MyLineRider

A few days ago I started working on some interactive charts with Flex 3 Builder Pro, and I have been making some nice progress. In the past I did some stuff with Flex 2, but the documentation and examples weren’t that great.

Now in Flex 3, the dynamic help has more and better examples and the livedocs are quite good. The charting API, however has so many possibilities that the examples and explanations are not enough. Hence, there is a lot of work required to customize the charts the way I need them.

In a few days i will start posting some examples, so others can learn from what I have been doing and hopefully I will learn more as well for the comments and feedback for my readers (Are you outthere?)

Today I went to monthly meeting of the BFPUG (Boston Flash Platform User Group) to see a presentation about Gamebrix. Naveena Swamy, the founder of the company, showcased their platform, and it was a real threat.

I believe Gamebrix is up to something big. With their platform you can create games in 2 ways: One, by using the Gamebrix express, in which you can customize preexisting games or game templates by changing assets (graphics, audio, animations). The otherone by using the Gamebrix Builder. With the later you select your assets (graphics, animations, audio), either provided by the system or by importing your own. Then, you can add intelligence to your objects (again images or animations). By intelligence I mean interactivity - user actions (mouse clicks on the object), behaviors (how the objects react to events- i.e. to collisions), constraints and more. Finally you create the game, which is compiled on the server and produce a swf file (Flash file) that can be placed in any website or social networking site.

The platform has been built with Adobe Flex and its very easy to use. Once a user finishes creating a game, she can share it through the Gamebrix platform or post it in her own website. The game creator can easily edit games, change graphics, sounds and logic and quickly produce completely different games based on the same main storyline.

One cool idea is to use the platform to create contexts. A company can define certain rules, like use those graphics ( a logo, and some other branding elements) and use these themes to create games for that company in exchange for prizes and recognition. If you want to explore the potential of this for your own organization you may need to contact the company.

Right now the platform is in public beta testing and the access to create and share games is totally free of charge. We discussed a little about their business model, but not enough to be able to mention anything in here.

Well, what are you waiting for. Go there and create some cool games and share them with the world!!

I had the intension to play with an Actionscript 3D engine since I first learned about Sandy and then about PaperVision 3D and Away3D, but always started and quited, because I had to spend a lot of time getting familiar with those engines.

Last month Lee Brimelow - theFlashBlog, posted a nice tutorial of how to create a rotating cube. I took the opportunity to play with the code (in Flash CS3) and then tried to ported to Flex. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to include the images as MovieMaterials in Flex, so my experiments didn’t work.

Tonight I decided to google a little to see if I could find a solution, and voila, I found it in the Labs|Vizar blog. (they include the source code there, in case you want to play with it as well)

Anyway, below I am posting my first experiment, using images of baloka.com. - Hey is only fair to promote my wife’s site, isn’t it? :)-

In the following days I will make some experiments to do other nice stuff with PV3D. Among the the things to try are including videos and/or animations in the sides of the cube instead of images, and event behaviors and more.

Igor has posted a nice initial comparison of these applications that allow creating web-enabled desktop applications using Flash and Flex.

I have been using Zinc since it was known as Flash Studio Pro and I been able to develop some interesting applications. I thing the new version of Zinc opens new possibilities, but I like also the great potential that AIR provides.

In the Flex 3/AIR preview tour last week, Adobe showcased many cool capabilities both for Flex 3 and for AIR. Clearly, it’s an exciting time for RIA developers.

When I tell people I develop e-learning applications, web-based visualization tools and enabling web-based collaboration using Flash and Flex (mainly flex) , most of them, including my own colleagues, think that all I do is to produce fancy PowerPoint-like presentations.

I try to explain to people that Flex is a software development tool, but since it compiles swf files they think is an animation tool. Hence, I was happy to see the article that Ted Patrick - Adobe Flex Evangelist published in his blog. In it Ted distills what Flex is and what is its value. Fro now on I will point people to that post when they need clarification.

Ryan Stuart, an Adobe Evangelist, has came up with his 10 RIA predictions for the year. Besides been an interesting read, I think he has some good points in there. RIA capabilities are improving rapidly because of the strong competition between Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe is very well positioned with the Flash platform and all the products in its portfolio, but Microsoft is a giant with a lot of followers in the development community.

At the end, the competition is good for the development community and for the end users. For the development community because we will have more tools - a better arsenal to produce great solutions, both for the web and for the desktop. For the end-users because, hopefully, there will be better and more efficient and effective web-based applications with improved UI design and navigation.

I believe in 2008 there will be a boom in visualization-collaboration applications. Ryan touches on those tow points in his predictions. I should add, that the integration “collaborative visualization” will be exploding as well. Currently there a few interesting web-based visualization applications like IBM Many Eyes created in Java and Gapminder, a Google product (acquired) made with Open Source Flash tools, and a few others. However, there collaborative capabilities are very basic, and they display visualizations from static data sources only.

Ryan did not mention any predictions about RIAs in mobile devices. I don’t know much about mobile devices, cell phones and PDAs, but I think there computational power, memory and storage capacity are reaching a point were they will be as powerful as basic computers and will be able to run Flash Player 9 and maybe Silverlight. Currently, only a handful of them support Flash Player 9, but I think this will change in 2008.

One thing is for sure, we have an exciting year a head of us…