At Adobe MAX 2009, Adobe unveiled the next release of Adobe Flash Player that realizes the promise of a consistent, cross-platform runtime across desktop and mobile devices. Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 was released on December 17, 2010 and is available for download.

More details: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

From InsideRIA.

Flex does not provide a way to temporarily disable event listeners and re-enable them later. You may want to do this to prevent endless loops. For example, when some code modifies the selectedIndex of a List, an event is fired. If you have a listener that reacts to the event, you may need a way of suppressing the listener’s response under certain conditions. You have two choices:

* Couple the listener to the code that generates the event, so it knows when to ignore the event. This defeats one of the purposes of event-driven programming, separation of concerns.
* Suppress the event dispatch

My gift to you today, dear reader, is the EventManager class. This class remembers all event listeners assigned to an EventDispatcher, and can remove or re-instate those listeners with a single method call.

package events {
import flash.events.EventDispatcher;

public class EventManager {
private var dispatcher:EventDispatcher;
private var type:String;
private var listener:Function;
private var useCapture:Boolean;
private var priority:int;
private var useWeakReference:Boolean;

public function EventManager(dispatcher:EventDispatcher, type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean, priority:int, useWeakReference:Boolean) {
this.dispatcher = dispatcher;
this.type = type;
this.listener = listener;
this.useCapture = useCapture;
this.priority = priority;
this.useWeakReference = useWeakReference;
}

private static function disableFn(item:*, index:int, array:Array):void {
var em:EventManager = EventManager(item);
em.dispatcher.removeEventListener(em.type, em.listener, em.useCapture);
}

public static function disableAll(listeners:Array):void {
listeners.forEach(disableFn);
}

private static function enableFn(item:*, index:int, array:Array):void {
var em:EventManager = EventManager(item);
em.dispatcher.addEventListener(em.type, em.listener, em.useCapture, em.priority, em.useWeakReference);
}

public static function enableAll(listeners:Array):void {
listeners.forEach(enableFn);
}
}
}

package {
public class EMDemo extends ComboBox {
private var listeners:Array = new Array();

override public function addEventListener(type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean = false, priority:int = 0, useWeakReference:Boolean = false):void {
super.addEventListener(type, listener, useCapture, priority, useWeakReference);
listeners.push(new EventManager(this, type, listener, useCapture, priority, useWeakReference));
}

/** Prevent update events from being issued */
public function quietlySetIndex(newIndex:int):void {
EventManager.disableAll(listeners);
selectedIndex = newIndex;
EventManager.enableAll(listeners);
}
}
}

Two researchers from Japan’s Keio University (which yours truly attended just until recently by the way) have developed a kitchen appliance aimed at the total web geek in you, a YouTube-powered microwave. The so-called Castoven [JP] is based on a conventional, unbranded model of “good quality” but sports a 10.4-inch LCD screen in the door panel.

castoven_3

Needless to say the researchers didn’t forget to build a set of speakers into the microwave, too. It’s connected to a Mac, but I suppose this would work with Windows computers as well. The concept, first made public in a research paper published last year [JP, PDF], is to make people’s everyday lives a little more worthwhile through mashing up web contents with electric appliances.

The main idea is to display a YouTube video whose length depends on the time you need to heat up what’s inside the Castoven. Say, you want to prepare a lunch box that takes 3.30 minutes to be ready. The Castoven would then automatically pull a video from YouTube with that length and display it on the screen until the meal is finished.

The Adobe AIR 1.5.3 runtime and SDK are now available for download. This release includes an updated version of Flash Player, security updates and several bug fixes. The developer release notes include critical information that all developers building AIR applications should be sure to read including important information related to certificate renewals (see earlier blog post) as well as bug fixes.

Highlights of some of the important changes in this release:

* If you have deployed an existing Adobe AIR application using AIR 1.5.2 or earlier and you want to update your application to use the 1.5.3 namespace, you will need to specify the old publisher ID of your application in your descriptor. Instructions on how to find your publisher ID and specify it in your descriptor are described in the release notes.
* The process for changing certificates in an update to a deployed application has changed. Beginning with AIR 1.5.3, certificate renewals will no longer be handled automatically and you will need to use the migrate feature of ADT. Please learn more about this topic by reading the release notes.

Critical issues fixed in this release:

* When an intermediate certificate expires, it is no longer possible to sign an application with a renewed certificate (fixed by removing the publisher ID).
* The AIR application installer crashes on Linux systems using AMD Phenom processors.

The alpha 5 updated build of Flex Builder for Linux is now available on Adobe Labs.

Adobe AIR 2 Beta on Adobe Labs.

AIR 2 includes several highly-requested features. Some of the prominent features of AIR 2 are:

* Server sockets
* Open documents with the user’s default application
* Microphone data access
* .rpm and .deb packages for Linux
* Launch native executables
* USB mass storage device detection
* Global Error Handling
* UDP sockets
* TLS/SSL sockets
* DNS lookup
* Packaging an AIR application in a native installer
* Database transaction savepoints
* Screen reader support (Windows only)
* Printing enhancements
* Increased maximum size of NativeWindow
* Multi-touch events (Windows only)

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM – News), the enterprise cloud computing company, and Adobe Systems Incorporated (NYSE: ADBE – News), today announced the availability of a new offering that unites the power of the Force.com platform with the richness and ubiquity of the Adobe® Flash® Platform to enable a new generation of cloud-based rich Internet applications (RIAs). The new offering, Adobe® Flash® Builder(TM) for Force.com, integrates the two platforms to bring the richness of the consumer Web to enterprise cloud applications to enable a significantly improved level of developer productivity.

“Adobe and salesforce.com share a common vision for accelerating developer success with cloud computing,”

Read more

The Actionscript Conference(TAC -09
) is a community conference that with the focus on the Flash Platform. Attendents will see themselves immersed in a day of learning, knowledge exchange, and networking. TAC aims to bring topics on Actionscript 3.0, Flash development, Enterprise Flex, AIR, Integrating of Flash and other Platforms, and building Rich Internet Application to its audience.

It is going to be more excitement to attend the TAC-09 and it is going to be totally different from TAC-08. This time the more exciting thing is about the speakers. Please do visit the below provided link to check out more. I can say a good opportunity to meet, interact & experience.

TAC -09

The Actionscript Conference(TAC -09
) is a community conference that with the focus on the Flash Platform. Attendents will see themselves immersed in a day of learning, knowledge exchange, and networking. TAC aims to bring topics on Actionscript 3.0, Flash development, Enterprise Flex, AIR, Integrating of Flash and other Platforms, and building Rich Internet Application to its audience.

It is going to be more excitement to attend the TAC-09 and it is going to be totally different from TAC-08. This time the more exciting thing is about the speakers. Please do visit the below provided link to check out more. I can say a good opportunity to meet, interact & experience.

TAC -09