Promethe's Blog » RIA

funanbulle, our #air24h application!

Promethe — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:10:16 +0000

The Adobe 24H Challenge was last friday and the application the 14 teams created are already online. You can see all the available applications on the official website.

Our application is called "funanbulle". The goal of the application is to allow families to create their own micro virtual world and gather. We wanted to show what such virtual worlds would look like. The idea was to enable people to share and chat in real time with a fun and engaging user experience.

funanbulle, Aerys' #air24h challenge contribution

The application is nothing more than a proof of concept. If we had enough time, we would have added lots of feature like:

Audio chat
Photos and videos sharing
Interactive objects to trigger applications (games, sharing applications, etc...)

In the end, we had just enough time to build a 3D chat. But I think it was a lot of fun and it looks really nice! Here is a quick video to show what funanbulle is about and how it works:

This video was made by Michael Chaize to show the 14 applications created during the contest.

To install the application, just click on the following picture to go to the install badge:

When the application starts, you will be asked to "join" or "create" a room:

If you don't have a room number: select "create a room" to create a new room. When the room is created, you'll join in automatically join it. The room number will be visible in the top right corner. You can share it with your friends and family to enable them joining your room.
If you have a room number (because a friend already created a room and gave you its number for example): select "join a room", type your room number and click "Go". And voilà!

You can use the bottom text input to chat with your friends. But you can also launch special actions by typping one of the following commands:

/jump
/wait
/sit
/use
/wave

We hope you'll like it and have fun with it!

AIR 2.0 HTTP Web Server

Promethe — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:42:50 +0000

AIR 2.0 brings a lot of new features. Among them is the new ServerSocket class. The Socket class exists since Flash 9 and enabled a lot of new client/server applications. But it has always been limited to client side sockets as long as AIR (and the Flash Platform as a whole for that matter) is concerned. Therefor, this new server socket feature makes it possible to build actual server software using AIR!

Rich of this new and incredible ability, Christophe Coenraets posted a small but yet very powerful code snippet to build an HTTP web server using AIR 2.0!

Voice Recognition in Flash 10

Promethe — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:59:05 +0000

The following video demonstrates a new "voice gesture" library targeting the Flash Platform. As you might have guessed, those "voice gestures" are pretty much like "mouse gestures" but they are activated by voice only. I guess it uses some kind of voice learning/recognition algorithm. I can't stress enough how trhilled I am to see this kind of new and powerful software coming to Flash. This enables a whole new kind of usages and applications...

Voice Gesture from didier.brun on Vimeo.

Rich User Interface design with Balsamiq Mockups and Napkee

Promethe — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:12:13 +0000

Creating a rich and efficient User Interface (UI) is the Saint Graal of every Rich Internet Application (RIA) developer. As Michael Chaize said it in his RIA introduction conference he made this year at EPITA, we call it "Rich" Internet Application because the software takes advantage of a rich User Interface and offers a rich user experience.

Flex developers can use the "Design" view of Flash Builder to design their UI. But this method requires to already have the components you want to work with and make sure they are full MXML. Because the WYSIWYG editor of Flash Builder does not interpret ActionScript components, it is more of a "What You See Is ore Or Less What You Get". If you need more than the Flash Builder WYSIMOLWYG editor -- and I certainly hope you do -- here are two awesome tools to create and export UI mockups.

More details right after the jump...

The first one is called Balsamiq Mockups and enables you to create the rich UI mockups per say.

The second one is called Napkee, and import Balsamiq mockups to export them targeting an HTML/AJAX web application or a Flex project :

Those two applications use Adobe AIR. It is actually very neat to design AIR/Flex applications using an AIR Application. In my mind, this is quite a good proof that Flex and AIR are both relevant and efficient technologies.