon that will kill Silverlight, Java and Flash once and for all... Again! Sadly this is becoming sort of a cliche (of everyone wanting to kill Flash) and it's my second article in a row trying to give you a completely different point of view.

The mythical new framework is called Gianduia which relates to Gianduja a sweet chocolate containing about 30% hazelnut paste, invented in Turin by Caffarel in 1852 (wikipedia). I'm betting on a hazelnut reference in the logo once Gianduia is out!

Since early version of Gianduia is already deployed on some parts of Apple.com (here and here), I went to find out what exactly is it. Here's what I found by digging through the available information and sources.

Gianduia is:

  • A client-side Model View Controller based framework in JavaScript 1.x
  • Cocoa (with CoreData) and WebObjects translated to JavaScript
  • Lots of OS X / iPhone / iPad style interfaces in your web browser
  • Targeted at building HTML5 web apps using Cocoa
  • Meant to unify multiple JS frameworks used by Apple into one piece

What it's not:

  • A Flash, Java, Silverlight or any other "killer" - it's just another JS framework running in your browser
  • Portable - it runs in the browser, but it needs XCode+Mac to compile from Cocoa.
  • Self sufficient - it relies on device or browser for delivering video / audio / interactivity to the end user

Gianduia's direct competition:

So if it's not the next "Flash Killer" what exactly is Gianduia's purpose? The answer is simple: Apple are just trying to fix their own loose web application toolset and to put all components under a single unified framework. In this case however they will be competing with other JS frameworks out there such as:

Gianduia's APIs

At the time of writing, Giandua's main framework file is located here. Depending on requirements on each application, it would call and load multiple "modules" which appear to be sort of a descriptor files of an equivalent UI element or utility class in Cocoa, just written in Javascript.

For those of you who want to peek under the hood and check the inner workings of the framework, below is a list of some of Gianduia's framework classes (links to Javascript files). Whitespace has been removed from JS files, but they uncompressed and still more or less readable.

You can see some really interesting stuff here like NSPersistentStore or NSBindingDeclaration, take a look:

Foundation

AppKit

CoreData

The Unusual

While browsing through the new API I noticed a new syntax which probably relates to Gianduia's data binding features. The following bit comes from a script type="text/declaration" tag located in the head section of Apple iPhone reservation tool.

Maybe someone from readers could provide more ideas on what this code does? Do you think it's a good approach?

PLAIN TEXT
HTML:
  1. <script type="text/declaration">
  2.     skuThumbnailC : Gianduia.AppKit.NSImage {
  3.         src = skuRepetitionC.objectAtEnumerationIndex.url;
  4.     }
  5.     skuNameC : Gianduia.AppKit.NSDynamicString {
  6.           value = skuRepetitionC.objectAtEnumerationIndex.name;
  7.     }
  8.     selectedPlanInputC : Gianduia.AppKit.NSDynamicElement {
  9.         value = selectedPlanURI;
  10.     }
  11.     errorMessageC : Gianduia.AppKit.NSDynamicElement {
  12.         elementClass="alert";
  13.         innerText = errorMessage;
  14.     }
  15.     hideWhenNoWhereAvailableC : Gianduia.AppKit.NSConditional{
  16.         condition = skuRepetitionC.objectAtEnumerationIndex.hideNotAvailStoreDesc;
  17.         negate = true;
  18.     }      
  19. </script>

Impressions

I might be mistaking, but after playing around with the live demos and looking at the sources I think Gianduia is not meant to be written by hand rather than generated by a compiler - syntax is sort of unusual, hacky and difficult to read.

However even in this case Gianduia will have a slight edge over other JS frameworks due to the fact that it's developed by Apple; This means if this framework ever gets released to the wild you can expect very tight integration with XCode and ability to choose "web" as a compile target for your next Cocoa application.

The dark side of this is the new language lock-in trend that starts to emerge - it seems that Apple wants everyone to write their code only with Obj-C in XCode, on a Mac and compile to other platforms, but not the other way around.

As far as the demos go, I was not impressed. What I saw was pretty basic and static web forms and still the UI components did not seem very responsive. I would really like to experience this framework integrated in a more advanced web application to test how well it performs handling difficult tasks.

Gianduia seems to have implemented a dependency model which results in chain-loading of framework components. At one point during my test of Apple iPhone reservation tool I had user interface frozen (with unresponsive inputs and no preloader) for 12.7s while the dependencies were loading in the background - that's a bad user experience!

Conclusion

It's shaping to be a nice extension for developers using XCode and a solid framework for building layout based HTML apps but we will have to wait and see if it's anything more than that.

Just don't put your bets on Gianduia killing Flash -

it just won't happen.

8 CommentsPosted in Applications, Flash, General, Javascript, JS