flash platform! {desktop, mobile, touch screen…}

Finally a wonderful news for all mobile developers! Sony Ericsson are developing some API that allow to create content with Flash Lite and J2ME and those technologies work toghether.

Yes! It’s not a dream, it’s Capuchin a true bridge for those technologies.
From eetimes.eu:

“The aim of the project is to provide developers with an intuitive tool to create applications with a cleaner user interface (UI) without sacrificing the strong, feature rich and widely deployed Java ME infrastructure, including secure, well-developed content distribution.” 

Probably we start a new era, in other site I read that those API will be available on Autumn probably… we stay tuned with Sony Ericsson dev labs.
Let’s go! 

I’ve just seen new MDM site where you can find the new release of Zinc!

I download it and I want to try in next few weeks, I hope to great new features and new performance.

You can find more information in Zinc page, take a look and stay tuned to read new Zinc 3 experiences!

Zinc 3.0 codename Pandora will be release at Q1 of 2008, but now you can see first images for Macintosh and Windows directly from Jaspal Sohal blog.  You can also try to enter in Candidate BETA program if you are registered in multidmedia.comIn fact they said:“The Public Beta will be a Release Candidate Build with all functionality that will be in the final release. Registered Users will have an opportunity to download the Public Beta and test it over the Holiday period. The Zinc™ 3.0 Public Beta will be available for both Windows and Mac OSX.”

This weekend Adobe announced that is ready new flash lite version developer edition, dowloadable for free from labs.adobe.com.
Remember that you can develop flash lite 3 contents only if you upgrade Flash CS3 and Device Central.
More information about features and files to download you can see at Bill Perry’s blog.
If you test this developer release in your device, remember to write in Flash Lite 3 Forum which device you are using!

You can also see Flash Lite 3 application in action from Biskero’s blog, very cool video!

Finally multidmedia announce Pandora project that is new Zinc version with new big features and optimization.
New features are (from Pandora’s devlab):

. Mac OSX Output will now be in Native Universal Binary and optimized for Mac 10.5 “Leopard”
. Windows Projectors will have been specifically optimized for Vista
. Windows & Mac OSX Projectors almost 500% faster than Zinc 2.5 Projectors
. The entire {mdm}Script API will now be 100% Modularized
. Dynamic Form Creation
. An extensive Custom Command SDK will be available for both Windows and Mac OSX Developers
. {mdm}Script 3.0 - Completely re-written from scratch and now Unicode (UTF8/UTF16) Compliant
. {mdm}Script 3.0 - Greater Similarity between Windows & Mac OSX Classes
. Completely New GUI on Windows & Mac OSX - Screenshots available in December 2007!
. Several other “Industry Firsts” to be revealed in December 2007!

Probably Zinc 3.0 will go out in January 2008 but a public BETA will be release in December.
So take a look at Multidmedia site!

One of my customers ask me to pass some sensible data to server with MD5 algorithm.
So I don’t know what was MD5 algorithm and I start search some news about it… I love wikipedia!

MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a cryptation algorithm made by Professor Ronald Rivest in ‘90.
In this algorithm you can pass a string to a hash function and it returns a new 128 bit hash value (a new string).

Surfing on web I search how it works to create an AS3 version, but I find some free libraries in riaforge.org that implements
this algorithm and many other!
Very useful if you must pass any important data, so you can take a look at Houser’s AS3 library and Torgemane’s library (I love this one).

For italian developers I also put a little flex example in flex developers UG.

Enjoy!

One recent project that I produce is a touch screen software, obviusly I made it with Zinc.

So I’d like to share my experience with my blog readers.

First of all, I must say that Zinc has a too bad documentation, a lots of examples don’t work and there are some big bugs.

ZINC and FTP CONNECTION
In my last project I add a routine to download new files from touch screens.
Zinc FTP API works only in Windows, but for this project, all touch screens had OS Win, so no problem.
In this case, I found 3 problems, first of all I can’t download all files togheter because Zinc had some issues to do this operation, so when I download a file, when onComplete event triggered I launch another one.
Probably Zinc didn’t copy all bytes from FTP server to client and it crashed.
So I put a setTimeOut function to call a new file after 1 second and it works!
Finally, using close method of FTP class, FTP session is still opened…so I delete FTP istance and it works! So crazy!

ZINC and Flex
Recently I produce 3 projects with Flex and Zinc…I found a lots of interesting issues.
When you work with Zinc in Flex, you must add SWC library to use Zinc API, so you bring it from 2 folders(one .swc in for Flash and one for Flex, but you could use both in Flex) and there is different way to implements same API with .swc for Flash or for Flex, so take a look of which .swc you could use to work.
Another problem that I found is when you create a transparent application and you have mx:TextInput, if you have focus in textinput component and you try to use keyboard arrows to move cursor, you’ll receive an unknown error!
In Multidmedia forum Peter suggests to me to use callLater function, but it doesn’t work.

So those are some problems that I would share with you, I hope that they are useful for everyone.

On saturday I leave Italy to my first Flash on the Beach edition!
I take a look at seminars and there are 3 intensive days, lots of strong speakers and I hope to meet there new friends!

Obviusly in this blog I report my impressions about this event and share ideas or knowledge.
So stay tuned!

Surfing on web I find this guide to write good code with Flex 2 and Actionscript 3.

I take a look to it, that’s so interesting to create a good and useful code, so anybody could understand your code with this simple rules.

Multidmedia announces the Beta release of swc with MDM API for Flash CS 3 and Flex 2 that you find in devlabs.
It works only on Windows, but in the final release will works with both OS (Win and OS X).

This new SWC grants access to the {mdm}Script API for Flash CS3 Developers. The new SWC is still in beta whilst the final remaining issues are resolved, but provide developers access to {mdm}Script functions from within Flash CS3.

In the next few weeks, Multidmedia will announce new information about Pandora project, so stay tuned!

Richard Galvan in his blog notify that in next days Adobe will release official extension of AIR for Flash CS3.
He don’t give us a date, but in his blog you can find some screenshoots about this argument.

So we’ll stay tuned with labs site!