Read up on cross domain data exchange with SWX Beta 1 on the SWX blog.
Archive for May, 2007
I just wrote up a comprehensive blog post on the SWX web site on a new method of allowing cross-domain data exchange that's in SWX Beta 1, as well as an issue that this new method has with the default rules in the Apache mod_security model (and instructions on how to work around this, generously provided by Folkert Hielema). Also, there's a sneak peek at a third method of handling cross-domain data exchange that will be available in the next beta release.
I presented a new version of my Rediscovering Fun session at Multi-Mania yesterday and had great fun doing so!
I had originally planned (way back) to show a few SWX examples on the Nintendo Wii (since SWX is Flash Player 7+ compatible and the Wii runs FP7) but later evolved the presentation to include mobile SWX samples instead. (SWX is destined to be the data exchange format for Flash Lite, especially considering that Flash Remoting doesn't exist and XML has an enormous processor hit.)
Anyway, this did mean that I had a Wii on stage (HAH!, I kill me!) and I decided to put it to good use by playing a game of communal Wii tennis with some of the audience at the start of my session. (If anyone has a photo of this, please let me know!) 
After that little bit of fun, I moved on to demonstrate SWX Beta 1 for the first time ever and took the risk of live coding during the session. For the first time during a live coding session, all three of my examples compiled first time through. This only strengthens my belief that SWX is simple. Very simple!
Oh, and I ended up winning a weekend in Lisbon, which was totally unexpected (the last time I won anything was probably when I was 12!)
Multi-Mania this year was at least twice the size of last years' and yet was as warm and friendly as ever. I'm so happy to see that it lost none of its charm in the transition from a single-track conference to a multi-track one with a neat roster of international speakers. I heard on the grapevine that next year it might even be a two-day conference. Oh yes, and did I mention that its free to attend?
I know it's only just over but I can't wait for Multi-Mania 2008. Here's a warm thank-you to Koen, the Multi-Mania crew, and the lovely warm people of Kortrijk! You guys rock!
SWX Beta 1.0 is now available for download.
Read more about this release in this post and on the download page.
I'm going to be presenting SWX Beta 1 at the Multi-Mania conference in Belgium in a couple of hours and I will be writing more about this important release in the coming days.
Update: Here are the release notes for the Beta 1 release:
What's new in Beta 1.0 (released 2007-5-25)
This is a major release, taking SWX from Alpha to Beta stage.
- Added Full API. This API gives you an abstract interface (you don't have to do movie clip loading by hand), callbacks and timeouts and queued calls.
- Added LoadManager and ExternalAsset classes (part of the Full API). You can use these to load any external asset in queue.
- Refactored gateway and compiler code.
- SWX gateway now performs error checking and returns errors.
- Removed error reporting code from SWX Twitter API as this is now handled by the gateway.
- API Change: The
argumentsproperty is nowargsto be consistent with the Full API. - Added Full API and No API versions of most Flash samples.
- Updated the SWX start page with the latest code example from my blog.
- Added
cancelAllCalls()method to the SWX class andcancelAllLoads()method to the LoadManager class. These clear out the queue of waiting SWX calls and movie loads, respectively. - Added an additional method of allowing cross-domain data exchanges that doesn't require the main SWF to grant access to the SWX data SWF.
The SWX Beta is as ready as its going to be but it's too late for me to make a release tonight (I need to be at the airport in about five hours -- around 6am). Rather than a late-night botched job, I'm going to leave it for tomorrow in Belgium.
There are two things that I wanted to get in there that I haven't been able to. The first is writing in the actual calling URL to the allowDomain call in the data SWF (so that the application that loads the data SWF doesn't have to System.allowDomain the data SWF just because it has to use _parent._url for its own allowDomain). The second is an API addition. The current beta will have a cancel() method. In the next beta, this will be replaced with pause() and kill() methods.
I'll elaborate on these on the release notes, tomorrow. Now, I'm off to get about three hours of sleep before the trek to Belgium for Multi-Mania.
Update: I'm waiting for a half-hour delayed flight to Brussels and I added the kill() functionality to the API and decided against adding pause() -- no need to over-engineer (you can easily kill an existing load and then add it again to the queue.) The final method call in the Beta 1 ended up being cancelAllCalls(). Simple == good!
We've reduced the cost of posting a job on the OSFlash job board to a far more affordable $50 per job.
It used to be $200 per job, which I personally thought was really excessive! Thankfully, Dave updated his Joard job board engine so that job board owners can now set their own prices so I've lowered it to the lowest it allows.
Dave, can you believe it, I'm actually blogging the price reduction finally -- will miracles ever cease? (And there's 20 minutes to go to midnight so I theoretically could have put this off for at least another quarter of an hour without breaking my word!) 
Oh yeah, and $50 US actually means £26.40 or so (depending on the current exchange rate) in the UK. not something ridiculous like £50. See, Adobe, it can be done! (And I live in the UK for goodness sake!)
OK, that's it for the word from our sponsors, now back to late-night SWX hacking in preparation for the Beta. This must be what prolonged childbirth must be like... I really want this beta to pop out now. Come on baby, o-n-e m-o-r-e p-u-s-h !
Oh yeah, and Episode 9 of the .net podcast that we recorded the other day is now live! Listen to it here!
Here's a summary of what went down, from the .net site:
Silverlight vs Flash
Microsoft have been heavily pushing Silverlight, their "flash killer" at MIX07 and it has created a considerable stir. Techcrunch are claiming that this could be the end of flash and AJAX. In one of their posts they claimed that "it made flash/flex look like an absolute toy" and "without exaggeration, AJAX looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight". Our panel is not so sure. Aral Balkan was not at all impressed while Gary Marshall (who was at MIX07) gave only guarded praise. What the panel did agree on was that some healthy competition will keep Adobe on their toes.
Google’s plans for world domination
This month’s .net magazine is packed with some great interviews with Google staff and so we thought it would be good to discuss their plans for world domination on the show. We cover geotagging, SEO techniques and the story that Google are actively targeting Microsoft with their office suite.
Microsoft squashes open source
The entire panel fall over each other in an attempt to be the first to condemn Microsoft’s campaign to extract royalties from the open source community. The general feeling is that not only is this a PR disaster for Microsoft, it is also nearly impossible to achieve. The conclusion is to simply ban software patents... period
Home working
In this month’s .net magazine Gary writes a column about home working and how more companies should embrace the practice. As we have a mixed panel made up of both office workers, home workers and (in Aral’s case) coffee house workers, we decided to chat about the pros and cons of leaving the commute behind.
A very quick update in case you're wondering why I've been so quiet in the last couple of days: I'm moving to a new place! The removals people are coming tomorrow morning and I'm packing up, etc.
I'm still going to release Beta 1 of SWX before Multi-Mania next week.
OK, back to packing...
This year looks like it's going to be another busy one as far as conferences go. 2007 started off with a bang for me with my talk at MacWorld 2007 in San Francisco, followed by Pixel Reloaded in Singapore. Last month, I spoke at FITC in Toronto, which was a real blast, and it looks like May and June are going to be quite busy also.
Here's a brief look at the conferences I'm going to be speaking at during the rest of the year.
May's conference frenzy kicks off for me in a week's time with Multi-Mania in Belgium, where I will be presenting a session titled Rediscovering Fun.
Rediscovering Fun is an eclectic session that spans the inspirational, creative and technical categories and covers the creative process that led me to create SWX and why SWX is the best data format to use when creating mobile applications with Flash Lite and mashups and other data-driven applications with Flash.
Multi-Mania is a wonderful conference and I can't wait to meet up with my Belgian friends. It's a much larger event this year and the speakers include, among others, Mario Klingemann, Serge Jespers, Stephanie Sullivan, Joey Lott, Peter Elst, and Mike Downey.
And, here's a tidbit of trivia, if you read the domain name (multi-mania.be) in Turkish, it reads "Multi-Mania, damn it!" Be (pronounced as in "bed" without the d) is a commonly used exclamation that roughly translates to "damn it". Cool!
Multi-Mania takes place on May 25th in Kortrijk, Belgium.
Right after Multi-Mania, I will be presenting two sessions at Adobe Live Netherlands on May 30-31: Memo to the CEO (on agile development process, design patterns and other good practices) and Rediscovering Fun.
I return to the UK at the start of June to take part in a panel discussion titled The Future Is Wide Open at the developer evening at Adobe Live UK on June 5th.
Here's the official session description:
Open source development tools/platforms/environments will increasingly shape future generations of rich applications on the desktop and on the web. Will any single enviroment dominate the next generation of applications? How can proprietary tools survive in an increasingly open world? Will there be a clear winner? Which technologies will win is still to be decided, but one thing is clear, the future is wide open.
This is going to be a timely discussion, following on the heals of Adobe's announcement that it is open sourcing Flex.
At the end of June, I head out to Seville, Spain with my good friends Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith to present a workshop on Flash and Web Standards and a slightly-modified-for-non-Flash-developers version of my Rediscovering Fun session at the Serestandar.es conference.
Serestandar.es is a non-Flash web conference and I look forward to acting as an unofficial ambassador for Flash again. I love conferences like this and d.construct as I find it refreshing to be exposed to different viewpoints, approaches, and technologies and to expose others to the same. Not to mention that I can't wait to sample the scrumptious cuisine, warm weather, and laid back Spanish lifestyle again.
After Serestandar.es, it looks like I will have a quiet summer when I will concentrate on developing SWX even further, updating Arp, and working on some mobile Flash Lite applications with both.
In September, I'm booked to speak at granddaddy of Flash conferences, the one and only FlashForward conference which takes place from the 19th to the 21st in Boston. My session, again, will be Rediscovering Fun but I will be presenting a very mature SWX by this time. In fact, with SWX hitting beta hopefully today, I predict that we should see Version 1.0 in June with incremental point releases from there onwards.
Finally, November will see me presenting at Flash on the Beach. FOTB takes place in my lovely hometown of Brighton in the UK and it looks like there will be yet another stellar lineup of speakers presenting there this year.
It looks like 2007 is shaping up to be a great year full of conferences, good friends and lots of SWX!
Seb just asked for Mac SVN client recommendations on Twitter and I realized that I hadn't blogged about Syncro SVN. It's the only SVN client I've found that is actually usable on OS X.
PC users are spoiled with the excellent TortoiseSVN but the few clients that exist on the Mac, well, how should I put it, umm, suck. Badly. Except for Syncro.
Check out Syncro SVN. Personally, though, I still prefer the command line!
. . . there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google, Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won't be free anymore.
We need to stop software patents (and Microsoft). Now. Any ideas?
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