David Deraedt

Update: I guess I spoke too soon :) Both lupo manager and lupo translator will be a few days late and are now expected to be released in early June...

I'll be giving a presentation on the blurring line between Web apps and Desktop apps for Regart.net's RIA day, which will take place next thursday (April 30th). Please note that this event is completely free of charge.

My presentation will focus on one question : Will the distinction between Web apps and Desktop apps soon become obsolete ? If you've ever been wondering why something like Adobe AIR exists, now that everything seems to happen in the browser, then this presentation is for you.

Other presentations include Thibault Imbert Flash Catalyst demo, Erick Ghaumez on the evolution of usability and UX, Nicolas Gans and Vincent Maitray on the Flash/Flex developer workflow, and Eric Ambrosi on Silverlight 2 custom components.

The full program and registration form are here.

See you there ;)

Following the sneak peek video, I wanted to give you a better, in-depth overview of my new toy, Lupo Flex application Localization Studio. So here's a pseudo real-time video demo of me localizing a Flex app using Lupo Manager, and a feature list.

Real Time Demo

This video shows a case study : I use Lupo to translate a sample Flex ecommerce application in "real time" (not including the actual translation job). The video lasts about 8 minutes, but, presentation constrains aside, internationalizing such a small app shouldn't take more than 2 minutes with Lupo.

Update: Check out Lupo Flex Localization Studio page for more information

I'd like to introduce you to my latest AIR application, currently under development, code-named Lupo.

Lupo is a Flex application Localization Studio. It's a set of tools designed to help localizing Flex / AIR (and to some extends, Java) applications, with productivity in mind.

Why localization? Because it's a great way to increase revenues simply by opening new markets. And it is my understanding that this is the "reach" part of RIAs. After all, what's the point of having a 98%+ player penetration rate, an über ubiquitous desktop/browser/mobile & devices presence, if half of the users can't use the application simply because they don't understand it ?

In my very humble opinion, the BugQuash event that took place on saturday was a success. I don't have any exact figures, but I think it gathered more than 60 developers who fixed a very honorable amount of bugs. The whole thing was kind of messy at first, and although I didn't have any patch approved, it still was a really fun experience. To sum up : I came, I saw, I failed, but I had so much fun in the process I can't wait to do it again :).

The event

I gathered a pretty nice list of Adobe AIR related people you may want to follow on twitter. The idea was to list people very committed to this technology, such as those who have publicly published an AIR application, those who haven't but tweet a lot about it, active AIR team members, etc... Why did I do that ? Services like wefollow are nice, but I think that the follower count is not a relevant enough criteria. I think we need more human powered, subjective, peer review based lists and rankings.

I'm proud to announce my very first publication on the Adobe AIR developer center : Tips for building AIR applications that can be easily updated.

To sum up, the article is about identifying the potential pitfalls you may encounter when building and deploying an Adobe AIR application update, and learning some tips and techniques on how to avoid them.

Hope you enjoy.

Read the whole article on Adobe AIR developer center.

Lita, my AIR based SQLite admin, is doing pretty well, thank you. It has reached more than 2600 unique installs so far. I'd like to take this self-satisfaction opportunity to tell you about the new directions Lita is taking, including the new team, a call for feature requests, and roadmap.

In the meantime, don't forget you can follow me on twitter to get all the latest news regarding AIR development in general, and my applications in particular.

We now have a team

First of all, I'm happy to announce that Adobe's own Paul Robertson has joined Lita's development team, which, so far, was just me.

This post is part of my Teaching Flex Series.

All my students are experienced professionals. However, they mostly come from two very different worlds : Java (about 50%) and Flash (maybe 30% to 40%, the rest are .NET and PHP devs). Dealing with these very different cultures is one of the biggest challenges I have to face as an instructor. But not necessary in the way you might think...

Disclaimer: I'm coming from the Flash crowd, but switched to AS3 & Flex years ago.

At last, the Adobe AIR marketplace has undergone a much needed facelift which you can try by yourself here.

In my opinion, the previous marketplace felt pretty clumsy, yet still bearable since it was just a beta release. We knew from the start that sooner or later, we'd discover what Adobe really had in mind for us. So when I got the news of a brand new website (beta v2 ?), I was eager to see if it could live up to the hype. As you'll see, this is a very decent makeover, but so far, I cannot say that I'm completely sold.