James Whittaker » air

My Flex & AIR tutorial in .NET mag

jmwhittaker — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:07:52 +0000

I’m really excited to have my first tutorial published in the premier web design magazine .NET issue 192 (Practical Web Design in the USA). The 4 page tutorial uses Flex and Adobe AIR to create a desktop application for uploading and viewing your movies on YouTube. All tutorial files and the finished AIR application are packaged on the CD with the magazine.

Using a few open source API’s the tutorial guides you through creating the project in Flex Builder importing the libraries and instructs on how to create a SWC for use across many projects. Moving on we cover basic Flex UI elements like lists, item renderers, view states and stacks. Finally simple skinning and styling then it guides the user through exporting the final AIR installer file.

The great thing about this tutorial is that you can build upon it in so many ways. Maybe add some Degrafa to the UI and create a great interface, or mix it up with some more web API’s. There is also some useful links, a quick guide on creating the AIR installer badge for your app and where to find more interesting AIR applications like RefreshingApps.com.

You can also download the source files for the tutorial here (ZIP 1.3MB).

I have had some great feedback from this and hopefully the .NET guys will ask me to do another tutorial soon.

Speaking at Bath Camp

jmwhittaker — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:09:08 +0000

I’m really excited to be presenting a session on Adobe AIR at Bath Camp on July 1st. It’ going to be an introductory session into what Adobe AIR is, how you can develop for it and a view of some cool apps created using the framework.

Bath Camp is going to be the first non Adobe focused event that I’m speaking at so it’s a great chance to meet up with other developers and designers from the Bath & Bristol region.

Looking at the Bath Camp Ning pages I will be following in the footsteps of Paul Boag (Boagworld & Headscape) and Ryan Carson (Carsonified) who have previously delivered sessions.

Also confirmed is Joe Leech from usability consultancy CX Partners who is talking about user centered design, usability and all good stuff like that.

So if you are around Bath and fancy coming along and saying hi over a beer or two register here and we’ll see you there from around 7pm onwards at the Assembly Inn (see map below).

View Larger Map

Flex resources

jmwhittaker — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:51:24 +0000

Adobe Flex is a great platform to work with for creating rich engaging applications of all sizes for the web and now the desktop with AIR. Now we are at Flex version 3 and the next version Flex 4, which is the SDK, and the editor now called Flash Builder are just around the corner.

There are a number of resources, guides and articles that I use regularly when building Flex or AIR applications. This is a growing resource so bookmark the page and feel free to suggest anything that I may have missed.

Here we go then:

Explorers

Guides and cheat sheets

Coding standards, conventions and best practice

Flex performance

AIR performance

Styling & skinning Flex

External Libraries

Further help

This is just a small list that you can use everyday. It’s not definitive and does not try to be.