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On Friday we had our Flex Usergroup Hamburg meeting in our Adobe office. Our speaker Claus Wahlers gave us a look behind the scenes aka source of FC64 which he developed together with Darron Schall. Claus started with some “basics” about how the C64 works to get an idea about what has to be emulated. After that he showed us parts of the code and explained the architecture behind which is divided into the CPU, MemoryManager and the Renderer which besides trillion other things does the final setPixel32.
All in all rocket science and Claus could only explain the tip of the iceberg but we got an impression what it means to build an emulator. Further he mentioned that Ralph Hauwert (one of the guys behind Papervision3D) is currently working on a Flash Player 10 version. This should open new opportunities since the new Vector class (typed Arrays) should be a big performance boost and the new sound features could open the door for sound emulation of the SID chip. For more infos and the source check the OSFlash FC64 site.
Our next usergroup meeting will already be in two weeks. David Sowerby from Straker Interactive will show us ZoomFlex which claims to fasten up Flex development and generates code which is based on Cairngorm and the Universal Mind Cairngorm extension. Check the german FlexUG Hamburg blog for more details.
I am using the Firefox plugin FireFTP for a long time now and never had any problems. Today the worst case happened: I tried to drag-n-drop and image from my desktop into the target directory and - the browser showed the image in this tab and FireFTP was gone. “Makes sense” I thought so I re-opend FireFTP to upload it by selecting the file locally on the left side and then dragging it to the right side on my FTP directory. Unfortunately my img directory was gone - away - removed, aaaahhhhhh! This sounds like an evil bug.
The last backup was a little older so I started recovering with that, copied the files I still had on my machine but I am afraid a few pics are gone. So if you encounter broken images please drop me a comment so I can look if I can fiend them anywhere.
Lessons learned: more backups, more carefully with such tools. The worst case would have been that FireFTP decides to even remove more than only this directory. What would have been if I dragged my image on the root directory of my FTP server? Anybody wants to try ;)?
btw: what are the most popular FTP clients for OS X?
When I try to open http://gmail.com in my browser I get this:
Looks like Google has some issues with german trademarks or whatever. The funny thing was that this showed up as URL: http://mail.google.com/gmail/
So removing the last word “gmail” from the URL finally let me into my “Google Mail” account and NO - I am not traveling here 
If you are a Flex developer in these days the situation on the job market should be pretty fine. Here a little link collection about this topic:
- Flex Directory, List of firms focussed on Flex
- Flex.org Jobs, Blog
- OSFlash Jobs, Blog
- Yahoo Group Flex Jobs, Group/Mailinglist
- Google Group Flex Jobs, Group/Mailinglist
- GlassDoor, Company Rating, Reviews and Salaries
- CrunchBase, Company Database
- The Naugle Group, search firm focussed on RIA developers
- Indeed.com search result on Flex
- LinkedIn, Business network
- Xing, Business network
- Adobe Corporate Jobs
Update 06-28: Flex Gigs, RIA Jobs
Update 06-30: Flexjobs.in
I use Ant a lot to compile AIR or Flex projects. When it comes to larger projects (especially when you compile multiple modules and libraries) you have to increase the amount of memory Ant is allowed to use. Otherwise you can get an exception like this:
[mxmlc] Loading configuration file PATH_TO_YOUR_SDK/flex_sdk_3.0.2.2095/frameworks/air-config.xml
[mxmlc] Error: PermGen space
[mxmlc] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
[mxmlc] at java.lang.String.intern(Native Method)
[mxmlc] …
- In Eclipse open menu: Run->External Tools->Open External Tools Dialog…
- Select the build script you want to change on the left
- Select the JRE tab on the right
- Set the following as VM arguments: -Xms768m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m
These values work for me but you might want to change it to match your environment and project size.
Update: List of JVM options (via Cornel Creanga)
AIR 1.1 was released yesterday and comes with localization features, certificate migration feature and new API calls for File.spaceAvailable and NativeWindow.supportsTransparency. Further 1.1 includes minor bugfixes and memory improvements.
If you develop with Flex Builder be sure to read how to use AIR 1.1 with Flex. There is another Adobe Developer Center article by Christian Cantrell on “Building multilingual Flex application on Adobe AIR“.
Oliver Goldman posted a link to the AIR 1.1 FAQ which also has a list of fixed bugs. Download AIR 1.1.
New on Adobe Labs (Adobe Labs blog):
“This beta release of the update framework for Adobe AIR Applications provides APIs to assist developers in including good update capabilities in their AIR applications.”
“Now, with the Adobe technology code named SwitchBoard, AIR applications can communicate with applications in the Adobe Creative Suite®.
Adobe AIR developers can create applications that participate as first class citizens in creative workflows. Each SwitchBoard solution consists of an AIR application written for SwitchBoard, JavaScripts, and the SwitchBoard service that delivers the scripts to the Creative Suite applications. AIR developers only need to include a Flex library called SwitchBoard.swc in their projects in order to send and receive scripts to and from Creative Suite applications.”
InsideRIA covers a little article about SwitchBoard.
Oliver Goldman from the AIR team has blogged great information about AIR-in-the-enterprise and the support of AIR enterprise deployment and configuration.
Yesterday the new site AIR for IT administrators was launched and provides white papers on deployment, security and configuration.
As Oliver pointed already out ReadWriteWeb has a very interesting article about AIR apps on the corporate desktop.
InfoQ published the case study NASDAQ Market Replay about AIR and Amazon S3.
There are many more reasons why AIR is a perfect fit for enterprise/corporate apps:
- Digitally signing
- Installing and running from the browser
- Custom chrome for fully corporate branded AIR applications
- Localization with the Flex Framework
The next meeting will take place June 27th. My dear friend Claus Wahlers comes the long way from São Paulo, Brazil, to give us a view behind FC64, the award winning Flash C64 emulator he developed together with Darron Schall.
More (german) details on the flexughh blog.
The on AIR tour in Berlin yesterday was really a great event. The location and catering was really good and all was very well organized. What a pity we did not have more time in Berlin as the weather was so sunny.
Here just a summary of all speakers:
Adobe
External speakers
- Benjamin Dobler (showed Parleys.com which is really awesome)
- Marco Kaiser (showed the AIR twitter client thwirl)
- Andre Charland (talked about Nitobi and AJAX)
All sessions where recorded and should be available a week after the tour is over. Until then check the live site with a lot of videos, images, tweets, posts etc.
Just a few more AIR links:
- Aptana IDE for AIR
- AIR Enterprise Deployment
- AIR Admin guide (PDF)
- Notes on the AIR File Format
- AIR Badge Wordpress plugin
- Remote Plugins and Modules in AIR
- AIR Custom Chrome v0.2
- AIR Custom Chrome Windows with Drop Shadows
- Customize the look and feel of a window
- Screen Capture
- Launching an Aplication from the Browser
- Native Drag-n-Drop and clipboard integration
- Creating Windows shortcuts (.lnk) with AIR
Apps
Today I am at the on AIR tour in Berlin. The event is pretty cool and now the last session with Lee Brimelow just started.
Here a quick picture and more to come:
