Flex Learning Paths @ Adobe DevNet

I stumbled upon this post on Abdul's blog and Flex Learning Paths is really fantastic step from Adobe in developer's network.

I quite liked the Manager's section as well ;) that's pretty much what a Manager would need from estimation or scheduling perspective. Go through it and am sure you will learn!!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/learn/

Adobe Flash CS4 Announced

As you have surely already read, Adobe Flash CS4 was announced today. It's been quite a while since I last used Flash (coding part that is; I continue to solution and manage products/projects based on Flash) I really was impressed with the overall Flash CS4 look. Some new features are really impressive and hit hard!!!

You can find more information on Flash CS4 here.

You can find more information on all of the new CS4 tools here.

Driving Adobe: Co-founder Charles Geschke on Challenges, Change and Values

One of the best interview article you will ever read in your lifetime!! Do read the embedded PDF, it has the Adobe corporate philosophy, really cool. A definitely must read!!

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2038

AS 3.0 STRING-Concatenation Error: Very Interesting!!

A very interesting post by Colin Moock in which he discusses a very common error thrown by AS 3.0 compiler because of String concatenation.

A more interesting and very details explanation is followed as well by Francis Cheng.

http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000283.html

What Non-Flex Resources Have Helped You with Flex?

That is exactly the question Matt Chotin is asking the Flex community. Go ahead and comment on his blog entry about your learning experiences and source.
My personal take, I learnt Flex (of watever little I know) from the online community reads, blogs, Flexcoders, and ofcourse Adobe site reads. I have not read a single book till day but would like to read atleast a couple of them :)

Adobe MAX 2008 - Enjoy the Experience

MAX is an experience unlike any other — an opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, partners, executives, and Adobe staff for education, inspiration, and community. MAX 2008/2009 will be held in San Francisco, Milan, and Tokyo.
Adobe MAX 2008/2009 will be held in San Francisco (California, US), Milan (Italy, Europe) and Tokyo (Japan). Speakers and Session registrations are open.

MAX 2008 USA - San Francisco, CA - Nov 16-19, 2008
MAX 2008 Europe - Milan, Italy - Dec 01-04, 2008
MAX 2009 Japan - Tokyo, Japan - Jan, 2009

To view the interactive experience on Adobe MAX 2008/2008 and click anywhere outside the informational window.

Flash Lite eSeminars in APAC by Adobe

Adobe has organized some eseminars on on Flash Lite content. Here are some for the coming weeks:

• July 9th - Adobe Flash Lite Widgets for the Chumby
• July 23rd - Reactive Mobile Content with Adobe Flash Lite
• Aug 6th - Persistent Data in Adobe Flash Lite
• Aug 20 - Tips and Tricks for Effective Adobe Flash Lite development

Each of the sessions can be accessed here, and start at 2pm (AEST - +10 GMT).

[via Alessandro]

Adobe Captivate wins CODiE Award

The CODiE 2008 awards were announced in San Francisco and Adobe Captivate won Best Corporate Learning Solution in the education category.
I have been working on various e-Learning projects over the last 3-4 yrs using Captivate and this award just shows how far it has come from a simple screen recording utility to the 'best-of-best' e-Learning authoring tool. Not only it is easy to use but turns out it is really popular among the most effective training development tools.

You can go ahead and put your feature requests for the coming versions of Captivate.

Flash Player 10 is out!!

Adobe Flash Player 10 is available for download from Adobe Labs. Code-named Astro, the latest Flash Player is available for MAC, PC and the Linux users.

Following are some of the highly anticipated and requested Features:

• 3D Effects — Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone.
• Custom Filters and Effects — Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
• Advanced Text Layout — Fully supported Bi-Directional Text Support. A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
• Enhanced Drawing API — Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-style properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
• Visual Performance Improvements — Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration.
• Dynamic sound generation — Dynamic sound generation extends the Sound class to play back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object.
• File Reference runtime access — Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without round-tripping to the server. You no longer have to know a server language or have access to a server to load or save files at runtime.

MXNA is back!!

It has been some time that I was wondering about MXNA and just now I read this blog post, MXNA is back up as feeds.adobe.com.
Christian Cantrell has all of the information on his blog and background. He has been instrumental in putting it up, upgrading it to CF8, and making sure it’s real quick.
My daily dose of blog reading was incomplete without MXNA, glad to see it back!!

Flex Showcase

I have been majorly out of touch of Flash and other Adobe (or Macromedia :) technologies. One of the things that I started studying but could not continue was FLEX.

Just stumbled upon one the sites I used to refer for the latest in Flex, Flex.org and it now has a “Showcase” section that lists a variety of public-facing Flex apps. Great reference for Flex apps.

Adobe MAX 2008

Adobe MAX 2008/2009 will be held in San Francisco (California, US), Milan (Italy, Europe) and Tokyo (Japan). Speakers and Session registrations are open.
Adobe MAX is an experience unlike any other, an opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, partners, executives and Adobe staff for education, inspiration, and community.

• MAX 2008 USA San Francisco, CA Nov 16-19, 2008
• MAX 2008 Europe Milan, Italy Dec 01-04, 2008
• MAX 2009 Japan Tokyo, Japan 2009

I am looking forward to MAX India but not sure if that's gonna happen :(

Adobe Launches Photoshop Express

Adobe today announced Adobe Photoshop Express public beta, a free Rich Internet Application available to anyone who wants to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects.
As the newest addition to the Photoshop family line, Photoshop Express has taken much of Adobe’s best image editing technology and made it simple and accessible to a new online audience. Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2GB of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket to start with.

Security changes in Flash Player 9

I am a little late with the this update, but nevertheless this is importanat peice of info for all Flash/Flex developers. Adobe released new version of Flash Player 9,0,115,0, and there are lots of security changes are being introduced. Some are already there in the current release, more expected in later releases.

For more information on specific changes, you must read the detailed article on Adobe Developer Center.

Adobe CS3 Launch Events

Adobe launched CS3 sometime back and now its time for launch events in India. It's great to see that Adobe is organising events in as many as 9 cities. Great going!!!

Creative Suite 3 is here
Come join us and scores of sharp creative minds for the launch of Adobe Creative Suite 3 in India.

You can register for event here.

Flash CS3 is here!!!!

Just learned from Mike Downey's post that today Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 which includes a huge new release of Flash, Flash CS3 Professional.

This is huge cause now you can actually do AS 3.0 development in Flash. A host of other new features are also listed in the post as well as on Adobe's website. One of my favourite new feature is:

Convert animation to ActionScript
Instantly convert timeline animations into ActionScript 3.0 code that can be easily edited, reused, and leveraged by developers. Copy animations from one object to another.

Read the full post here.

What will I use Adobe's Apollo for?

I found a really interesting post by Kristin on "What will I use Adobe's Apollo for?". Lists out all new amazing possibilities Apollo offers for developers. In case you have anymore ideas, please share.

You can read the full post here.

[via GalaxyGoo]

Apollo alpha on Labs

Today Adobe released an alpha version of Apollo for developers on Labs. You can download it from here and get started on learning more about the new cross-platform desktop runtime.

You can also lay your hands on free pdf copy of Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide by O’ Reilly.

MAX 2007 announced!!

Dates for MAX 2007 are out. Following are the details:

North America MAX 2007
September 30-October 3, 2007
McCormick Place West, Chicago

EMEA MAX 2007
October 2007 Barcelona, Spain


Japan MAX 2007
November 2007Japan

[via Matt]

Apollo alpha on labs soon!!

This is very exiting and cool!!

Mike Chamber blogged about Apollo alpha release on Adobe Labs.