Intelligent Software Solutions developed a touch table for the White House Situation Room.

The application is really a mash-up of technologies including the ISS-developed Web Enabled Temporal Analysis System framework for data access and aggregation combined with a custom touch interface developed by ISS, utilizing the Adobe® Flex® framework, finally sending results to Google™ Earth.

With this we can see that Flex Framework is getting more and more mature.

To find out more read this press release.

On Wednesday, March 17, 2010 from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (GMT+0200) will be available online an interesting web seminar hosted by Adobe Systems.

Join Piotr Walczyszyn for this 30 minutes e-seminar followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. Learn how to define mutitouch, how to support it, and how you can handle multitouch events. Also explore new techniques for interacting with software and devices with the latest capabilities of the Flash Platform.

For registration please go to: multitouchflex.eventbrite.com.

A few friends showed me this ad. Incredible! Wonderful made. Please look how the background moves away to give space to the add and at the end the jar is zooming back in the movie. This is why Flash Player will evolve even more. I don’t think HTML5 will be able to do this (at least in a couple of years).

Go here (http://vimeo.com/9194146) and enjoy the ad.

If you have a big project you will soon find out that you’ll need to have to versions of the application. One that you work on and one that you need to give it as a release build. On a release build you need to get rid of unwanted things like pre-filed login credentials that you need to have in the development (to rapidly get over login with one click instead of loosing time filing the fields) and that has not to be in the release build.

Here we have Conditional Compile Blocks or Conditional Compilation Definitions. This works like this: you define a variable that is set in the compilation arguments, and depending of theirs values we remove from compilation some unneeded lines of code.

For example in the properties of your Flex project in the Flex Compiler zone you have the following compile arguments:

-locale en_US -define+=CONFIG::development,true

and in code you can use it like this:

CONFIG::development {
    // this is a conditional compile block
    usernameTextInput.text = "myusername";
    passwordTextInput.text = "mypassword";
}

This means the because in the compile arguments we have CONFIG::development,true (which means that CONFIG::development is true) the code lines inside CONFIG::development{ } block will be compiled in the application.

If instead we have CONFIG::development,false (which means CONFIG::development is false) the code lines inside CONFIG::development{ } block will not be compiled.

So, using…

• -define+=CONFIG::development,true — the code lines are compiled in
• -define+=CONFIG::development,false — the code lines are not compiled in

You can define any conditional compile variable but you need to keep the CONFIG name space, like this:

-define+=CONFIG::myvar,true
-define+=CONFIG::debug,false
-define+=CONFIG::othervar,true

This is it, kind of simple.

You can see the the available arguments for MXML compiler by executing mxmlc -help command or by going here and scrolling down to the mxmlc 3.0 options section.

A new version of Flash Player 10.1 has been released: Flash Player 10.1 beta 3. I summarized what’s new from the release notes bellow.

• Support for new platforms
• Designed for mobility
• Developer productivity
• Enhanced browser integration
• Expanded options for high quality media delivery

Lots of fixed bugs are included in this release, bugs from graphics, networking, audio/video, text input, etc. More in the release notes.

Good news. There is a debug version for Flash Player 10.1 beta 3 available.

Flash Player 10.1 on mobile phones? Many thinks that is not possible. But it is. See a few demos of Flash Player 10.1 on different mobile phones showing up “the best way to experience the web“.

Flash Player 10.1 on Android

Flash Player 10.1 on BlackBerry

Flash Player 10.1 on Motorola Droid

Flash Player 10.1 on Palm Pre

Of course the iPhone is missing and you know why.

What I certainly remember from these movie clips is that Flash Player Team is working hard making the Flash Player a great experience on mobile phones and other devices.

I wish Apple would work with Adobe creating a great Flash Player experience on their devices.

Together with the release of Adobe AIR 2.0 beta 2 Adobe has released Flex SDK 3.5a. The big fix is this bug (SDK-24766) – ApplicationUpdaterUI not working on Flex SDK 3.5.

From the announcement on the Official Flex Team Blog we read….

The refreshed build, SDK 3.5a, has only a few files modified in order to fix this issue and this change does not affect the signing and caching of the SDK 3.5 RSLs originally released in December.

We encourage all developers using SDK 3.5 to upgrade their build to SDK 3.5a to continue their development.

The 3.5a Flex SDK can be downloaded from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3.

Today, 2nd of February 2010 Adobe did launch Adobe AIR 2.0 beta 2. The first beta release of AIR 2 was in November 2009 and after 3 months Adobe AIR 2.0 is almost ready for release. Good job AIR team!

Some features and enhancement:

• Print Job Enhancements – better control of the way content is printed from an AIR application
• TLS/SSL sockets – TLSv1, SSLv3
• Flash Access support
• IME API/IME Text Input Enhancements
• AIRCore framework – service monitoring and URL file promise classes

Go to official AIR 2.0 page and read the release notes, the FAQ and download the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime and SDK. Along with all these read the announcement on the Adobe AIR Team Blog and test the samples.

Applications built against Adobe AIR 2 beta 1 will not run using the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime. In order for an AIR 2 beta 1 application to run on the AIR 2 beta 2 runtime, the namespace of the beta 1 application descriptor file must first be updated to “2.0beta2″ and compiled against the AIR 2 beta 2 SDK.

Today, Apple just announced the new iPad device. Great peace of work… and a better news is that the developers will be able to develop applications for iPad using the Flash Pro CS5. You may already know that we are able to develop applications for iPhone using Flash Pro CS5. Following that path, making applications for the new iPad using the tool above, looks like the natural way.

Although Adobe didn’t announced that Flash Builder 4 will be able to package iPhone apps it seems that it is possible – read this article from Ted Patrick blog.

I’m glad that Adobe is prepared for the new iPad. And although Apple do not want to add the Flash Player on their devices Adobe found a way making all Flash Platform developers, also, iPhone and iPad developers. You can read more here.

Related resources…
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone

Our friend Mihai Corlan, who is an Platform Evangelist for Adobe, has a nice idea and ask us to give him a hand to build a Drupal image module with Flex. Now it’s ready and Mihai will talk about this on Feb 05, 2010.

From his web seminar agenda:

• Front end design of widgets and main page
• Back-end integration with Drupal
• Importing your libraries from Flickr and Picassa
• How to account for loading issues when having large libraries of images
• Why Flex and ActionScript where the technology of choice for such a project

Please reed more about it and register at: http://drupalimagemodule.eventbrite.com.