Category: Software Development

iPhone and Flash — iPhone SDK comparison with Windows Mobile, S60, Android

Just saw an interesting article on Engadget that compared iPhone SDK to Windows Mobile, Android, S60 and Toolchain.

What is really interesting is that Windows Mobile along with Nokia S60 supports Flash.

iPhone, as you know, does not support Flash (and won’t support it any time soon, given Apple’s comments yesterday about Flash being too slow to run on iPhone).

And what is even more interesting is that Microsoft and Nokia have signed a deal to make Silverlight available on Nokia S60 and S40.

So two things really:

  1. Adobe needs to do something to get on to the iPhone platform. AIR runtime perhaps?
  2. Adobe needs to look at engaging Nokia for AIR runtime.

Here is the article at Engadget: iPhone SDK Comparison Chart.

Incorrect Flex 3 SDK download on Adobe site

I just went to download Flex 3 SDK from the Try Flex Builder 3 page on the Adobe site.

The file that downloads when one clicks the “Download Flex SDK 3 for all platforms” link at the bottom of the page is called “flex2_sdk_hf1.zip”.

When one unzips the file and looks at the readme, it confirms that the SDK vesion is: Version 2.0.1.

I presume the “hf1” in the file name suggests that it is Flex 2 SDK with ‘hotfix 1’.

Is anyone else also facing this issue or is it only me?

The SDK that ships with Flex Builder 3 does indeed have a readme that indicates SDK version 3.0. I guess I’ll just use that for now.

Update (9.30 a.m.):

The link on the download page has now been fixed. Adobe took just an hour to pick up this blog entry, respond to it, and fix the issue. Very impressive!

Given that I downloaded the incorrect Flex SDK (2.0) earlier today, and am downloading the correct one right now (3.0), I can’t help but comment on the size of the SDK. Flex SDK 2.0 was 38.11mb. Flex SDK 3.0 is 78.44mb! Lots of goodies!

Important Flash Player Security Update – Check your applications

Adobe Devnet has a security advisory on the upcoming Flash Player 9 update. The advisory lists a few very important changes to the security model in Flash Player which can possibly impact your existing Flex and Flash applications. The changes are primarily to address the vulnerabilities of the earlier versions of Flash Player (9,0,115,0 and before).

There are four key changes that can possibly impact existing applications:

  • A socket policy file will always be required for all socket connections
  • A policy file will be required to send headers across domains (This will possibly affect some of the Flex apps that I work with)
  • The allowScriptAccess default will always be “sameDomain”
  • “javascript:” URLs will be prohibited in networking APIs, except getURL(), navigateToURL(), and HTML-enabled text fields

Although no date is specified, but these updates to Flash Player would come in force during April 2008.

Here are some relevant links, including the link to the security advisory:

RIA conference announced — Web on the Piste, August 2008, New Zealand

Web on the Piste — the Conference on Rich Internet Technologies has been announced for this year.

It will be held on 20-21 August 2008 in the pretty Queenstown, in the South Island of New Zealand.

The theme for this year’s conference is usability and user experience in RIAs.

The cost for registering for the conference is AUD 500.

So if you are interested in either attending or speaking or sponsoring, head over to the Web on the Piste website and register your interest.

Last year’s conference was quite successful for a new event. The conference was completely booked out. There were about 120 participants. And there were some really nice speakers from the US, Australia and New Zealand (including me 😉 ).

In case you don’t quite know what the word “piste” means: “a piste is the name given to a marked ski-run or path down a mountain for the purposes of skiing, snowboarding, or other mountain sports” (from Wikipedia).

Queenstown is known for its beautiful surroundings and great skiing duing the southern hemispehere winters. So the big idea behind Web on the Piste is that you come down under, get to interact from peers, learn a few things about RIAs and ski/snowboard/bungee!

Here are links to some pictures from last year. Some pictures are on Flickr, and some are on Facebook.

(BTW, I work for Straker Interactive — the organizers of Web on the Piste).

A great utility to test Lucene indexes

If you work with Lucene, then you know that you need to write your own GUI for testing the Lucene index. This can be a little annoying as the purpose of using Lucene is to quickly index content and retrieve it. Writing a GUI to test if Lucene is indexing the content correctly detracts from the purpose of using Lucene.

I was really kicked to find this nifty little utility called “Luke” that provides a GUI for testing Lucene indexes that have been created. I’ve been using it for a about an hour now, and simply love it.

Luke can be downloaded from this site.