Playr is a Flash Actionscript 3 class built to take the heavy lifting off your hands when building any kind of music player appliction in Flash, Flex or AIR. Yesterday Ronny released an update on his blog and it all looks very promising! Ronny has put up a dedicated site for Playr where all of the information, code examples, downloads are gathered. Almost a year ago, I started playing with the first version of Playr. I was working on a RIA project for school called ”Interlude”.

The main goal of Interlude was to provide an flex/air based mp3 player which offered you a user friendly music management tool. For the beta version, I was planning to implement  a smart playlist generator,  using the last.fm api and a cool personal mood feature. Via last.fm Interlude looked for similar artists and generated a playlist filled with matches from your own music collection. The mood feature allows users to create their own personal moods. This can go from ”music@work”, ”workout music” to ‘’sex music” and allows them to tag their mp3 files. Whenever they feel like creating a playlist based on what mood they are in, this feature allows them to quickly generate an optimized playlist.

This all sounds very cool but I never had the chance to finish it. I just did not had the time to work out the first beta version, and as some of you might know, in the beginning of the second semester I started my internship @ Boulevart and from that point things went very fast. Any way, the good news is that my colleague Maarten (flex developer) fell immediately in love when I showcased Interlude at the office. He decided to bring it back to life so we will be announcing the first beta version of Interlude soon. Here are already a few screenshots from the first designs.

There still is a lot of work to do, and I think Maarten will kick my ass if he sees the standard components, but hey its a start no? :) We will be using Ronny’s Playr class in this project as well. If you want to stay tuned on Interlude and if you are interested in beta testing send me an email at thomas.joos[at]boulevart.be

A while ago, Maarten Cox ( Flex developer at Boulevart ) released his first version of CrazyCam. A flex/air application bringing photobooth features for windows users. Being donwloaded over a 1000 times at the Adobe Market Place it was quite a succes. Maarten worked hard on an update and here it is. Some of the biggest improvement are a new interface design and the ability to not only take pictures but shoot video’s as well! CrazyCam V2.1 also offers an implemented gallery where you can watch your pictures and video’s inside the application itself.

The new version can be downloaded from the Adobe MarketPlace. You can find more info on Maarten’s blog or at labs.boulevart.

A while ago, Maarten Cox, a colleague of mine at Boulevart, released a cool AIR Application called CrazyCam. As a windows-user, you were never able to show off like mac users when they are using photo booth. From now on, you can make crazy funny pictures like every mac user out there. Ofcourse, mac-users can also use this application, as it has some other effects then photobooth.

CrazyCam offers 33 effects like mirror-effects, fire, water, snow, rgb, ascii and many more (which were created by Paul Neave ). Just choose an effect on the left side, do a crazy face and make a snapshot!

You can find more info on Maarten’s blog or at labs.boulevart.

Today Adobe announced the Adobe Open Screen Project, which is dedicated to ensuring a consistent rich Internet experience across a broad range of digital screens and form factors including mobile phones, consumer electronics, televisions and personal computers. This experience will be driven by the Adobe Flash Player and AIR (in the future) and is meant to ensure that designers and developers can focus on the consumer experience and know their efforts will scale across different platforms and screens. The Open Screen Project is meant to enable a consistent runtime environment for designers and developers across desktops and devices.

There are lots of companies involved in this project, all of them believing in this unified vision of the future. You can find all the members of the Open Screen Project here

What exactly are they up to there at adobe? Well to give a quick summary, these are the most importants things they are going to change:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Go and check Ryan Stewart’s blog to get more detailed info about what these topics actually means for the community and desktop-developers. Adobe has released a video and further information for developers also, definately worth checking!

Also Mark Doherty’s post posted his impressions about what it means exactly for mobile developers!
You can read more about the Open Screen Project here as well as an FAQ.

And last but not least: let’s quote Aral Balkan:
What does that mean for us? It means Flash _everywhere_. It means you picked the right platform to develop your skills on. It means Flash will be around for a long, long time!

Spaz is a free, open source twitter client for Mac, Windows and Linux. The current version, known as Spaz.AIR, uses the Adobe Integrated Runtime. Spaz has won “Best HTML Community Application” in the AIR Developer Derby. It has a nice interface, look and feel and a high usability. Following your friends and collegues was never this fun ^^ I could recommend this application to everyone who likes to twitter but is tired to check the site constantly or to use a boring twitter tool (like twinja or twitterAIR ) I just started with twitter but this tool makes it much more fun for me

to download this app click here and start twittering on your desktop.

Yesterday I went with some other students to Braschaat for another interesting AUG-meeting. They hosted a session about AIR, presented by Mike Chambers & Lee Brimelow. Chambers’ part was a little introduction into flex and he also talked about new technologies like Hydra and Thermo, which both seemed amazing by the way. Brimelow’s part was more AIR-related. First of all he showed us a couple of AIR examples to explain how usefull this new technology could be. He also showed us some of the cool stuff you could do with a desktop application that no other technology could output. He gave a overview of the sort of nativ window options you have in AIR. You could basically tune you’re own desktop app into any shape you want.

Getting started with AIR is something that I have on my tot do list but it is not quite that difficult to produce an AIR application, because as a developer you already have the existing web development skills in HTML, Flash, .. to create it. Lee also give a nice overview when to use Flex and when to use Flash to develop applications.

if you want to learn more about AIR you could visit some of these sites:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
http://onair.adobe.com/
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/
http://theflashblog.com/

grtz Vile Body