O’Reilly: Inside RIA

When I transitioned from artist to developer, once I learned Flash I didn't go any further. Sure I know PHP, Ruby, JavaScript and a few other languages but not as well as I know ActionScript. Where am I going with this? Well, when I was an artist I picked the right tool for the job, but as a programmer I locked myself into one language and made that my focus. In 2010 my New Year resolution and life goal is to become a Renaissance Developer just like I was as an artist. Here, in no particular order is my list of the languages I want to learn in 2010: Silverlight, Unity, HaXe, Object C. I would love to hear your thoughts and if you want to also become a Renaissance Developer?

InsideRIA had three sessions at Adobe MAX this year: The Battle of the Flex Frameworks Returns, with Greg Owen; Augmented Reality within the Flash Player, with Jesse Freeman; and InsideRIA's Secrets of the Best Rich Internet Apps of 2009 (So Far), with Garth Braithwaite.

Advance Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Setting Up The Flash Developer Guerrilla Workflow.

As we all know, Flash on mobile devices is nothing new. Flash Lite is on 400+ different mobile device models and 800 million total devices. It's hard to argue with those numbers. However, with the advent of the iPhone, netbooks, and new mobile operating systems such as Google's Android and Palm's WebOS, users are demanding an experience that mirrors the desktop. Others, as in Adobe and the Open Screen Project, want to take that notion a step further, and bring desktop Flash to mobile devices. The SkyFire mobile browser aims to do just that.

The basic explanation of Augmented Reality is to superimpose graphics over real-world environments in realtime. In Flash, this is usually done with a webcam and a marker card. When you hold the card up to the webcam, Flash is able to detect the orientation of the marker and superimpose, in this case, a 3d model on top of it. This technology has been around for a while now and having access to it in Flash is really exciting. Although it is still in its infancy, over time the speed and power of AR will improve to hopefully play an important role in how we view the web. Now is a great time to get your feet wet in order to get a better understanding on how it works.

The jets and sharks, Hatfields and McCoys, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants, Adobe and Microsoft. Now several years in the making, the Adobe - Microsoft rivalry is gearing up. Especially with the anticipated new release of Silverlight 3 and Flex 4. As any seasoned Flex veteran will tell you, Adobe is the defacto standard for Rich Internet Applications. When asked about interest in Silverlight, the response may vary, but usually ends in “I haven’t actually spent a lot of time [or tried] it.” A product of Microsoft, Silverlight is. But as professionals in the RIA industry it is a good thing to be open minded. After all, as hard as it is to admit, Flash isn’t always the best tool for the job.

Have you ever had the need to manage multiple data sources in your application? Perhaps in development you want pull from one data source, and when you are running on a hosted server, pull from another data source. Well, here is an extremely basic, yet useful tip for doing exactly that.

Here's a fun post that I've wanted to do for a while, but just haven't had the time until recently. I'm very interested in working with geographic data, 3D, and data visualization. This post is the first of what I hope to be several, where I will combine these interests and create an interactive 3D globe that you can recreate for your own purposes.

This week GMail goes offline through the power of Gears, Adobe AIR surpasses 100 Million installations, developers get a comprehensive list of Silverlight controls, Flash gets some augmented reality, and a test drive of the BlazeDS and Spring integration is provided. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Although I'm up to my neck in RIA every day, I'm still impressed by some of the things that people are able to do with RIAs and the internet. Here are a few examples that really grabbed my attention this evening.

This week saw big announcements for both Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, Flash SEO is revisited, SilverlightContrib brings open source Silverlight controls, Google Gears improves its Geolocation API, and Quake gets ported to Silverlight. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

If you’re anything like me, you remember how excited you were years ago when you first wrote a simple line of code, ball._x++, in an onEnterFrame event and gleefully watched a ball fly across the stage. I promise you that little moving ball ain’t got nothin’ on what you’re about to learn here.

This week Radiohead captivated the online community, the Flex 4 SDK gets its first public build, Bruce Eckel questions Sun's UI credentials, and an Adobe Evangelist compares Flex and Silverlight. All this and more on the Weekly RIA Round-Up.

I was checking out the PaperVision3D blog today, and stumbled across a really impressive data visualization technique used by the band Radiohead with the release of their new video for "House of Cards". Why is this on insideria.com, you may wonder? Read on to see...

Since diving back into PaperVision3D in my last post, I've been having some fun playing with 3D concepts. I forgot how cool 3D visualizations can be, but at the same time, they can get really confusing and really complicated very quickly. At the same time as they are getting complicated and confusing, they also start creating abstract shapes that are intriguing.

I haven't touched PaperVision3D in a while, and some of the recent articles here on insideria.com motivated me to dive in and take a look around. Here's what I came up with after sitting down with it for an evening...

Materials
Why do you need to learn about materials in Papervision3D? Take a sphere for example: How do you determine whether the sphere is a globe, an eye, or a basketball? You only know by which material is mapped to the sphere.

This article will cover the basics of the materials available through Papervision3D and teach you how to add materials to Planes. Let's get started, we’ve got a lot of “material” to cover:

Flash Player 10 public beta is now publicly available for download. This next generation player has added some outstanding new features. Many of these new features were first demonstrated at MAX 2007 in Chicago last year. If you didn't see these demos, here is a quick recap of these new features.

The best way to learn Flex is to get in there, and to start working with it. However, there are things you might not pick up on on your own. One of the best ways to get to know the inner workings of the Flex framework, and to learn how others do it. Now, where can you look to see how others have done things? Here are a few ideas...

Brad Umbaugh and I were interviewed on The Flex Show last week discussing our use of 3D in Discovery Earth Live. You can check out the full interview here if you're interested. In the interview we discuss the nature of 3D interfaces, some things to think about when attempting 3D, and just barely scratch the surface on the differences between Papervision3D and Away3D. Kinda timely given Andrew's post on 3D just a few days ago. Finding the "right" way to use rich innovative features like 3D is a topic I'm really passionate about. We didn't get into the usability aspects of it as much as I'd liked in the interview, but I'm hoping to do a panel at MAX or Web 2.0 NYC later this year and get more into it. Is that something you'd be interested in? Leave us a comment if you don't mind.