ScaleNine

I came across some iPhone Dev Camp App favorites that were pretty cool. And useful. One app I’d like to see for the iPhone is one that used the built in camera to read bar codes and then pull up information. If that was possible, you could do things like:

- Scan a bar code on a food item and get nutritional information, definitions of what those 26 letter ingredients are, etc.

- Scan a product and get reviews, price comparisons, place to purchase, etc.

Then, if they could get some text recognition you could take a picture of a business card and have the iPhone recognize the text and add the info to your contacts list. Possible? Probably not. Would be super cool though.

Ok… One last thing. Cover flow for contacts.

That’s all.

I’ve been involved with a lot of things lately, so I just thought I’d share. ScaleNine has been doing great and a lot of the themes featured here have filtered out into a number of Flex projects and Adobe demonstrations. As I’ve been busy, other individuals in the community have contributed to some of the free theme efforts. The UI showcase section is growing at a rapid rate as there have been more adopters of Flex and people have had had the time to develop some sweet apps.

About a couple weeks ago I presented at the LA Flex User Group as a trial run for some of what I’ll presenting at the 360Flex Conference in August. Andy McIntosh, who I’ll be presenting with, and I have been working diligently to put together both an informational session and a hands on session surrounding the topic of “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex 2″. The hands on session will take the methods we’ll be discussing in the informational session and applying it to an app. You can learn more here.

Then there’s Degrafa, another side project. Jason Hawryluk and I have been working on a Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex and things are moving along nicely. It’s awesome seeing what we’ve been able to accomplish so far and are very excited about it’s potential. We’ve only scratched the surface. Check out Degrafa here.

Based on the great experience I had over at the LA Flex User Group I’m in the process of trying to get an Orange County Flex User Group. There’s a couple things holding up the process, but I’m hoping to have more info about that in the near future. I can’t wait to have a local (more local than LA) user group to meet fellow Flexers.

The main thing that I’ve been devoting my full attention to is my full-time job at Atomic Curve. We’re pushing hard to get a huge Flex project we’ve been working on into beta. It’s exciting to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’ll be able to share more about it in the next few weeks.

Ok, I’ve gotta go catch my breath.

Browsing the Flex area of the Adobe Exchange I came across some really nice themes created by Ralf Sczepan of Fleksray.org. One theme is called Flekscribble, which falls into a visual category along with the Napkin Skin created by Eylon Stroh. The other theme available is called DarkNite.

Both of these themes are available for download from Fleksray.org or from the Adobe Exchange, so you can check them out, use them and modify them. I will also be featuring these themes on the ScaleNine homepage. Nice work Ralf!

I just got back from doing a presentation at the Los Angeles Flex User Group organized by Tom Bray and Robert Cadena of Search Coders. It was great to finally meet those guys and have conversations with fellow “Flexers” along with shaking the dust off some of my presentation skills.

The presentation, titled “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex 2,” was a test run of some of the topics Andy McIntosh and I will be presenting at the 360Flex Conference in August. Overall things went great and I got a lot of feedback. Some of the feedback I got was to be expected like, “You need more visuals.” I got into a time crunch and didn’t get to implement all the visuals I wanted to, I mean come on, I’m talking about something visual and I have no visuals. Completely understandable and I’ll make sure to get more in there.

There was a bit of redundancy in parts of the presentation that I breezed through to get to showing some actual live examples of what I was talking about. Everybody really responded to those, so I’m going to try to work live examples in the presentation even if I do have to break between the slides and FlexBuilder. I’ve got a bit of work to do.

Also, I mentioned to those who attended that I’d be making the presentation slides available so you can access a PDF of the slides below. The redundant parts were stripped out and the majority of the slides have general concepts that I went into detail while speaking.

Download Presentation “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex 2″

Jason Hawryluk, the creator of the Flex 2 Primitive Explorer, and I are in the process of creating a Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex. We’re calling it Degrafa and we just got the blog up where we’ll be discussing our progress, goals and looking for feedback. We will also be posting examples that will start basic, then gradually get into more complex bits of the Degrafa framework. We’re pretty excited about what we’re putting together and what the framework will be capable of.

The process involves exposing the Flash Graphics APIs up to the MXML level, but the Degrafa framework doesn’t stop at just the Flash APIs available. This may not seem like such a big deal, but it’s amazing thinking of the powerful possibilities this brings into the hands of both developers and designers. There are also, a lot of fundamental reasons why this is a great step toward easier visual design for Flex applications.

Some immediate benefits of bringing this up to the MXML stack are, but not limited to:

• Reuse of graphical assets.
• Visual tooling preperation.
• Less code to write in order to achieve great visual graphics without using another tool, all directly in Flex.
• Readability when compared to ActionScript.
• Dynamic runtime changes to all aspects. Something not available in a SWF or PNG imported asset.
• Complexities of learning ActionScript to reap the benefits of the graphics api’s are far less, allowing visual designers to make use of the available power of the Flash runtime immediately within Flex.

To learn more about Degrafa, check out the Degrafa site: http://www.degrafa.com

When I was added as a speaker at 360Flex, Andy McIntosh, of Effective UI, and I had topics that overlapped in a number of ways. I was scheduled to present on “Creating a Theme” and Andy on “Skinning and Styling”. When I read this I got in contact with Andy to try to hash out how we’d make our presentations not overlap. The more we discussed it the closer we got to a realization that we should do a joint presentation.

We proposed this to John and Tom, the organizers of the 360Flex conference, and we were given the green light to move forward. As a result, Andy and I will be giving an informational presentation discussing methods for “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex 2″, which will be followed by a hands-on session where we’ll put those methods to use on an application.

Andy and I are excited about this new direction and it’s made our presentation authoring much less of a headache. For more information on our sessions, or any other events occuring at the conference, check out the 360Flex conference site.