360 Flex - Day 2 (Tuesday)

360 Flex - Day 2 (Tuesday) - Live Blogging

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

Transitioning
Anticipatory
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 thatâ€™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