« June 2006 | Main | February 2007 »
September 12, 2006
Sneak Peeks at Flashforward
During Kevin Lynch’s keynote at Flashforward in Austin, TX today, I had the opportunity to demo both Flex Builder and Apollo One of the things that Kevin wanted to do was to have each demo be a sneak peek of something, so everyone who presented had to have something new to show.Flex Builder 2.0 for Mac
The first part of my demo was to introduce Flex concepts and I built the Flickr browsing app, which a number of us have done before, so that wasn’t new. What was new was that I built it using Flex Builder on my MacBook Pro! This was the first time that we’ve shown the Mac version publicly, and it went great. Often when you demo pre-beta software, you have problems, but Flex Builder worked like a charm.
Now my whole presentation had to be between 10-15 minutes, including slides and witty banter, so the Flex part was probably under 10 minutes, but I was able to show off design view, and MXML and embedded ActionScript coding features. The performance is great and it’s been very stable.
Building Apollo Apps
There were a couple of new things in this demo. To start with, this was the first time that we’ve demoed actually building an app for Apollo. Previously we have shown apps running on Apollo, but haven’t ever shown what’s involved in getting them to do so.
What I did was to take the Flickr app that I developed in the first part of the presentation and converted it into an Apollo app that ran outside the browser. To do this, there were just a couple of tweaks that I had to make, most notably switching the Panel to an ApplicationWindow so that it would get Maximize/Minimize/Close controls and to configure Flex Builder to use the Apollo launcher instead of the browser.
Another interesting thing about the demo was that I again did it on the Mac. Previously we hadn’t even shown Apollo apps on the Mac and so it was really cool to be able to not only show it running on the Mac, but building it there, too.
Finally, I showed an example of an Apollo installed my system like any other desktop app. For that, I had a version of the Flickr app in the Doc of my Mac and ran it from there. One thing that I did not mention during the demo and nobody would have been able to figure out is that I actually built the installed app on Windows and just copied the app package over to the Mac where it installed itself.
Originally, I had planned to demo the installed app on Windows running in Parallels on my Mac and show how it could be just copied over to the Mac and run. However, the networking at the hotel where the conference is taking place had been very flakey and I was having throughput problems, so I wanted to simplify the setup and so that part was dropped.
Looking Forward to MAX
There were lots of other great demos given during the keynote. Big Spaceship showed their Nike Air site, which is really cutting edge, running on Flash Player 9 for Linux, which was the first time we’ve shown that. Mike Downey and Justin Everett-Church followed me with lots of great features from the upcoming Flash 9, including the new Photoshop import wizard, which looks fantastic, as well as my personal favorite, being able to save timeline motion as XML is really MXML, so you can paste it into a Flex app and it works!
Overall, the next few months should be really exciting as things get polished up for MAX. Don’t miss it!
Posted by Mark Anders at 06:02 PM | Comments (1)