I’ll be at ApolloRanch in Boulder this coming Saturday evening. The event is scheduled to begin at 5 o’clock and run just shy of midnight. Sounds like they have a full and engaging schedule lined up with a lot of opportunities to both interface with other developers and learn a lot of useful stuff at the same time. There are 85 tickets left as of this posting and I would encourage anyone in the Denver area interested in Flex or Apollo to sign up- it’s FREE!
Adobe annouced today that Flex is going open source!
Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK.
So what does this mean? While most of the components of the Flex framework: SDK, source code, libraries, et cetera will be open to community development, Flex Builder, Charting, and possibly other tools will remain as they are.
This action should hopefully help in two areas:
While I do enjoy using Flex Builder, The price seems unjustified and open source tools are getting very close to providing a very similar workflow. A quick scan of the many Flex-related projects on Open Source Flash is evidence of this. Adobe making the decision to release Flex as open source may be the push these projects need to really make something wonderful. I certainly have high hopes for the entire Flash Platform resulting from this announcement.
This announcement expands on Adobe’s commitment to open technology initiatives, including the contribution of source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation under the Tamarin project, the use of the open source WebKit engine in the “Apollo” project, and the release of the full PDF 1.7 specification for ISO standardization.
It was reported a few days ago that we will finally see a new version of CamStudio screen recording software! This is great news as the program has not be updated in a few years now. I’ve tried to run version 2.0 on Windows Vista and it unfortunately will not record anything but some chunky multi-colored fuzz. If 2.5 remedies this- that will be wonderful. As for any other new features, we will have to wait for an official announcement. Very exciting news.
When the Apollo alpha was first released a few weeks back, I began working on an application which would allow the user to drag a photo into a canvas area, and then present drawing tools to modify the photo and save it to the hard drive. Certain functionality such as drag and drop support is not yet available in the alpha release, so I’ve modified the project into what I call “HTML Snapshot Saver”.
This new module will allow a user to navigate to the website of their choice, make some quick sketches or notes over the page itself, and then save that image as a jpg to their documents folder. I can see possible uses for something like this in troubleshooting scenarios but this is mostly just a learning experience for my self. This is version .5 of the application because there is some functionality that I have not built into the thing yet. In any case, you can download it below.
About a month ago, I was interviewed by a writer from the University of Denver faculty and staff monthly newspaper, ‘The Source’. The context of this meeting was the launch of the second iteration of our VAGA project this past January. I sat down with the writer and gave her a short demo of the application, explaining how unique a system this was among educational institutions and the greater world in general, the technologies behind the application, the necessary expertise of such a small group of developers, et cetera. While I understand that not all of what I went into would be included in the paper, I had hoped for a little more technical accuracy and positive engagement.
The article itself is rather short and unfortunately does not convey much of what I tried to get across. In fact, it somewhat erroneously states that “The program was created in ActionScript using the Flash Platform.” While this is somewhat true, the underlying core of the system is built using ColdFusion and mySQL. All of the major tools in the application are built with Flash, and while this is a large chunk of the programming involved, it is certainly not the whole picture.