Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook Available for Kindle

The Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook from O’Reilly is now available for the Kindle. This book is great for anyone from beginning to advanced and covers Flex, Flash, and JavaScript/HTML AIR development:

The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios often encountered when using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. Thoroughly vetted by Adobe’s AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and more. If you want to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR to build innovative applications, this is the book you’ve been waiting for.

As you might guess, I am a bit biased – but, I think this book is the best source of AIR recipes available today.

An Honest Open Discussion on Web Standards and HTML 5

If you monitor the web, you likely think that the Flash Player and Silverlight are on life support, and that HTML5 is rapidly changing what is possible on the web. In reality, many people who are commenting on HTML5 don’t fully understand the current landscape. Did you know that HTML5 editor Ian Hickson stated that HTML5 won’t fully be implemented in all browsers until 2022? Did you know that iPhone developers can start fully using HTML5 now? Did you know that all features in HTML5 were originally from web plugins? Did you know that Google uses a web plugin for Google Wave?

We need an open honest discussion about HTML5 and what it means for the web. Unfortunately, you aren’t going to get the truth from fanatics on either side, but instead we all need to examine all of the evidence and come to our own conclusions. I have spent a great deal of time analyzing the facts, and in the process I have made several observations.

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Observations about Apple, the iPhone, PhoneGap, and the Flash Player

I have several developer friends who aren’t Flash Platform developers. Many of them have been down on Flash/Flex content lately – and a good deal of it has centered around the iPhone. After all – the iPhone doesn’t have Flash because of performance / battery life issues, right? Not exactly. In my opinion, it is something a bit deeper. While this post won’t change the whole Flash / iPhone saga, hopefully it will help educate you on some of the motives that aren’t always publicly shared.

In this while debate, I have made three observations about Apple that have shaped my perspective:

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Join Me at Adobe Max 2009

I can announce now that I am presenting a full-day pre-conference lab at Adobe Max 2009 in Los Angeles. If you build ColdFusion-powered Flex or AIR applications, you will definitely want to attend this session. We will be diving into some aspects of CF8 and also the upcoming version of ColdFusion (codenamed Centaur). Here is the official description:

Building ColdFusion Powered Flex and AIR Applications

ColdFusion 8 proved to be an ideal and powerful back end for Flex and AIR applications, and the next version of ColdFusion promises to go even further, improving integration and simplifying the building of data-centric AIR clients. In this session you’ll get hands-on experience with the planned Flex and AIR support in the next release of ColdFusion.

Hope to see you there!

Flash Camp Orlando Was Awesome

I want to thank everyone that came out for Flash Camp Orlando! We had a great time – and a packed house. Greg Wilson gave us a look at the new Flash Builder and Catalyst betas as well as the Tour De Flex dashboard, Jason Madsen gave a great introduction to Flex, Carl Smith and Christian Saylor gave great presentations on UX and the relationship between developer/designer and user, Andrew Powell presented a great overview of BlazeDS, and Maxim Porges gave a great introduction to his upcoming Loom project that brings AOP to AS3.

I want to thank Universal Mind and Adobe for sponsoring this event! I also want to thank Andrew Powell (co-organizer of the event) and the rest of the Universal Mind team that volunteered time and effort to make this event happen.

Presentation and Code Samples

You can get my slides and code samples on the presentations page.

Help – Someone’s AIR Application is Hitting My Server

I truly need your help. I believe that someone followed my AIR Tip on monitoring an AIR application’s Internet connection – and left my server name as the URL monitoring location. In addition, I believe this AIR application is set to check it’s connection every second. In addition, this AIR application has obviously been distributed to multiple people, as I have over 40 IP’s so far that are doing this. The only piece of identifying information that I have comes from the logs (the user-agent):

“app:/OTBAir.swf” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/526.9+ (KHTML, like Gecko) AdobeAIR/1.5.1″

So the application is named OTBAir – or something like that. If you know of this AIR application, please let me know ASAP. I am not upset – as I think this probably was an honest mistake, however, I am having to spend a lot of extra time blocking IP’s to prevent my server from getting bogged down with the requests.

Flex Camp Miami Slides

I really had a great time with the guys at Flex Camp Miami. Several of you asked some great questions, and I hope you really enjoyed the quality presenters that we had at the event. Maxim Porges has an great overview of the event and all the sessions, and you should certainly check it out if you want to learn more about what went on at the event.

Working with Data in AIR

My presentation on Working with Data in AIR covered the basics of working with the Encrypted Local Store, the file system, and the embedded SQLite database. We ran out of time and didn’t get to look at online/offline synchronization with LCDS, but we still covered a great deal in the presentation. You can download the slides below, and I will post code samples within the week.

Presentation Slides (PDF) – 1.2 MB

Getting in Contact with Me (Twitter and LinkedIn)

I learned at Flex Camp Miami that many people were not aware that I was on Twitter (and LinkedIn). I am mindmillmedia on Twitter, and you can view my LinkedIn page here.

Hang Out with the Flex Camp Miami Crew

Many of us are going to be hanging out at Titanic (a local bar in Coral Gables) tonight (Thursday March 5th) at 9pm. We would love for any Flex Camp Miami attendees to stop by and hang out (this is just an unofficial meet and greet – so, drinks and food are up to you).

Directions to Titanic

Come Join Us Friday for Flex Camp Miami

This Friday is the much anticipated Flex Camp Miami. If you haven’t registered yet – that is fine. You have two options: go ahead and register at the site, or you can show up on Friday at the venue. This will be a great event, and I am really excited that we added Jeremy Grelle to the line-up (the architect behind the Spring / Blaze DS integration). This completes a great list of speakers covering a wide range of Flex/AIR topics. You can check out the full list here: Speaker / Topic List.

If you will be traveling into town, don’t forget the hotel discount code “FCM” at the Holiday Inn Coral Gables. We hope to see all of you there!

UPDATE: I can neither confirm or deny the predictions that Doug McCune made about Flex Camp Miami. You will just have to come and see.