Apollo ... the end of Zinc-type Apps?

Anyone who has programmed in Flash for longer than a couple of months soon realized that they would love to add functionality and power to their Flash applications. Flash is meant for the web, yet its ease of use and huge outreach to users makes a very appealing case for using Flash for more than your standard web applications. Programmers that have married themselves to Actionscript seek to utilize Flash's power on desktop applications or on other devices and for a wide variety of purposes. People have constantly asked me "Can Flash do _____ ?" The answer, as many of us have found, is often times "No." Or at least, not by itself. Hence the emergence of third-party applications, such as Zinc, that give Flash developers the power that software programmers have always had. Having access to the Windows/Mac API essentially turns a Flash programmer into a software developer.

Of course, Adobe won't sit idly by and watch as third-party applications fill a growing target audience's need. The solution seems to be the buzzword of the year in the Flash developing community: "Apollo." According to Adobe,

"Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being created by Adobe that will allow developers to leverage existing web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and PDF to easily create and deploy desktop applications. In this session, Mike Chambers will give an overview of Apollo, discuss how it aims to make RIA development and deployment better, and show how to get started developing for it.
(Understanding Apollo—Adobe)

So the question in my mind is, will Apollo fill the void? With using useful yet often buggy and unreliable Zinc-type applications, I've too many times run into walls with features that either aren't what I'd like them to be, or are at best in the beta stage.

It's obvious that the makers of programs like Zinc recognize the power of Apollo, and have reacted to protect their profits and customer allegiance. Soon after Apollo became an office buzzword early this summer, Multidmedia launched a designer/developer competition to encourage users to incorporate Flash/Flex projects into a widget-type application that runs on a user's desktop.

Although Zinc seems to be threatened, I still wonder about Apollo's capabilities. Are we going to have to continue relying on third-party applications or dead Director programs to access things such as multimedia devices, media players, or form-based applications?

Although I hope that Apollo is everything that it's hyped up to be, I am wary of trusting that Adobe will fulfill all my developer needs with this application. Clearly, however, Adobe is in the best position of anyone to capitalize on developer's needs. Especially if the Apollo runtime were automatically pushed with versions of the Flash Player, the capabilities of a large market penetration with the this product seems very appealing.

Apollo is definitely on its way, but developers will wait to see if it truly will be the solution that everyone says it is. If you're like me, you want to know more. A good start would be to register for next week's online event at Adobe, Understanding Apollo.

Adobe Flex Builder 2 for Mac

My work was kind enough to buy all my team members new Mac Book Pros. We use Boot Camp or Parallels to run Windows for any apps that we can't use on the Mac. For me, the only thing I couldn't develop in Mac, was Flex 2 Builder.....that is until now! Adobe released the Flex Builder 2 for Mac on Labs. Check it out.

Save out bitmapData to JPG

I've seen several examples of saving a bitmapData object out as a JPG. Most of the examples would freeze while parsing the huge pixel information. So I wrote a class that delays the parsing and dispatches progress. This way you can update the user on the processing progress, rather than have the application freeze for several seconds. Check it out. And as always, right-click to view/download the source.

Don't pay attention too much to the crappy drawing tools built into this. Maybe we'll have a better drawing app for a future example. This example is more for the bitmapData to JPG conversion.

Simple Time-lapse Webcam

It's been a busy week. After having a baby and moving to a new home, I'm finally finding time to post a little experiment with the webcam in Flash.
I'm sure you've seen time-lapse videos, where the camera takes a picture at a very slow rate over a long period of time. The result is a video that looks like it's on super fast-forward.
I decided it would be fun to use Flash along with my built-in webcam to create a simple time-lapse application. The rate is set to take a snapshot once every ten seconds, but can be easily edited in the document class, TimeLapseExample.

See an example I recorded

Check it out (camera required).

Tour of Apollo

Ryan Stewart, recently interviewed Kevin Lynch, the Chief Software Architect at Adobe, about Apollo, the cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe. Check it out.