Well it’s a new year and I have held off posting anything. I didn’t really have a lot to say and I am not one to blog about nothing. A TV show about nothing was a huge success, but I can’t see a blog about nothing doing as well.

The past year has been a roller coaster for me and my family to say the least. We moved twice (4 times if you count corporate housing stops), one move was into a completely different country, I started 2 new jobs (Yahoo! and now Disney), my son went to 2 different schools, and somehow my wife found the time to get pregnant with our third child. So that means we won’t be resting anytime soon.

Looking back I wouldn’t of changed a thing as crazy as everything was. I learned so much professionally and personally. Professionally I have grown, my coding has improved greatly, for the most part I have been strictly working in AS3 and have absolutely no desire to turn back, unfortunately legacy code exists and AS2 will never go away, not for a long time anyway.

One of the best things of last year was working with Papervision, it has opened up a whole new world (or dimension) to me. I am a developer but I do have a creative side and being able to merge both halves of my brain using something like Papervision is truly amazing. Introducing the third dimension into interface design improves user experience because as humans we are trained to work with objects in 3D space and building everyday metaphors into the UI of our apps will make them that much better. Now if we could just get rid of the keyboard and mouse it would make obtaining those metaphors a lot easier. I think we are going to see a lot more 3D in the RIA space in 2008.

Last year we were all introduced to the iPhone, I am not going to drone on about it, but it truly is a great piece of hardware and software. Sure it is missing a few key things, but it is only a first release. Early this year Apple is releasing the iPhone SDK, you know engineers will be all over this SDK and it will only be a matter of time before some really cool apps and extensions are released for the iPhone. There is already a GPS extension in the works, GPS is the only thing I miss about my old LG phone.

So what else do I see happening in 2008. This is not a political blog so I won’t go into how I see the global economy switching from the U.S. dollar to the Euro, and I won’t go into the recession that everyone seems to be poo pooing which personally I think has already started. I also won’t go into how the Big 3 American car companies are digging their own graves and how the auto Unions are holding the biggest shovel. My all Chrysler employed family may disown me if I talk down the unions, oh wait, I think I just did.

2008 should be an interesting year from an RIA standpoint. There is a lot coming down the pipe. AIR is the first thing that comes to mind. Adobe has done a great job with AIR, I am just not sure how well it is going to take off out of the gate. In its current state it is a cool toy. I don’t think it is going to flop, I just think it will take a little time to fly, and maybe another major release. Personally I don’t agree with the whole AIR run time. I have used both mProjector and Zinc in the past to wrap swfs and create desktop applications. Both of these products allow you to create cross platform (Mac and PC, no Linux love) stand-alone apps with the Flash player included in the executable (if need be). These products had more hooks into the OS and file system, what they didn’t have was an embedded version of Webkit and a JS API. They also didn’t have the ability to interact with PDFs. So yes, AIR has it’s advantages, I just don’t agree with the runtime, it just adds a level of unnecessary complexity and doesn’t easily allow for easy deployment. IMHO. The apps should be stand alone so you can burn them on a CD and have them just work.

I mentioned the iPhone SDK already, this will be huge, of course people are going to try and monetize off of this, why wouldn’t they. What I am really hoping, as are most who are reading this blog, is the iPhone Flash Player we’ve been all dreaming about. There are rumors, lots of them, unfortunately only one guy (and probably a few hundred others) know for sure, Mr. Jobs, please enlighten us. The Internet on your phone is still a little watered down, you promised me the real internet in your ads, where is it? I know there would be memory issues, let’s face it, there are some very heavy flash sites out there. Already I have seen Safari on the iPhone close/crash when an image heavy page is loaded. By now I am sure most of you have heard about QVM or tamarin-tracing, could this be the beginning of something huge?

What else, Flex 3, all I have to say is wow. If you haven’t played with the beta do so now. The profiling and refactoring alone will blow you away. Flex has taken off big time, the one thing that puzzles me though is the number of recruiters who contact me with Flex work yet I still don’t see a ton of it out there in the tubes. Some of the jobs are with Fortune 500 companies. Either they are taking their sweet time to launch their “next big thing” or they gave up on using Flex because they couldn’t find the talent.

This year we will also see the Flex framework fully open sourced. Thank you Adobe, this is really going to change the landscape. Maybe we’ll finally see an AS3 decompiler.

EcmaScript 4, this is going to be an interesting one to watch. There has been a lot of rumblings from a few of the big players. Microsoft doesn’t like it. Once again, Microsoft and Adobe will be at each others throats.

IE8 will be released, yawwwwwwn.

Thermo, Astro, Buzzword oh my. H.264, Google Gears, WPF, it’s shaping up to be a good year. I have even heard some rumblings from the Cold Fusion camp, sounds like there is going to be some cool stuff coming from them.

I am not one to make resolutions, I believe if you have to wait till the beginning of the year to make a resolution you’re not very motivated. But this year I want to expand my horizons. I want to get into other technologies, I have played with a lot of things but I want to go beyond playing. Things like Ruby, Gears, Python. I want to get dirty with SQLlite. I also want to contribute more to the Open Source community. I also don’t want to move, don’t want to start a new job and maybe want to take a vacation for the first time in 4 years. We’ll see how much of this list I get to, with a third child on the way it could be tricky.

In closing, Happy New Year to all, I hope you and your families have a great 2008.

Josh Tynjala and I were speaking today, well actually typing over IM. We were discussing a problem we both ran into recently, the fl.transitions.Tween class was not dispatching events consistently. Sometimes the TweenEvent.MOTION_FINISH event would be broadcasted, other times it would not. Sometimes our programmatic tweens were visually completing, other times they would not, in a few cases they wouldn’t even start. After a little debugging we realized that the AS3 Garbage Collection was killing the tweens. You may be asking why would the garbage collection be doing this? Let’s start out by looking at some example code.

var len:int = _model.getNumberOfItems();
for (var i:int = 0;i<len;i++)>
     var clip:MovieClip = _scope.getChildByName('button'+i);
     var myTween:Tween = new Tween(clip, 'alpha', Regular.easeOut, 0, 1, 0.5, true);
     myTween.addEventListener(TweenEvent.MOTION_FINISH, buttonAnimationComplete);
}

Pretty simple code, in my AS2 days I used code similar to this a million times and never had a problem. All I am doing is looping through a set number of MovieClips and fading them up from 0 to 100%. Most times this worked fine, but a few times the tweens never completed and buttonAnimationComplete was not called. This is because the AS3 Garbage Collection was deleting the Tweens just like it should be. What? The tweens should be deleted? Yes.

Notice that I am storing the reference to my tween in a local variable that gets overridden in every iteration of the loop. This means there is no real reference to the object and when there is no reference to an object it is flagged for removal by the garbage collector. Since there is no real way to know when the garbage collection cycle is going to run the tweens were completing some of the time and other times were being thrown into the back of the big garbage truck that slowly creeps around your code.

The best way to ensure that this doesn’t happen is to store your reference in a class level member. I ended up storing all of my tween references in a class level array. Once all of the tweens were complete I cleared the array. Here is the updated code that I used, the entire class is not shown here, trust me your scroller will thank me.

private var _buttonTweens:Array = new Array();
private var _buttonTweenCompleteCount:int;

private function animateButtons():void {
     var len:int = _model.getNumberOfItems();
     for (var i:int = 0;i<len;i++)>
          _buttonTweens.push(new Tween(clip, 'alpha', Regular.easeOut, 0, 1, 0.5, true));
          _buttonTweens[_buttonTweens.length - 1].addEventListener(TweenEvent.MOTION_FINISH, buttonAnimationComplete);
     }
}

private function buttonAnimationComplete(e:TweenEvent):void {
     buttonTweenCompleteCount++
     if (buttonTweenCompleteCount == _model.getNumberOfItems()) {
          _buttonTweens = [];
          dispatchEvent(new Event('buttonsReady'));
     }
}

I am just using Tweens as an example, but you can run into this same issue with any object that has local references that are overridden. For example, I had a Timer event set to iterate every 100 milliseconds and it called loadAsset(), a method that did just what it says, it loaded an asset.

private function loadAsset():void {
     _currentItemToLoad++;
     var myLoader:Loader = new Loader();
     myLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, assetLoaded);
     myLoader.load(new URLRequest('images/galleryImage' + currentItemToLoad + '.jpg'));
}
private function assetLoaded(e:Event):void {
     var holder:Sprite = new Sprite();
     holder.visible = false;
     holder.addChild(e.target.content);
     _scope.addChild(holder);

     e.target.removeEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, assetLoaded);
}

Just like the Tween example above my Event.COMPLETE event was not firing all the time. This is because I was storing the reference to the Loader in a local variable that was overridden each time the loadAsset method was called. To get around this I stored all my references in a class level member (an object or an array work nicely).

Hopefully this helps you figure out why you are not seeing certain events in your code, it had me stumped for a bit. Now you know, and as G.I. Joe said “knowing is half the battle”.

Google defines Thermo as “Two bars or wires of dissimilar metals joined at one extremity which Couple develop a current (thermoelectric current) when heated.” I define it as a major accomplishment for Adobe that is reinventing the term “Deseloper“. Aral Balkan has posted videos from the sneak peak at Max, too cool.

This is a very early sneak peak, possibly even some smoke and mirrors, but still, Adobe has hit the nail on the head and may have finally beat the Flex Project workflow issues. Watching these videos do bring up a few questions.

Are Thermo projects bound to the original assets? If the developer are working on a project together and the designer changes something in the design will Thermo automatically update the MXML. Obviously within reason, but say the designer moved the Favorites album list above the top list. Whould Thermo recognize this and make the change without the developer intervention?

All of the styles appear to be inline in the demo, can they be extracted into CSS for runtime styling? For larger applications this is mandatory for projects that are multilingual or are available under multiple brands.

What about working the other way? Open MXML in Photoshop? I don’t know how many times I have had designers take a screengrab of something I am working on, hack it apart in Photoshop just to show me what they want. Obviously they could do some of this in Thermo but I doubt Thermo will have every tool that is available in Photoshop and if it is a quick change a designer doesn’t need to learn Thermo, they can make the change, hit Save and the workflow isn’t interupted. This would also allow designers to skin existing components or even a prototype that a developer whipped together to show a concept.

With other WYSIWYG development tools the code output is usually something I wouldn’t want to hang on my fridge. MXML is pretty clean but there are optimizations that can be applied to ensure quicker compilation and easier access via Actionscript. I hope this will be considered. In the end it is all compiled so the output is usually not an issue but as a developer I have opened many files a designer has created with a WYSIWYG applications and have almost fallen out of my chair.

I am sure I will have more questions as I let this sink in. Coming from a design/creative background developer/designer workflows are something I have worked on at most companies I have worked at. I think this is a huge step in the right direction. As long as Adobe doesn’t create a visual tool for creating business logic my job will be secure when Thermo hits the market

This has to be one of the coolest AIR apps I have seen to date. The simplicity of it is what makes it so appealing. Imagine turning anything you see on the web into a desktop widget.

  That is what Snippage does, you can crop a web site and keep the cropped “snippet” on your desktop. Once it is cropped you can set a refresh increment and visually watch for changes. When you want to view the whole site again just click on it and the rest of the site is exposed. It’s missing a few features like custom refresh increments, the crop marquee doesn’t scroll with the page when you scroll and no force reload. But hey, it’s only a beta, it will only get better.

Snippet is created by one of the true pioneers of Flash work Gabocorp. Check out the snippet video and download the beta for yourself over at their site.

Just when we thought the Flash Platform arena was starting to dry up (YA RIGHT!) Adobe throws a new tool into our arsenal, Apollo. Apollo isn’t that new, but it is, isn’t it? It’s been around for a bit now, and already has become very popular. All this popularity and Apollo is still only a code name. That alone tells me it is going to be a huge release.I have to admit, I knew Apollo was out there, I knew what it was all about, but I really wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to it. Not sure if it was because I had enough on my plate, or because it wasn’t released yet, or because I have done a lot of flash to desktop work with other third party swf wrappers (zinc, mProjector, ScreenWeaver). I’m not sure.

That all changed on Friday night. I was one of the lucky few who got to attend ApolloCamp. And after seeing some of the sample apps, seeing the excitement in the crowd, and personally seeing the potential of this app., I was pumped. Just check out my intensity in this pic taken of me at Apollo Camp.

I think my holy $@&t moment came during Christian Cantrell’s presentation. He presented script bridging between AS and JS. That one presentation proved to me that no other swf to desktop application can compete. He was injecting JS and AS events into existing sites, injecting and altering css in existing sites, and mashing up some of the biggest properties on the web today with only a few lines of code. His address book and google maps mash up was quite impressive. And his Scout application was every web developers dream app.

Adobe was very generous, amazing schwag (can you say free full version of Flex Builder), great food, lots of beer (and more beer when “people” started to “twitter” on low quantities of beer - I have to admit, I started the more beer twiter rally - not a surprise to anyone who knows me).

So what were some of the other highlights? I’m a little late posting this and I’m sure most of you have already read all about ApolloCamp so I’ll be quick. Kevin Lynch asking what “Moxie” was (for those that don’t know Moxie is the codename for Flex 3), Sean Christmann + project artemis + apollo = light saber == WOW!, Yahoo APIs + Apollo = Endless possibilities (sorry couldn’t resist plugging my peeps). The list is endless. Check out other blogs if you want to read more about the presentations. I don’t have time to type up a transcript of the entire conference, I’d much rather play with Apollo.

To all of you who were not lucky enough to attend. Ahhh hahahahaha, just kidding. The alpha build, documentation, ApolloCamp videos, O’Reilly pocket guide, sample code will all be available on labs.adobe.com sometime this week.

I have to say this was probably one of the best conference I’ve ever been to, very well organized, and very informative. I can’t wait to see what’s next, stay tuned here to see what I build in Apollo, I have a few big ideas, now I just have to find the time to actually dev them.