For the next four weeks, I will be conducting a series of four Adobe Connect sessions through Columbus Digital, Columbus’ Official Adobe User Group. These sessions will focus not on ActionScript or Flex Development itself, but rather on ancillary skills and tools important to Application Architects and Developers who want to get into serious Flex application development.

The topics will be as follows:

• October 5th- Flex and Subversion
• October 12th- MVC Frameworks and Cairngorm
• October 19th- Unit Testing with FlexUnit
• October 26th- Automating Application Compilation and Deployment with Ant

I’ve been invited to speak at the Columbus Ruby Brigade on AIR and Ruby integration. Given the expert nature of my audience I’m not going to dwell too much on Ruby and Rails, but will focus instead on how to integrate Flex & Air into a Ruby based service layer. This will be a highly technical presentation- I will be covering the following topics:

• The internet ecosystem: Ruby, Rails, AIR, Flex, and where do they all fit
• Cost: What is it going to take?
• Installing and using RubyAMF
• Overview of MXML, Actionscript, Eclipse and the SDK
• Consuming data services with Flex & Air
• Building a simple call/response architecture

The presentation was on Monday, June 16th. The files are below:

I’ve finally gotten around to fully open source my various applications, factoring and debugging the code, commenting and applying all the necessary licenses and other miscellaneous logistical duties to get my two AIR applications up and out there.

src ="http://www.practicalflash.com/AIR/Installers.html"
width="100%"
height="200" style="border: 0px none #000000">

Practical Desktop

Practical Desktop appears to be a simple timekeeping application, though in reality it’s an open source widget framework that allows pretty much anyone to build a deployable block of functionality that can start interacting with other widgets. The wrapper’s there for you, go nuts. The source is here

From a personal perspective, I use it as a beta and explorative sandbox, because there are a lot of interesting things coming out in the near future that I’d like to offer some guidance on development best practice, and to do so I will have to figure it out myself first. Rest assured that the widgets I build will be functionally complete, though perhaps limited in feature support.

Pandora

The Pandora Desktop application is really just a customized webkit browser that’s hardwired to the Pandora mini player. I’ve fixed the application so minimization works in Windows, and expanded it to include the player’s html wrapper as well. The reason I did this is because Pandora’s a free service, and I’d like to make sure that I’m not ripping them off by stripping out the ads. Optimally I’d like to help them convert their existing player to AIR, but until I have free time (or they pay me ) that won’t happen.

Good morning, everyone. With the release/opensourcing of a few AIR applications I’ve been working on, I’m refactoring the majority of the Practical Flash libraries. I apologize to you if this breaks your svn:externals, but in order to both stay in line with Adobe’s branding guidelines and make sure that I make my SVN repository as flexible as possible, I’m breaking things apart a little. Basically, the new folder structure will be as follows:

• Ant
  Ant macros, includes and libs
• Libraries
  The new home of the practicalflash libraries, refactored to match the Flex 3 project layout
• PandoraDesktop
  The Pandora Desktop application
• PracticalDesktop
  The Practical Desktop utility widget framework application and timekeeper
• Tools
  Miscellaneous non-actionscript tools and utilities
• build.xml
  The unified build script

This morning (well, at 12:01 AM) Adobe announced a large cross-industry collaborative effort called the Open Screen Project. According to the marketing boilerplate, it is dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.

What it really means is described in this article.

Today is Flex Camp Cleveland, an educational seminar targeted at someone starting out in Flex. If you’ve had some experience doing software development and are interested in building RIA’s, the entire Flex Camp series are really useful to attend.

The lineup of speakers is pretty impressive, including Ben Forta and Adam Lehman from Adobe, Kris Schultz and myself from Resource Interactive, Doug Pierce and Curtis Gayheart from WonderLab and Scott Andrews from DimpleDough. I’ll be giving a more detailed event report when it’s over, however for the time being I will post my presentation assets here for download.

Yes yes, another tech blog. Thousands are out there, some copies, some linkers, some parrots and some few are source of original content. The purpose and vision for this particular one is the latter, and while we are moving from “Content is Key” to “Community is Key”, I feel there remains a niche for the individual. Which begs the question: What is my purpose for this blog?