Back to work

I am back to work. There are so many things to do, I am going to be busy in coming weeks (months).

I just wanted to update, in-case you were wondering where I have been.

Comparison between different client-side-storage (cookies, shared-object etc)

Niall Kennedy has posted interesting article, where he compares client-side-storage of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Adobe Flash Player.
Though, the title of post talks only about AJAX, I still find it useful in general. I thought to post it, you might find it useful.
Check it out.

Time flies

Last year on Jan 31st, I left Adobe (Macromedia). I joined Yahoo! after that and quit Yahoo! too with a wish in mind to take a long break. Break didn’t last long, I joined Nanocast and still working here.

When I looked at date today, I realized time flies when you are busy...

Bruce Eckel on Adobe Flex

Bruce Eckel, well known for his books (Thinking in Java etc), has written an interesting article where-in he talks about his views about Adobe Flex and other technologies. Thanks to Matt Chotin for posting this link on his blog.

I remember, Bruce Eckel started playing with Adobe Flex in 2005/2006. We saw some mails from him on flexcoders.

Check out the article

Technorati tags: bruce eckel, flex, ria, article

FlashLite developers from India - Please read

India Adobe Mobile and Devices user-group (IndiMaD) is launched today. Mariam has been working on it for sometime.
If you are working on Adobe FlashLite platform or interested in FlashLite; Please join the group by sending email to [flashliteindia at gmail.com], we can request Mariam to setup registration form and a mailing-list for it.
Let’s start sharing knowledge and developing kick-ass stuff :)

Adobe Online Store - Nothing changed

Last year, I talked about my experience with Adobe (Macromedia) online store. Today, I had similar experience while attempting to purchase Adobe FlexBuilder2 for following reasons:-

  • India still doesn’t exist among APAC stores list
  • FlexBuilder2 is not available in International store, I need to contact some reseller? (View screen-shot
    )
  • I can’t change my address to have India as my country

Well I have dropped the idea of buying FlexBuilder2 after this. Anyway, I am happy with Flex2SDK and VIM.
I am just wondering, why haven’t things changed in last 10-11 months? I was assured by folks that things would get better. I hope, it does. It’s really sad to see how Adobe is ignoring a country like India.

Apollo - I am thinking about it

Techcrunch article on Apollo made me think again about Apollo:-

  • How should Apollo’s security-sandbox look like?
  • What kind of applications, I would target for Apollo?
  • There must be some guidelines/best-practice to make a successful Apollo app? The way we have today for web-apps.
  • There must be application-signing process? Adobe certified Apollo applications? VeriSign certified application? How these things gonna work?
  • Would it be easy to synchronize my different Apollo installations so that I can have same settings (global or application-level)? The way delicious solves problem for bookmarks, something of that sort? May be access to Bluetooth, Network, IR APIs?

Loads of ideas/questions in my mind. I would wait, think, watch and build. Apollo is still under-development.

Enabling BitmapData.draw (..) on crossdomain images in Adobe Flash Player 9

Adobe Flash Player 8 and 9 have security-sandbox where-in you can not use BitmapData’s draw (..) on crossdomain images, as I mentioned in one of my posts. There is no easy way of doing it with Flash Player 8, you need some kind of shim/library.swf or server-side proxy.

Fortunately, Adobe Flash Player 9 has some APIs (Loader, LoaderContext) to make life easier, provided you have a crossdomain.xml with right permission on the server hosting images.

Say “ServerA” has main application and “ServerB” hosts image files. You need to place crossdomain.xml in root of “ServerB”. Just having crossdomain.xml is not sufficient, so you need to do something more:-

  1. Create a LoaderContext instance
  2. Set it’s checkPolicyFile = true;
  3. Pass LoaderContext instance to Loader.load (..) method, as shown below.

Note: Following code shows the steps, it’s not a working example.

var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest ();

request.url = “http://ServerB/images/foo.jpg”;

//This is important step..

var loaderContext:LoaderContext = new LoaderContext ();

loaderContext.checkPolicyFile = true;

var loader:Loader = new Loader ();

loader.load (request, loaderContext);

//now you can draw.

var bitmapData:BitampData = new BitmapData (200, 200);

bitmapData.draw (loader);

Why we need to this? Doing so would instruct Flash Player not to begin downloading the image file until after attempting to download a policy file. If Flash Player successfully finds policy file with right permission, you are set to do Bitmap drawing.

Believe me, that’s all you need as long as you meet two criteria (crossdomain.xml and checkPolicyFile=true). I would try to post a working example.

Technorati tags: bitmapdata, flashplayer, flash player 9, draw, crossdomain

Some Adobe Flex/Flash related resources from India

I have compiled a list of sites, mailing-list and bloggers from India. Most of them blog about Flash, Flex, RIA Usability, Web 2.0 etc.

Website/groups:-

Blogs:-

Above list is partial. If I have missed something, please feel free to leave the URL (of blog, site, mailing-lists etc) in the comment. I would update the list.

If you are Adobe Flex developer, you might want to register on International Registry of Flexcoders.

Technorati tags: flexcoders, flash, developers, blog, india

Yahoo! Podcasts

I noticed following things about Yahoo! Podcasts

  • Doesn’t provided RSS (Media RSS) feeds for categories/search. RSS feeds available for “My subscriptions” only.
  • Listening experience is bad because they are using Window Media Player or Quick-Time in popup :). Why not Adobe Flash Player for MP3 files, most of files are MP3?

I hope, they also provide RSS feeds for categories and search. Then I can use Yahoo! Podcasts more often. Second point is not important, I am not sure how many people listen podcasts online.