Hello Guys,

The wait is over… Adobe has announced the downloadable beta of Flash Builder 4 (Flex Builder is renamed now) and most awaited Flash Catalyst, on Adobe labs.

Download links:

Flash Builder 4 Beta
Flash Catalyst Beta

Get your gloves on guys…

I came across a really nice debugger tool to debug flash, flex and air applications at run-time. It is De MonsterDebugger This is by far the best debugging applications I have seen. It not only allows accessing all the properties and method of the objects inside the SWF, but also permits to manipulate the values and pass parameters to inbuilt object methods and custom methods.

The native flash trace can be replaced by the trace of this application and voila… you will be really surprised to see the innovative way of displaying the trace. It also features memory consumption which allows for better optimization and have a check on garbage collection.

The best of the all is it is open source air application. Once installed, it takes less than a minute to enable your flash,flex and air applications for the debugging, using this tool. Go check it out and you will not be disappointed.

Lee Brimelow has provided a fantastic introduction session on the tool and can be accessed here.

Congratulations to Nishita, who is working with me, for securing whooooping 98% to become Adobe Certified Flash Developer. All eyes on the rest of the guys , I know they are not too far…

Congratulations to Bharat Patel!!!
He is working with us as a Flex Developer.. Err… Now he is an Adobe Certified Flex Developer. 3 Cheers for him.. Are you listening guys??? )

Areez Gangji, an intern at Adobe, has compiled a list of top 10 rocking Flex and Air applications, invaluable for students. It is a must read. Go through them, here.

After a reasonably long wait, finally Sun Microsystems have announced the release of JavaFX preview for public. Click here to visit the official site where you will find loads of information and tutorials to get started. The scene is becoming hot with Silverlight getting into final release, Adobe preparing Flex 4 and JavaFX just arriving on the canvas.

Long live RIA!!!

Hi Folks,

Flex 4 SDK is out and can be availed from here.

There is a good amount of information about Gumbo, a.k.a. Flex 4, on Flex open source site. You can read about it here. Also, the specifications for Gumbo can be accessed from here.

If you are interested in video demos, don’t miss Matt Chotin’s classic video presentation on the plans of next Flex SDK.

One of the key improvements in the next Flex version is the Designer/Developer workflow. Ely Greenfield has provided a superb piece of video to demonstrate the same, a must watch.

As a techie, if you are interested in delving deeper in the Component Architecture of Gumbo, move on and if you wish to have a look at the feature specs, this is the place.

Gear up guys…

Astro is moving.. err… galloping. The beta 2 of Flash Player 10 is out.. There are number of improvements including enhanced audio API, Fullscreen keyboard access and a lot more. Well, best place to check out the details is here.

Great going Adobe!!!

Voila… Adobe has recently announced a tie-up with major search engine giants including Yahoo and Google to revamp the flash player so as to enable these search engines to fetch the content within the swf files and rank them for search keywords. Keeping in mind the penetration of flash player (around 98%), this is going to result in a major boost in the number of applications deployed on flash player. It is learnt that it will also fetch the dynamic data pulled inside swf files. Well, there is much more insight on this by Justin Everett-Church from Adobe, posted on Flashmagazine. A must read for all flash/flex enthusiasts.

This is an obvious question as to what is so Rich about RIA. An experienced RIA developer can easily answer this question. The most important aspect of RIA is the UI and Usability. Though they may sound similar to you, they in fact are 2 different things. While UI deals with colors, contrasting themes, visuals, state transitions etc. Usability is all about how easily the application is accessible to the normal user. By normal user I mean one who is average computer savvy. This takes a great amount of deal in deciding the overall anatomy of the application and states’ management. There are abundant amount of fantastic sources available on web to know about all these aspects. However, as I came across a brilliant company specializing in providing state-of-the-art User Interface and Usability experience, thought of sharing with all of you. EffectiveUI has a niche expertise in providing kick-ass, rock solid visual richness to RIA. Their clientele is pretty Impressive. Check out their site and know it yourself.