Pocket Flash

Did you know that you can have 3d planes floating around your screen?

Late last night I was playing around with the AIR - settings and changed ‘Window style’ to ‘Custom Chrome (transparent)’ and created my air app. My AIR app loads in images and slides them along the screen on a 3D Plane, here’s the results.

Look what I got in the post just before the weekend, an alpha prototype Chumby yay. After a weekend of playing around my head is spinning with ideas for widgets. Unfortunately half of which have already been developed, I think I’ll stick with the magic 8 ball idea first and make use of the motion sensors you can access via flash.

I’ve also had it in my mind to upload my 20Gb music collection and write an Air app that plays my music over the air (no pun intended) I’ve just had BE broadband pro installed so I have a 24mb line so speed shouldn’t be an issue. I can then also access my music from home too, without having to carry back and fourth. So what’s stopping my writing a Chumby widget that does the same? Well, time for one, but in theory there’s not a lot else. It would only be about 20-30 lines of PHP to spider the folder structure and write it into XML then you could have all the fun you like with a nice little UI. Unfortunately I have no idea how to rip get the album art from Amazon or even from iTunes, but the fact coverflow did it independently, before it was swallowed by Apple means it’s possibly right?

I really should have posted this when I first watched it, but here you are a video taken from the Adobe Max conference, showing some new features for the new player. Notably there’s now a Z rotation property for sprites.

Youtube video of Google’s CEO Eric Schindt schwiped straight from abduzeedo, check it here.

I think if Adobe can nail a realistic distribution model for Flash Lite apps that would enable developers to get content out there, then Flash developers (and by that I mean Flash, Flash Lite, Flex and AIR) can really define “web 3.0″ apps in the way Eric mentions in this video. I’ve always thought that Ruby on Rails and Flash (of any sort) make absolutely beautiful partnership for developing RIAs as Rails offers a low entry for such a powerful set of technologies.

On another, note Flash has always been synonymous with viral marketing and as I truly believe, Flash Lite one day find itself hand in hand with mobile and therefore viral marketing.

Well there goes my plans for today, get Apollo here now.

There are also a few sample Apollo applications that can be downloaded from Adobe Labs too.

Renaun Erickson has posted the keynotes from ApolloCamp

This pretty much sums up what I’ve been thinking since I watched Christopher Brichford’s Apollo presentation

“But the idea is that Apollo builds on tools and technology that is already out there and move it further into Desktop RIA and phones (Apollo, Flash list).
Interesting note about reasons for choosing WebKit as the HTML engine. It was small, had a mobile version, Nokia has ported it”

Surely it’s only a matter of time before we get to develop Apollo mobile apps?

Mike Chambers has posted his code from 360Flex to build a very simple WYSIWYG HTML editor, that shows the Apollo File and HTML API’s
Example Code for 360Flex Apollo Session

Christian Cantrells’ “Video : Apollo APIs Session from 360Flex” is available here
which shows lots of example apps and API’s in Apollo

If you are interested in any of those things, you MUST watch this video.

Does this mean I can now claim a Wiimote on my expenses?

I’m reaching fever pitch about Apollo,

A link to ‘Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide’ was sent to me this morning, I started mooching through it and found a staggering amount of links to ‘page not found’. The one link that did work, lead me to Ryan Stewart’s article ‘Apollo public alpha coming in the next few weeks’. I’ve been looking forward to Apollo for a while as I’ve used mdm Zinc to create cross platform desktop apps from Flash for a few years, and although it’s fairly easy I can’t wait to see the Flash / Flex - Apollo workflow.