Flash Camp London presentation
I was super excited to give a session at Flash Camp London today to Flash creatives from around the UK.
The camp was aimed more at the designer and creative side of Flash and we wanted to show some of the new and shiny features of Flash CS4. Some great speakers attended and I was honored to have presented on the same bill as some of the most renowned and respected individuals in the Flash scene.
My session was to show how easy it is to create a cross platform desktop application using the new AIR features of Flash CS4, then how to seamlessly deploy the application using the installer badge on a webpage.
AIR applications are super easy to do now in Flash which leaves you more time to work on the creative and interactive side of your AIR apps.
I cover building a simple chromeless AIR application called ‘Flash Camp Chatter’ that gets the last 4 tweets about Flash camp from Twitter and displays them in floating clouds, not exactly going to set the world alight but fine for a quick demo. You can try the application using the installer badge at the end of this post.
The application is simple and it’s left up to the reader to add extra features like animation, effects, more error handling etc. The application is shown merely as a proof of how to create a custom chrome AIR applications quickly in Flash CS4.
As the session was only 30 minutes long it was always going to be difficult to squeeze in all of the content I wanted to show. The slide deck here is more detailed than the one I used on the day.
Session slides
Demo files
Download a ZIP file containing all of the demo files.
You will have to create your own Digital Certificate and in order to re-export the AIR files from Flash CS4. To properly test the installer badge your AIR file must be located on a web server and the server must have the correct MIME type for AIR (see example below for Apache):
AddType application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip .air
Install the final demo app
Unlike in my session this badge will re-launch the Flash Camp Chatter AIR application if you already have it installed.
Other sessions
The presentation material from other sessions will be available from the Flash Camp website.
Photos and reviews
Dan (@dansumption) has some great photos from Flash Camp London up on Flickr. Big thanks to Dan for permission to use his pictures for this blog post.
It makes mine look quite poor as I only took a measly 7 pics.
Marc Hibbins has done a sterling writeup of Flash Camp which you can read over on his blog.
Posted in: journal | Tagged with:events, flashcamp, presentation, speaking
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Yesterday « Marc Hibbins said:
[...] James Whittaker’s presentation ‘Your First Custom Chrome AIR App With Flash CS4′ delivered exactly what it said on the tin. He offered a walkthrough on how to build your first AIR application, how to design a custom chrome and the various provisions that must be made in doing so, up to publishing an AIR application file and customising the various settings in the new CS4 GUI. He also spoke about handling icons, digital signing, then creating a nice installer badge at the end. His presentation files are already up online. [...]
on February 27th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Flash Camp Birmingham write up » James Whittaker said:
[...] Camp Birmingham (UK) organised by the Flash Midlands user group. After a very good Flash Camp London it was always going to be interesting to see how the format would work outside of London. The [...]
on June 19th, 2009 at 11:54 am
» Yesterday Marc Hibbins said:
[...] James Whittaker’s presentation ‘Your First Custom Chrome AIR App With Flash CS4′ delivered exactly what it said on the tin. He offered a walkthrough on how to build your first AIR application, how to design a custom chrome and the various provisions that must be made in doing so, up to publishing an AIR application file and customising the various settings in the new CS4 GUI. He also spoke about handling icons, digital signing, then creating a nice installer badge at the end. His presentation files are already up online. [...]
on September 2nd, 2009 at 11:22 am
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