OnRails.org

As you saw yesterday afternoon I didn’t blog too much, so let’s how today goes. The party last night was really fun, lot’s of networking, rock band playing and just a nice general geek atmosphere.

Evolution of RIA Design Principals

Right now the “Evolution of RIA Design Principals” panel is about to start.

Panel is:

• Chet Haase – Senior Computer Scientists at Adobe
• Bill Scott – Director UI Engineering at Netflix
• Ehud Waizer – SAP
• Paul Guirata – Catalyst Resources

Context: oriented to customer facing applications. Not games.

Chet Haase

He works on effects at Adobe. Effects used in a subtle way can make the user more effective.

What are the top 3 rules

1. Transitioning
2. Anticipatory
3. well-timed.

Don’t Lose the User.

Bill Scott

Principles for Interesting Moments

• Input where you output
• Require a light footprint
• Stay in the flow
• Offer invitations
• Be reactive
• Use transitions

Paul Giurata

Modular
Reusable

• Panel vs Page
• Panels being reusable application(s)
• Panels being re-used down to the code level
• Panels potentially being entirely separate applications

Bill mentions Christine Perfetti has a few videos on usability testing.

Compiled Favorite Principles

• Transitioning (Animations)
• Anticipatory
• Timing
• Don’t Lose the User
• Interesting Moments
• Modular
• Reusable

Consistency .via. developers working from the same code. Not a style guide as it’s open for interpretation.

Whats New in Flex 4 that’s NOT Spark! – Deepa Subramaniam

Deepa was on the engineering team for 7 years and now just got promoted as product manager.

She will put the slides on her blog. So I will go easy with the notes.

We will talk about:

• Enhanced States
• Pixel Bender Integration
• Text (TLF)
• 2-way Data Binding
• Advanced CSS
• OSMF
• MXItemRenderer
• RSLs
• Charting Enhancements
• ASDoc
• MXML Vector
• Compile time FXG Optimization
• Improved Compiler

2-Way Databinding

Inline declaration using the syntax, @{bindable_property}

<s:TextInput id="t1" text="@{t2.text}" />
<s:TextInput id="t2" />

Enhanced States Syntax

• AddChild/RemovedChild replaced with includeIn/excludeFrom
• State Groups

<m:states>
 <m:Sate name="A"/>
 <m:Sate name="B"/>
 <m:Sate name="C"/>
</m:states>

<Button label="b1" includeIn="A,B" />
<Button label="b2" includeIn="C" />

Text

• FTE – Flash Text Engine in FP10
• TLF – Text Layout Framework, set of ActionScript classes build atop FTE. Is XML-based markup

Each text element maps to a class

		flash.textLayout.elements.DivElement

			flash.textLayout.elements.ParagraphElement

		flash.textLayout.elements.SpanElement

		flash.textLayout.elements.TabElement

TLF Partitioning:

• Simple, plain text
• Rich text
• Rich editable text
• Rich, editable, selectable text

Pixel Bender Integration

• Pixel Bender: language for hardware-indepdent image processing algorithm
• Shader: compiled instance of a Pixel Bender kernel
• Flex introduces the ShaderFilter class. Simplifies pixel bender such that they can be invoked in MXML

Advanced CSS

• Flex 3: type and class selectors
• Flex 4: Multiple class selectors, id selectors, descendant selectors, pseudo-selectors, pseudo-state selectors

Eg pseudo-state selectors

@namespace s "library://ns.adboe.com/flex/spark";

s|Button:up {
  color:#000000;
}

s|Button:down {
  color:#FFFFFFF;
}

OSFM

• Generic framework for managing media in Flash applications
• Offers playback functionality, exposed in the Spark video component
• replaces FLVPlayback
• org.osmf.media.MediaPlayer
• Play, pause, stop, loop, seek, volume, autoLoop, autoPlay, …

MXItemRenderer

• Spark ItemRenderers for use with MX List-based components
• Extends Spark ItemRenderer and handles the contractual differences

Charting Enhancements

• FilterFunctions for chart types. Can specify custom filter functions against the data set
• Inverted axis support
• RendererDirection in PieSeries
• Performance related bug fixes

RSLs

• By default RSL is turned on.
• Default linked HelloWorld is 78% smaller
• How to monkey patch when using RSLs. If you monkey patch you loose the benefits off RSLs
• Flex is split in 6 RSLs: textlayout, osmf, framework, spark, sparkskins, rpc

MXML Vector

• New type
• Like Arrays but contents are restricted to a single base type
• Faster than array

<fx:Vector id="myVector" type="String">
  <fx:String>hi</fx:String>
  <fx:String>bye</fx:String>
</fx:Vector>

Compile-time FGX Optimization

• FXG directly to SWF representation
• Faster and smaller
• .fxg or past FXG into an MXML Component uses compile-time FXG Optimization

ASDoc

• Comments in MXML
• Support DITA creation
• Max, Win, Linux

Improved Compiler

• Incremental compilation. 50-80% better
• Full compilation: 30-40% better (large apps)
• Compiler Memory Usage: large apps are 30% better. multi-project apps are 70% better. Small apps are similar to Flex 3