May 29, 2008

Features vs Functionality

Filed under: Development,Flex — Steve @ 8:57 PM

I’ve just spent a few days trying to implement a specific feature in my current AIR project. Having tried several approaches and workarounds with varying degrees of nearly-but-not-quite-ness, I’ve had to admit defeat for now and have moved to a different implementation that I’m less happy with, but still allows basic functionality. At the same time Kieran has recently started work on his first Flex project and it’s been interesting to see how an experienced developer, when faced with a feature or issue he can’t easily implement or find a solution for, has quickly fallen back to a ‘next best’ solution, and moved onto getting the application functional and usable.

Time pressures obviously play a part here – the amount of time you have available before the project has to go out the door is going to impact on how much you are able to include desirable features over essential ones, but I think what I’ve picked up from this is that as soon as you encounter an issue, if you can’t predict reasonably accurately how long it’s going to take you to solve it, you need to set limits on how long you spend trying to make it work and at same time identify what is achievable if you fail to get it done within that limit.

If all this sounds like common sense, it is of course – but I found that in this instance I got too focused on a specific feature, rather than on getting the application functional enough that users can start using it sooner rather than later.

May 27, 2008

Do you use Google Apps?

Filed under: Applications — Steve @ 10:51 PM

Writing about web page http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080526-the-promise-of-google-apps-includes-a-shrinking-it-staff.html

Interesting article and discussion on Ars Technica about the increasing use of Google Apps and outsourcing of student email to GMail by universities. The article is discussing the specific impact this is having on IT staff numbers in some universities, but I’m more interested in the trend towards using applications ‘in the cloud’ and moving off the desktop, particularly in higher education.

In the discussion, quite a few people see migration of utility services such as email (particularly student email) as a ‘no-brainer’ decision; letting Google’s massive and well-resourced infrastructure handle scalability and uptime does on the face of it seem a fair trade-off for a bit of advertising and loss of branding, but as Googles provides more desktop-style applications, it is pushing the merits (and cost-benefits) of such applications to institutions in what seems to be a targeted campaign. As some people rightly point out, Google isn’t an exclusive provider of such services and others note there are many other complex issues to consider other than infrastructure and support costs, but on the face of it using free applications like some of those mentioned below seems like a valid move.

Anyway, I digress; how many students at Warwick have tried or regularly use online software like Google Apps (or any internet/browser-based application, like Buzzword, Zoho, Photoshop Express etc.) in preference to MS Office or even free applications like OpenOffice on the desktop? What/how/why do you use it? What would you say is missing from these applications (in terms of specific functionality versus a desktop application, or a whole package). I’m interested!

May 15, 2008

Flash Player 10 (‘Astro’) pre–release on Adobe Labs

Filed under: Adobe,Flash — Steve @ 8:55 AM

Writing about web page http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

A pre-release of Flash Player 10 is now out on Adobe Labs. Astro has a number of new features; P2P support, Speex voice codec (no more having to use ASAO!), dynamic streaming support and RTMFP, 3D, improved hardware acceleration and more sophisticated text control being the ones I’m most looking forward to.

The full feature list can be found here

May 14, 2008

Flash H264: Moving the MOOV Atom

Filed under: Flash,H264 — Steve @ 11:21 AM

I just had to encode a couple of videos from AVI to H.264 format for playing via a Flash-based video player and noticed that the player was having to download the whole file before playing it. I checked out this Adobe Tech article on H.264 encoding and here’s why:

One important thing about playing an H.264 video file as progressive download is that the moov atom needs to be located at the beginning of the file, or else the entire file will have to be downloaded before it begins playing. The moov atom is a part of the file that holds index information for the whole file.

I was using SUPER to encode to H.264, and by default the moov atom gets placed at the file end. Fortunately, Renaun Erickson at Adobe has kindly created a small AIR application (a port of a C++ application) that will take a standard H.264 file and relocate the moov atom to the front of the file, and then progressive download works properly.

Edit- thanks to Marshall’s comment, if you’re using SUPER there’s an option to select ‘Streamable H.264’ – do that and the moov atom will be put at the beginning of the file. :-)

May 9, 2008

AS Development skills sharing at Warwick

Filed under: AIR,Development,Flash,Flex — Steve @ 11:18 PM

Chris was talking today about intra-team/department skills sharing, which I think is a great idea. With regard to Flash and Flex development at Warwick we’ve recently embarked on something along these lines, with the formation of a University Flash and Flex developers group consisting of people actively using (or just interested in) Actionscript development. It started with a forum that was initially populated with ITS people (plus one or two others), but since starting to deliver some Flash courses for ITS Training I wanted to maintain contact with what attendees did with the skills they’d acquired after the course, and the forum was opened up to allow more people to contribute. We held the first ‘skills session’ a couple of weeks ago, in the Teaching Grid. It was purposely an informal gathering, consisting of developers from ITS and departments, plus lots of coffee and biscuits. The session was an opportunity for everyone to show what they’d been working on and share expertise and a mix of ongoing Flash, Flex and AIR projects were demonstrated, plus discussion on development approaches and potential applications in the future.

Overall I thought it went well (we ran out of time in the end) and although next time some structure to the session might help us cover ground more efficiently, the informality and range of projects kept it interesting, and it was especially good to share ideas with others while receiving questions and feedback. As a result of the session, I’ve been asked to present a more formal hour-long session on AIR to the CIS Team next week, which I think I’ll prepare some slides for.

Anyway, my point is that personally I found it quite fun/rewarding to find out what other people were doing or planning to do with the technology, and to see and discuss approaches/methodologies and alternatives; we should definitely do more of this kind of thing in future. Time will tell whether we maintain the Flash/Flex/AIR group sessions but I hope we can.

Warwick staff interested in Flash/Flex/AIR/AS3 development can join the developer group forum here. For students, Warwick Game Design have expertise with Flash for game development.

May 6, 2008

Flex–Spy – Live Component Inspector

Filed under: Development,Flex — Steve @ 9:42 PM

Writing about web page http://code.google.com/p/fxspy/

I’ve been using Flex-Spy today for the first time, and it’s really useful. It allows you to inspect and affect pretty much any parameter of a component while the application is running which is way faster than constantly building and running the app for trying small tweaks, and saves waiting for the CSS previewer or refreshing the Design View. Installation is a snap as it’s packaged as an SWC.

View a demo of Flex Spy (press the FlexSpy button top right to launch the inspector)

May 1, 2008

Adobe Open Screen Project

Filed under: Flash — Steve @ 8:34 AM

Writing about web page http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/faq/index.html

Adobe announced the Open Screen Project today. The project will allow access to key Flash specifications (AMF, SWF, FLV etc.) and remove licencing restrictions on Flash and AIR for devices. The stated aims are:

-Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Fantastic news – actually something that may have been lost in the noise here is that it seems like AIR is definitely coming to devices. Allowing access to the SWF specifications is a major step for Adobe. Kevin Lynch of Adobe describes the rationale behind OSP in this video.