And another one: Silverlight 4 Beta1 is out

Maybe symbolic to the general game of catch up that Microsoft is playing with Adobe, today the brand new Silverlight 4 beta was released:

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/

And what a round of catch up this is. Things might chance once I have used it for while, but for now I think that everyone of Silverlight's short comings compared to Flash have been answered. Printing, webcam, microphone, support for Chrome - it's all there.

Of course, still missing is a wide spread (90%+) install base of the Silverlight plugin - and the fact that it is no fun developing for Silverlight on a Mac (the applications run fine, but the developing tools are almost non existant). But okay, can't really blame Microsoft for that.

Downloading while writing this and thinking about how on earth I will find the time to check both AIR2.0 and Silverlight 4 out in detail...

Man, I love being a frontend developer.

New betas: AIR 2.0 and FlashPlayer 10.1

Yay!

New toys ready from Adobe:

AIR2.0 beta 1

This looks more and more like a fully viable platform for developing desktop applications. I'm very impressed by the speed that AIR is evolving, and all we need now is for Flash Builder to take that final step, and catch up with Visual Studio. But that won't happen for a while, since Flash Builder 4 is a bit disappointing in that regard.

The top 1 new thing on my list, is that memory usage has been reduced by more than one third!

Flash Player 10.1 prerelease

Global error handling, speed improvements, memory usage improvements, DRM and almost completely spanning both the desktop and the mobile marget (except the iPhone of course). We haven't really seen the full potential of FP10.0 yet, and already the bar is rising.

Can't wait to tinker with these two babies tonight.

Del.icio.us : air flash beta
Technorati : air flash beta

Google Wave Waffle

Update:

Did some UX tweaks and bug fixing. Also the main url for access is now:

www.staunsholm.dk/wave/waffle.xml

Mkkl.

Google Web Toolkit, Gears and Apps - what is the difference?

Often times Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Google Gears, Google App Engine and Google Apps are seen as one product. And yes, they are related, but they are also very different things.

Google Web Toolkit is a framework designed to work around "all" the tedious work when writing browser applications. To accomplish this a radical approch is chosen, namely that you write your application in Java. Not the kind you execute in an applet (remember? aaaaargh), instead the code is compiled into crossbrowser compatible javascript!

Using Eclipse makes this work very well, and because of the Java HotSpot compiler, you have an environment where you can retain the rapid development cycle of write->reload, that you are used to from traditional http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ development. But even better, you can debug the code in Java - an experience that is in another league compared to javascript debugging.

Google Apps is actually an end user offering from Google that resembles how many intranets are constructed. You know, a central place for documents, calendars, communication etc.

However, Google App Engine is something completely different. Or not. Actually this is a cloud based hosting environment that can host your GWT solutions if you should choose so. Google App Engine also what lies beneath Google Apps. It supports Pyhon instead of Java, if that floats your boat better.

Google Gears is another go at a browser plugin. Unlike most other plugins however, this one extends the browsers capabilities instead of creating it's own "universe". In short, Google Gears makes it possible (in a sandboxed way) to make browser based (possibly offline) "desktop" applications, controlling a local storage area, adding nice icons etc. Much of this is (will be) covered in html5, when that time is reached.

So, all of these technologies enable web based application development, but they are spanning different parts of the process, mainly split into the client and the server side of things.

Chrome extensions

RIAs come in many shapes and sizes. One of them is browser plugins, extensions, add-ons or whatever you want to call them. Firefox' succes is largely attributed to the many addons that independant developers have created (https://addons.mozilla.org).

Google Chrome hopes to repeat that succes with it's upcoming v4 release:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/index.html

Note that you need the newest beta release to develop and use these extensions.

The development itself is very straight forward, just like in firefox, using javascript, html and css. The documentation and tutorials found in the link above are quite good, so no need for me to go through it all here.

Now, all you need is that great idea... Simple: just go to addons.mozilla.org and browse the many addons available, I'm quite sure you will quickly find a few that you'd like for Chrome to have as well. Maybe in refined and better way?

AIR Blog Publishing Tool

Here's a great RIA idea if anyone's got some extra spare time:

An AIR based blog publishing tool. I have not been able to google anything but AirPress, and the download for that seems to have disappeared completely from the internet...

Personally I am using Zoundry Raven, which fits my needs perfectly, so a nice copy of that would do nicely - thank you :-)

Google Closure Tools

Google has just released three new tools for all you javascript junkies out there:

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html

The Closure Compiler seems an immidiate win to just about any javascript based RIA. Speed improvements, size reductions and type checking of your code - things we all wish we would have had many years ago.

The Closure Library is another go at a javascript framework. It does much of what fx. jQuery does and then some. I have used jQuery so much lately, so changing to a new framework is probably only something I would try if a really big project came along.

The Closure Templates don't immidiately strike me as super useful. It's a sort of language that automatically generates JavaScript (for the client) or Java (for the server) that outputs html. Almost looks like the kind of code we used to make in ASP or PHP in the old days, you now a spaghetti incident of html and code, only done in javascript and with an additional template layer. Not the way I would choose, but then again I never did a "Gmail" project.

JActionScripters

Japanese action scriptors are the best. After reading this blog for a while, I'm sure you will agree:

http://blog.jactionscripters.com

A lot of the work and writings are centered around the Spark framework (which is not related to the Flex Spark framework). Most of the documentation is in Japanese, but it's quite easy to see how the different classes work.

BTW this blog also intruced me to wonderfl, which contain so many little gems on how to do (mainly visual) stuff - much of which you wouldn't think was possible (250.000 flow particles, anyone?).

Adobe Social

The Adobe Social service is currently in it's first beta. This is Adobe's attempt at creating a simple way of integrating "all" of the big social sites out there (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, Google and AOL atm.). Rather than doing it from scratch, they have opted to use the services of Gigya - and simply provided an ActionScript API to simplify development.

There are plenty of other services out there, but the API seems quite straight forward to use, and ready-to-go actionscript code is not the most common thing among the competition.

The service bascially provides a unified way to login and communicate with the users friends.

Flash 2D Physics

2D physics in Flash? Simple:

http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

I've used the C version for a project a few years ago, with great results, and the Flash version seems equally fast and solid.

Flash 3D Physics

Check out JigLibFlash if you need a 3D physics engine for your flash project:

http://www.jiglibflash.com/blog/

Amazing how fast things have happened in the last few years. I can still remember my own painful attempts at an 2D physics library many moons ago...

Augmented Reality Squared

This is beyond cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsb76pva4s4

BTW this comes from one of the coolest AS3 blogs out there, check it out:

http://as3.miguelmoraleda.com/

Away3D Lite

Away3D Lite is an amazing, but Flash 10 only, achievement:
http://away3d.com/away3d-lite-v1-0-fastest-and-smallest-3d-engine-in-flash

Matthew Casperson has a lot more on it here:

http://www.brighthub.com/hubfolio/matthew-casperson/articles/49048.aspx

Very, very useful for creating interactive 3D in banners etc. And it's a lot faster than the full blown Away3D engine (because of the "native" 3d support in Flash 10).

Silverlight Feed

One stop feed for all the Silverlight news you will ever need:

http://geekswithblogs.net/wynapsetechnicalmusings/Rss.aspx

FlashDevelop

My favorite Flash / Flex editor: FlashDevelop. Go try it now:

www.flashdevelop.org