A ticket to Eldorado: Adobe Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 released!


On March 22 Adobe officially announced the product versions of Flash Builder 4, Flex 4 and ColdFusion Builder. This is some great news for the flash dev community as Beta versions proved that Flash Builder and the new Flex SDK are powerful tools to enhance developer and designer workflow. The just launched final versions were significantly improved to enable developers to gain the best in development time, integration and building more expressive applications.

Flash Builder 4 comes with over 90 new features, such as event code generations, a new Package Explorer, getter-setter generation, support for ASDoc tooltips right in the IDE, just to name a few. All these are intended to boost your coding speed and therefore, make the workflow more effective.

Among other important upgrades are a full overhaul of the Eclipse based editor, new data services browser and Network monitor that can help you debug network traffic such as AMF services. As you know, Flex Builder has been re-branded Flash Builder which is going to give people a clear idea about the scope of what that product does.

One of the most important things introduced within Flex 4 is a new component and skinning architecture called Spark. It brings an expressiveness of RIA applications to a whole new level in addition to supporting the new Flash Catalyst to Flash Builder workflow.

Adobe’s new release brought some piece of joy to ColdFusion community too as they finally got a decent IDE. It is based on Eclipse and includes a full line by line debugger that supports breakpoints. The new CF IDE is deeply integrated with ColdFusion 9, plus integration between ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder makes it fast and easy for CF developers to create Flex applications. The best part about it is that purchasing the premium version of Flash Builder, you’ll also get CF Builder and vice versa.

Still doubting whether you should buy new Adobe products? To clear up everything, look at this comparison chart created by Adobe that includes features of Flex Builder 3, Flash Builder Standard, Flash Builder Premium, and the Flex 4 SDK.

You can download the products here.

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Posted by Steve, March 24th, 2010 in Flash News
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Unity 3D: New Dimension for Game Development


If you are a 3D game developer/designer or simply enjoy playing web games, the name of Unity 3D is certainly familiar to you. Somehow the guys from Unity managed to create a multiplatform animation and game development application that is intuitive, flexible and deep, all in one. So what exactly makes Unity so popular? Let’s look under the hood and find it out!

One of the best things about Unity is that it’s accessible for both professional and non-expert users. Thus, if you are a decent game designer but you programming skills are your weak point, Unity engine can fill those gaps pretty well. Here are the main features making this possible:

  • Integrated development environment with visual editing, drag and drop interface and live game preview.
  • Universal web player available both for Mac OS and Windows and works in all browsers.
  • All the impressive performance speed and great 3D rendering is built with JavaScript and C# only. In other words, Unity-powered games work on iPhone which is definitely an advantage in terms of Apple-Adobe intrigues of today.

 

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Posted by Steve, March 15th, 2010 in Inspiration
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What’s tasty in Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3?

A few days ago Adobe launched a new beta version of its Flash Player 10.1. Including several important improvements and bug fixes, Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 is definitely a pleasant release both for flash devs and users.

Beta 3 release probably brought the biggest piece of cake to owners of netbooks (at least to those with the Intel GMA 500 and Broadcom Crystal HD Accelerator graphics chipsets). As you might already know, the third beta provides better HD Web video streaming performance.

Early Web video tests conducted by numerous techi observers and enthusiasts, (Cnet test, Engadget test) show great results: both 720p and 1080p streaming videos play back quite smoothly. Of course, experts don’t hurry to call this an outright performance, but the progress is obvious and more is expected to come with the final release of Flash Player 10.1 later this year. If you still haven’t tried Beta 3 on your netbook, catch up and share your impressions in comments! One thing we’d like to caution you about is that you need to install updated drivers for the aforesaid chipsets before attempting playback after the player update.

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Posted by Steve, March 1st, 2010 in News
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