October 2008 Archive

Wanted! - Flash Designer

We’re the UK leader in RIA development and building incredible applications with Flex is our forté. We’re growing like crazy because the world has  woken up and realised that Web applications don’t have to be boring or painful to use. These forward thinking companies are kicking our doors down asking us to build their next great idea. That means we need to grow. That means we need you.

A bit about us…we’re an interesting mix of competitive and casual providing a fun and exciting environment to work in where good development comes first and office politics are shown the door. We’re the UK market leaders in RIA development because we’re very good at what we do and because we allow our incredibly talented developers to do what they do best in creative and fun environments. What you will find is passionate and energetic designers like yourself having a blast building incredible applications. If that sounds like an environment you’d like to “work” in, we’d love to hear from you.

Key Skills:
Interface Design, User Experience Design and Flash interface development.

Requirements:
Ideal candidate will demonstrate knowledge of:

• Adobe Flash CS3


• ActionScript 3.0


• Mastery of Adobe Photoshop CS3


• HTML/XHTML/CSS


• Exposure to and an understanding of Adobe Flex


• Exposure to 3D, PaperVision or AfterEffects.


• Exposure to a server-side technology, preferably ColdFusion, .NET, Rails  or Java.


• A good understanding of the SDLC.


• Experience of agile software development with Scrum


• Excellent communication skills.


• Demonstrated aptitude for learning new technologies.


• Passionate “do whatever it takes” attitude.


• Goal-oriented and deadline-oriented.

If you live and breath interface design and are interested in working on cutting-edge technologies developing cutting-edge applications, drop us a line!

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 01 Oct 2008

10 reasons why Flex is wicked cool

Every couple of months, for some reason unbenownst to me I find myself getting incredibly motivated and enthusiastic about one particular technology that I use every day of the week.  Sometimes this might be ColdFusion, sometimes it might be AIR, sometimes it might be something else entirely that I’ve been researching, but at the moment it’s 100% Adobe’s Flex.

Now, this might sounds very much like a sales orientated blog post but it’s not, it’s a genuine 10 reasons why Flex is what I would call “wicked cool”.

So, on with the 10.

1. Flash Platform

OK, quick lesson for the uninitiated here.  Flex is Flash.  Well, what I mean here, is that Flex is purely a way of developing and generating a SWF file that runs in the Flash Player in the same way that Flash CS4 is an IDE for developing Flash movies. So what does this mean for a regular developer?  Well, this means essentially that anything that can be done with Flash as a runtime can be used from with Flex as well.  For instance, all of the new developments in Flash player 10 are now available to Flex applications as long as the end user has the runtime installed.

2. Open Source

The Flex SDK as it stands is an open source product.  What this means is that, for the large part, Flex is not going to dissapear anywhere after being binned by some company that doesn’t care, but it also means that Adobe cannot do anything really revolutionary with it without the communities input.  Being open source can only be a good thing.

3. Flex Builder

If any of you have ever used the older Flash IDE’s or come from a background largely in the ColdFusion market, you’ll love Flex Builder, most specifically the debugger.  It gives you full intellisense, refactoring and profiling capabilities as well as a full step through debugger.  Best of all, it’s Eclipse based, which means if you’re a common visitor to the likes of CFEclipse, Aptana, PyDev etc you’re already in the right place for Flex.

4. Community

As communities go, the Flex one is a greatly diverse bunch of very friendly people.  Not everyone comes from a Flash background, or even a client-side development background but everyone shares a passion and enthusiasm for Flex.  Additionally the back-ends available for use as back-ends to a Flex application means that if you’re a platform x developer using Flex, you can pretty much guarantee you’re not alone.  There’s plenty of user groups and conferences out there surrounding the Flex community, so if you’re not involved, get out there and get something going – you can only benefit from it.

5. Options

This point largely refers to the itegration opportunities available to the common Flex developer.  Supporting XML, REST, AMF and more, you can pretty much integrate with any backend you want.  Using Rails?  No problem, RubyAMF is out there, or plain old REST.  Python?  PyAMF etc, Java?  BlazeDS or Livecycle.

6. ColdFusion

This point ties in largely with the last.  By far and away the best option for a Flex backend is ColdFusion, the long since apparently dead platform.  ColdFusion gives you the ability to crack out some very simple code, deploy into a super scalable Java environment, and simply connect to Flex using AMF.  There’s no integration work involved, CF understands AMF natively.  Additional to this, Flex “gets” ColdFusion too.  There’s no need to create any sort of complex services-config file in your Flex project, just say “ColdFusion” and you’re up and running.

Additional to this, the Adobe team have hinted at a couple of conferences to a much deeper integration between the two products.  I can’t say too much due to NDA’s but expect it to get a whole load more interesting with a future release.

7. Runtime penetration

Some runtimes out there suffer from one significant problem.  Pre-installation of the runtime.  If you’re a Silverlight developer, Curl developer etc you have to have a serious thinka bout how many of your end users will have the runtime installed ready to receive your application in their browser.  Silverlight is currently knocking around the 10% mark, Curl is way behind that.  Flash?  Well, lets put it this way, there is not a single piece of software on the planet that has as many installations as Flash.  Nothing.    At the time of writing, 97.7% of machines are capable of running Flex applications.  Currently it’s taking Adobe about six months to get a new version of Flash to around 80% of the internet – which is damn fast.

Worried about your users not being able to run Flex?  Don’t be.

8. AMF

The Action Message Format.  One of the main reasons why Flex is so cool.  AMF is a binary transport format native to Flash which allows the flash platform developer to transport complex actionscript types across the internet in an incredibly efficient way.  James Ward, Adobe evangelist, has been running a census on various transport methods for a while now so it’s well worth checking that out to see how good AMF is when stacked up against some of the common alternatives such as JSON or XML.  For full details on AMF, check out the wikipedia page.

9. Adobe AIR

Unless you’ve had your head buried underground for the last year or so, you’ll be familiar with AIR, previously known as Apollo.  From a Flex point of view, the presence of AIR means you, a mere web developer tooled up with the ways of Flex, can deploy your apps to the desktop.  This is especially cool when you consider the capabilities of Flex versus the other AIR tool of choice, good old HTML and Javascript.  For more information on AIR, visit the product page.

10. Creative Suite

A lot of people forget this – Adobe have been at the forefront of creative design tools for several years now leading the way with Photoshop.  Whilst this isn’t a huge thing in itself for a web developer it does have a lot of effect of Flex, namely the fact that several of the Creative Suite tools integrate with Flex and Flash in loads of different ways. If you’ve not seen CS4 yet, you should, it’s brilliant.

So there you go, a quick brain dump of why I think Flex is wicked cool.  I’m not saying that it’s the only thing you need to know to be successful with RIA, but it’s certainly going to get you most of the way there.

Now, can anyone else think of any more than the 10 I have here?

Posted by Neil Middleton on 01 Oct 2008

New Demo Video of Flash Video in Silverlight

We’ ve got a new video for you all to see demonstrating our Flash Video to Silverlight converter as see in the closing keynote at ReMIX ’08 in Brighton.

For more information, please contact us and we’ll gladly help.

Posted by Adrian Munn on 02 Oct 2008

Monochrome now has a couple of ACE's up their sleeve

This morning both myself and Neil have been awarded the Adobe Community Expert status.  This is largely due to our involvement with Flex Community via events such as Flex Camp London ’08 and MAX Europe ’08.  Aside from Flex we also both have a healthy interest in ColdFusion being the UKCFUG managers along with Mark Drew and Kev McCabe.

So, as always if you need some Flex or ColdFusion help, or would like us to help you out with your events, please drop us a line and we’ll be happy to sort something out.

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 08 Oct 2008

Silverlight 2 drops!

Scott Guthrie has just announced that Silverlight 2 final will be available for download from tomorrow.

According to Microsoft, Silverlight has already been downloaded by 1 in four consumers worldwide which is a significant amount. Expect all of these installs to update to the latest version sometime over the next week.

This is a significant event as it not only marks a huge milestone for the Microsoft Silverlight Team, but it also marks the date that Flash finally got a true competitor after years of complete domination. While Silverlight 1.0 was released last year, it was mainly a video only version, with some JavaScript/AJAX support that lacked the true power of .net. With the release of Silverlight 2, Microsoft has introduced a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework.

Silverlight 2 allows web developers to create applications using any of the programming languages that are available in Visual Studio, including C#, VB.net, JavaScript, IronPython, and IronRuby.

Microsoft also announced a few other little tidbits of information not previously announced.  First up was backing from Microsoft for SoyaTec towards Eclipse plugin development for Silverlight, significant if you’re not traditionally a .NET developer or don’t want to buy Visual Studio. More information on this is available here.

Secondly, Microsoft are opening up the Silverlight / XAML vocabulary to help third party developer write tools for building Silverlight applications.

Lastly, Microsoft have developed a Silverlight control pack, containing loads of Silverlight controls ready for use.  Additionally, this is being released on the Microsoft permissive license on Codeplex, making it free and distributable.  This will be developed over time so expect some interesting things coming here.

We are exceptionally excited about Silverlight 2 here at Monochrome, so expect to see us posting a lot more information over the coming weeks.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 13 Oct 2008

Redirect TCP connections from one IP address and port to another

We’ve just performed a migration from one data centre to another and thus one IP range to another.

We wanted to minimise the amount of down time our clients had as we moved servers between data centres, and also wanted to ensure DNS for their domain names repointed to the new IP addresses in a timely manner.

To minimise the amount of downtime we decided to first repoint our clients’ domain names to their new IP addresses, and then proxy the requests to the old location of the servers.  Then, a week later we would move the servers to the new data centre, give the servers their new IP addresses and then disable the redirection.  This would mean that the downtime would be limited as much as possible.

All in all this worked very well and was very straightforward.

The only hurdle was finding a piece of software that we could install at the new data centre that would allow us to proxy all web traffic requests from one server to another keeping all headers intact.

Fortunately our friends at Firstserv recommended a command line tool called rinetd.  It’s a great little tool that will allow you to redirect any TCP connections from one IP address and port to another IP address and port.

We did give Apache Reverse Proxy a go but it wasn’t easy to get SSL to redirect, and that’s where rinetd came and saved the day.

I hope this helps someone else!

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 14 Oct 2008

AMF client for Silverlight 2

One of deciding features of which RIA technology will be used by clients is definitely AMF. This is truer when the application is going to be running behind the firewall and “player factor” is not so important. The Action Message Format was added to Flash Player 6 and at the beginning was used as the primary method for exchanging data between Flash and ColdFusion. On December 2007 Adobe Published the AMF protocol specification and allowed developers to implement their own AMF gateways. Currently there is a large number of platforms with AMF support. Just to name a few:

• OpenAMF for Java


• PyAMF for Python


• RubyAMF for Ruby


• ZendAMF for PHP


• FluorineFx for .NET

Fluorine.NET authors introduced a project called FluroineFxSL – nothing else but an AMF client for Silverlight 2. At the moment the project is not available for download. However it can be checked out from their SVN.

Having an AMF client in Silverlight is a significant step for this RIA technology. Clients who have their existing PHP/Ruby/Java/’you name it’ back ends, capable of running AMF can now really consider Silverlight, if AMF is the only thing stopping them from using Microsoft technology. What is even more interesting is the FluorineFxSL support for NetConnection (RTMPT protocol). It makes exchanging data between Silverlight and Flex/Flash clients using Flash Media Server or Red5 really easy.

The FluorineFxSL source code is hosted at Google Code. It allows anonymous checkouts and is available here: http://fluorinefx.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/.

More information can be found at FluorineFx weblog.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 14 Oct 2008

Creative Suite 4 goes gold!

By the time you read this post, Adobe will have finally announced the release of Creative Suite 4 after a successful period of open and public beta testing.

Creative suite as a family consists of:

• Adobe InDesign® CS4


• Adobe Photoshop® CS4 Extended


• Adobe Illustrator® CS4


• Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro


• Adobe Flash® CS4 Professional


• Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4


• Adobe Fireworks® CS4


• Adobe Contribute® CS4


• Adobe After Effects® CS4


• Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4


• Adobe Soundbooth® CS4


• Adobe OnLocation™ CS4


• Adobe Encore® CS4

So why should you upgrade from the already very capable CS3?  Well, in short:

New versions, new integration—Enjoy updated versions of the creative tools you rely on. Creative Suite 4 Web Premium includes new versions of Adobe Dreamweaver,® Flash® Professional, Photoshop® Extended, Illustrator,® Fireworks,® Acrobat® Pro, Soundbooth,® and Contribute.®

Complex pages made approachable—Design and develop more sophisticated websites with new Live View in Dreamweaver CS4, featuring interactive code editing. Rely on the new Related Files and Code Navigator features to dive deeply into complex pages.

Powerful animation tools—Give your content a greater sense of depth with the new 3D transformation tools in Flash CS4 Professional, complete with multireference rotation options. Bring your animations to life with the advanced inverse kinematics of the Bones tool.

Multiple export options from a single creative source—Design once and deploy to many formats without having to re-create your work. Move from Photoshop, Illustrator, or Flash Professional to Fireworks with confidence, thanks to a universal interface design.

Faster, more expressive design tools—Photoshop CS4 Extended introduces greater precision, more intuitive selection, and smoother image navigation, along with comprehensive 3D painting and ray-trace rendering. Illustrator CS4 incorporates multiple artboards, live preview, in-place editing, and robust gradient handling.

Intuitive audio—Amplify your impact with Soundbooth CS4. Multitrack recording capabilities and professional audio editing features make Soundbooth an essential component of your creative toolset, fully integrated into Web Premium.

Advanced application development—Design and create your Adobe AIR™ interactive prototype in Fireworks for deployment in Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, or Flex® software. Enhance your Adobe AIR application with HTML and JavaScript in Dreamweaver—and then preview or deploy it immediately.

Mobile authoring integration—Adobe Device Central CS4 offers tighter integration with Flash Professional and other Creative Suite 4 components and enables full-featured content testing including web pages, video, images, and interactive SWF files.

Direct connection with clients and coworkers—Share your ideas by accessing the Adobe ConnectNow web conferencing service. Browse and create color themes using the Adobe Kuler™ web-hosted application. Visit Adobe Community Help for quick access to tips, Adobe Help, and community-generated tutorials.

PDF collaboration—Communicate with your clients professionally with PDF export from Fireworks CS4. Fireworks automatically transforms linked pages into interactive PDF elements so clients can quickly experience how your design flows from one page to another.

Here, at Monochrome, we’re positively wetting ourselves with the thought of what we can do with CS4, and in most particular Flash from an RIA point of view.

If you would like to talk to us about CS4, or find out more about how Monochrome can help you, please get in touch.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 15 Oct 2008

The Queen visits Google HQ in London

So today Queen Elizabeth II visited Google HQ in London.

To tie in with this visit the Google logo on the Google UK homepage has been given the royal touch!

I’m pretty excited as my wife is in the events team and she has organised the Doodle for Google winners who have met the Queen today.  I’m still waiting on the latest inside scoop from her and I’m going to see if I can steal some photos!

In the meantime you can check out a video of the Queen arriving at the London Google HQ on the BBC News website.

When and if I get any photos I’ll be sure to post them

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 16 Oct 2008

Export notes from OneNote 2007 to JIRA as comments

A few weeks ago we found out that Microsoft OneNote 2007 is a great tool for taking notes during meetings. It allows dumping all the thoughts, conclusions to the file in robust and flexible way. But, as it often happens, we quickly found one major problem. We are using JIRA for managing our projects. The problem I’m talking about was how to move our notes from OneNote to JIRA without the need of tedious copy & paste operations.

Microsoft OneNote 2007 exposes very neat API for accessing the notebooks, sections and pages contents. Using that API and JIRA SOAP API we have created the tool for exporting our notes to JIRA. And we are sharing it now. Below you can find the description of the OneNote JIRA Export Add-in; files can be found at the end of this post.

OneNote JIRA Export Add-in

First, download and install binary release. It requires .NET framework 3.5 only. You can find the button on standard OneNote toolbar.

How does it work?

The idea is fairly simple. The add-in requires that section pages are titled with JIRA story keys. If that is true, outline contents are added as comments for the story declared by page title. Because one image is worth more than thousand words, take a look at the image below.

More information

This is just a first version so it has somehow limited functionality. We could designate only few hours for it but the one workflow we have implemented is pretty slick. So OneNote JIRA Export Add-in will not export attached files, will not take advantage of OCR data, or keep existing comments in sync. But it will take rich formatting and convert it to JIRA wiki markup. Once again take a look at the image. It explains everything.

Will there be a next version?

Yes, definitely. We are currently working on adding support for attached files. We would like to hear from you as well! If you have an idea how OneNote JIRA Export Add-in can be improved, do not hesitate to let us know!

License

The OneNote JIRA Export Add-in is available under MIT license. OneNote JIRA Export Add-in uses famfamfam silk icons. These files are available under Creative Commons License.

Files

You can download file from here:

• Binary release (ZIP archive)


• Source code (ZIP archive)

Posted by Neil Middleton on 20 Oct 2008

Google changes the way it indexes Flash content

Dominic Gelineau of Twist Image has put up a post on InsideRIA talking about some changes that have been made to the way that Google are now indexing and spidering Flash generated content – a previous black-hole in the world of Search Engine Optimisation.

We knew this was coming after Adobe’s press release back in July, but it would appear that the fruits of their labour are now coming to fruition which can only be a good thing.

More from the original entry here.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 21 Oct 2008

UKCFUG's back in town!

After an extended summer break the UKCFUG is proud to announce that it’s back and better than ever.  Over the next few months we promise to bring you a new format, longer meetings, more speakers and topics and a whole host of other top secret stuff.  We’ll let you know more over the coming months as details are finalised.

So, about the next meeting…

The return UKCFUG session will be held at Design UK on November the 6th at 7pm.  The agenda is as follows:

7.15 – 8.15 : Live-docs

8.15 – 8.30 : Break

8.30 – 9.30 : Structuring your development team and getting the work done presented by Neil Middleton

9.30 – Late : Pub

Live-Docs

Gardners question time for techies.  We will be recording (live!) the inaugural session of the new live-docs podcast, starring your CFUG managers Niklas Richardson and Neil Middleton of Monochrome, Mark Drew of CFEclipse/Reactor fame and Big Mad Kev McCabe from Scotch on the Rocks.

This session is a free form question / answer session about anything to do general web development, ColdFusion, or the Adobe stack in general.  Note that questions must be taken prior to the event so please submit them to neil [at] monochrome [dot] co [dot] uk or hand them to us on the night.

Structuring your development team and getting the work done

Learn how to organize and manage projects to work more effectively as a team and increase overall efficiency. This session will describe who you need on your web development team and show you ways to get the most out of them. Learn how agile processes can benefit both your team and your bottom line.

Where:
Design UK, 10 Warwick Street, London, W1B 5LZ

When:
November 6th 2008 7pm – 9.30pm

Directions:
Nearest Tube – Piccadilly Circus

See http://www.ukcfug.org for more information.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 22 Oct 2008

ColdFusion ranked amongst favourite App Servers

A recent survey by Evans Data of 700 developers worldwide has ranked ColdFusion amongst one of the best Application Servers. 21 Characteristics of application servers were rated by participants that they had personally used – ranging from performance through to value to cost ratio. So this survey reflects the true opinions and perceptions of the real users of the products!

The survey pitted ColdFusion against the likes of IBM Webshere, Jboss and Windows Server 2003 (????) with ColdFusion coming out a very respectable 4th behind WebSphere, Apache Geronimo and Windows Server, just ahead of JBoss by a narrow margin. Of the 21 characteristics ColdFusion scalability, support, security features and performance received the highest ratings.

It’s a free report and makes and interesting read so it’s worth taking a read and certainly dispels the ‘ColdFusion is dead’ stories that occasionally appear.

Posted by on 22 Oct 2008

Microsoft UK Developer Day 7

The registration page for Microsoft UK’s Developer Day to take place on 22nd November went live yesterday (22 October) and already it’s full and a waiting list started.

It’s a free event arranged by Microsoft UK at their UK head quarters in Reading – the sessions are all strictly none Microsoft staff, preferring to be real .NET developers from the community. It even takes place on a Saturday so no need to take a day off work to attend.

The session line up is impressive so here’s hoping we can get some guys to attend!

Posted by on 23 Oct 2008

Microsoft PDC kicks off on Monday

No-one from Monochrome is attending Microsoft PDC this year which is starting on Monday in Los Angeles but that doesn’t mean we’re not waiting with much anticipation to see what’s going to be announced.

Microsoft have already shipped Silverlight 2 earlier this month, they’ve released a wealth of information on Windows 7  – leaving the stage clear for Microsoft to announce where they are going with ‘Cloud computing’  and the much talked about Cloud OS – aka Windows Strata that Steve Ballmer recently said would make its debut before the end of the month.

www.microsoftpdc.com

Posted by on 23 Oct 2008

Playing with DeepZoom

One of the more interesting parts of the Silverlight 2 release is the DeepZoom capability as demonstrated a while back by the Hard Rock Cafe.  After the Silverlight 2 final came out last week I decided I would sit down and play with the DeepZoom composer, an application provided by Microsoft for composing DeepZoom imagery.

This initial demonstration that I have done isn’t anything crazy-complicated, but merely a simple composition of flat images at a variety of resolutions and sizes.  To give you an idea of the zoom capabilities of the product take a good look at Niklas’s eyes, or zoom down into the map.

This image contains all the Monochrome website content as of today.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 24 Oct 2008