If you missed out on any or all of the Build an app in a week web seminars that the EMEA Platform Evangelism team held last week, worry not. Below are all of the recordings for you to watch as many times as you wish. You don’t need any special software or app installed to view these beyond Flash Player.

The sessions are based around an application called EVA that the EMEA team are developing so you can get a real feel for how the Flash Platform designer to developer workflow can be leveraged to make creating rich engaging content easier.

• Erasing the designer-to-developer gap: Adding interactions to your design
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p90445619/
• Connecting your design to PHP services:
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p66013176/
• Connecting a web application to a J2EE back end using Flash Builder 4
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p20174257/
• Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p49752948/
• Going multiuser with P2P in Flash Player 10.1
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p93914495/
• Developing multiuser applications with LiveCycle services
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p53039407/
• Bringing web applications to the desktop with AIR 2
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p97751544/
• Code once and run on multiple mobile devices
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p24983267/
• Rapidly build, deploy, and maintain Internet apps with ColdFusion
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p57074073/

If you enjoy these then head over to the Adobe Flash Platform Events page and have a look at all of the other recordings.

For those who are interested in learning more about working with the Flex framework and Java, you’d be crazy not to attend the Flex on Java Exchange one day conference in London next week. There are plenty of great speakers and the programme includes a few panel style sessions so you can pose those questions you’ve been itching to know the answers to for a while.

Entrance isn’t free, but given the wealth of information in the sessions and the opportunity to network with such a high calibre of likeminded individuals the admission price of £95 seems well worth it.

Topics include:

• What can Grails do for me? Building Flex applications with Grails
• An introduction to the Spring ActionScript framework
• Flex & Java Communications
• Enterprise Flex applications with the Parsley framework
• An introduction to the Cocoa AMF framework

As well as the “park bench” open discussion sessions. Combine this with tea, coffee, biscuits (personal favourites of mine) and a free raffle for some great prizes; and this is a great looking event.

My friend and fellow Adobe Evangelist Michael Chaize, will be presenting the Flex & Java Communications session.

…you’ll see the new features in Flex 4, the integration of interactive designs produced in Flash Catalyst, advanced communications with Java using LiveCycle Data Services, Model-driven development, and Live collaboration services. Join Adobe for the opportunity to discover how when Flex meets Java you can revolutionize Enterprise applications development.

I will also be at the event, so please feel free to come up to either of us if you want to know more about the Flash Platform, be that the Flex framework, Flash Builder, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst or our runtimes – Flash Player and AIR. You never know we may also have some stuff to give away at our booth…

If that’s piqued your interest, here are the details so you can block it in your diary…

Wednesday 16th June 9:30am – 6:45pm
Admission is £95 for the day
You can read more about the event on the Skills Matter site here.

We look forward to meeting you all. :)

Now that CS5 is available, the EMEA Evangelism team will be holding an Online Developer Week from 7th June – 10th June where we’ll be covering the entire design, develop and deploy workflow by building an application using Illustrator and Photoshop CS5 along side the Flash Platform suite of tools.

We’ll be focusing on Flash Builder, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst and Flex 4 as well as the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 runtimes. Starting with designs from Photoshop and Illustrator and each day adding more functionality to our application so that by the end of the week we will have a fully functioning solution on multiple devices. In the process we’ll also be looking at P2P in relation to Flash Player 10.1 as well as how to link up your application to server technologies like LiveCycle, Java and PHP.

My particular session is on creating components in Flash CS5 Professional and integrating them in to the application via Flash Builder, so if you’re interested in the new designer / developer workflow between Flash Professional CS5 and Flash Builder, and how you can harness both to create flexible component solutions then this session will be of interest. Actually all of the sessions are worth attending so be sure to sign up for the rest as you won’t be disappointed :p.

The full schedule is below and you can register HERE. Don’t delay as this will be an exceptional week of CS5 / Flash Platform goodness.

Schedule:

June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones (that’s me of course)
June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyscyn
Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

I’m going to keep this short and sweet as the title pretty much sums it all up. Today I start a new chapter in my career as a Flash Platform Evangelist at Adobe. I’m super stoked about this and I’m both excited and honoured to be working with such a high calibre of individuals both on a professional and personal level.

I’ll be doing a follow up post about my first week as an Evangelist (well in a week obviously :p), but I wanted to celebrate this great opportunity by letting all my friends and peers know. I’d have done this announcement sooner but I’ve been sworn to secrecy for a rather long time – feels good to be able to shout it from the rafters at last :D

Go Team! :D

After many many months Flash Builder 4, ColdFusion Builder and the Flex 4 SDK have been released. You can download them right now from Adobe. Andrew Shorten (Product Manager for Flash Builder has a full write up of the new features and technical changes over at the FlexTeam blog

It you’re too excited to read the whole article you can jump straight to the overview of the improvements and feature updates here:

• What’s new in Flash Builder 4
• What’s new in Flex 4
• An introduction to Spark

I have a load of articles that I’ve been holding on from posting while these products were in private beta, but now they have been released I can finally get around to publishing them :D

Developers make the worst testers – mainly because we either ignore the issues (consciously or sub-consciously) or we “knit” with the code until it is perfect and therefore doesn’t need testing in the first place. That said, we are generally very good at solving problems in a logical and methodical manner. So with this in mind, I thought I’d document an issue I came up against earlier today in case anyone else finds themselves in the same predicament.

This all came about as I was updating my Flex Builder plugin in my established installation of Eclipse. I would get as far an defining the eclipse instance in the Flex Builder installer and then it would throw a dialog up on the screen informing me that I had to close my browser. The strange thing was that I didn’t have any browsers open. Thus began my trawl through the Activity monitor to determine what – if anything – on my system was “pretending” to be a browser.

After much prodding and poking I finally found the root of the issue – it was the Xmarks ‘plugin’ for Safari. That’s not to say it’s an issue with Xmarks, far from it, it’s just it obviously contains a browser for synchronizing your bookmarks with the server and in doing so sets off the alarm bells with the Flex Builder installer. On killing it via Activity Monitor I could happily continue installing.

So if you have the Xmarks plugin for Safari installed, make sure you stop it via its PrefPane entry before you attempt to install Flex Builder.

According to this information it’s true, but not for all Creative Suite owners. It appears that if you bought Creative Suite 4 Master Collection or Web Premium after September 15th 2009 you can snaffle yourself a free license for Flex Builder 3.

Just follow the instructions (reproduced below, but you’ll need to go to the site to proceed) and Adobe will send you a serial for Flex Builder 3 – pretty cool huh?

Adobe® Flex™ Builder 3 Standard serial number request
As a Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Master Collection customer, you are eligible to use Adobe Flex Builder 3 at no additional cost. You will need to first download a trial version of Flex Builder 3 and then activate Standard edition using the serial number we email to you.

Proof of Eligibility
To receive a serial number to unlock the product, you must prove that you are a Creative Suite 4 license holder by uploading an electronic copy of your Creative Suite 4 Sales Order Receipt from Adobe or from an authorized Adobe reseller, in addition to providing a valid Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Master Collection serial number. A Flex Builder 3 Standard serial number will then be emailed to you.

Terms and conditions:
Flex Builder 3 serial numbers are only available to customers who have purchased a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection on or after September 15, 2009. By submitting this request, you are confirming that the serial number you enter has been obtained by acquiring a valid Creative Suite 4 license from Adobe or from an authorized Adobe reseller. Once installed, the use of Flex Builder 3 is restricted to the license holder of Adobe Creative Suite 4.

So just head over to https://freeriatools.adobe.com/cs/ and start the process rolling :D

Initial documentation for Cairngorm 3 has been uploaded to Adobe’s open source site. There’s not a huge amount of info there at the mo’, but what is there is worth a read – especially once they get more detail up about the Presentation Model and how it functions with the Presentation Graphic Layer and the Presentation Behaviour Layer.

It’s obviously early days, but good to see that Cairngorm hasn’t fallen by the wayside, as it’s been quite quiet when it comes to updates over the past year or so. Hopefully with this version there will be more focus on helping those new to Cairngorm get up to speed but without sacrificing those who are already familiar to the older version 2.x framework (and vice versa).

What seems like a lifetime since the first public beta of Flash Builder 4 has ended with the release of Beta 2 this morning. There are a heap of new things that have been added / moved / refactored since the last beta. One of the big things for me is the fact that there are far more Spark components included now. However we have generation of getter / setters, DCD and Unit testing. As well as enhancing the debugging / profiling

For a overview of wwhat’s in the latest beta check out Tim Buntell’s article on Adobe.com.

There is also an introduction to Flash Builder 4 video – you can view that here

I couldn’t sleep last night so I thought I’d play with the new effects in Flex 4. With the ultimate intention of actually sleeping at some point I decided to try the AnimateColor effect first – my thinking was I could soothe myself to sleep with subtle colour changes over time.

I was surprised how quickly and easily I could achieve a colour changer and after playing with it for a while, it did indeed have the desired affect. So first thing this morning I thought I’d post up the tiny amount of code required to animate colors in Flex 4.

The animation has a duration of five seconds from the beginning of the transition to the end, and it will automatically set the rectangles colour based on the colour you pick from the “From Color” colour picker (As you can see when coding I fall in to the US spelling of colour – even on labels :p, but when blogging I revert back to my normal UK spelling)