Adobe Flash is getting more and more popular as the platform to develop multi-touch applications on.

Check out a post at http://www.multitouch.nl/?p=216 regarding a Summit that will be organized between Natural User Interface and Adobe in 2009 with the main focus on development of multi-touch solutions on Adobe’s Flash platform.

In case you haven’t seen my post on our NUI Group community website regarding that event, please have a look here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3582/

This video was made as a proof of concept of Flash applications running on the tracker of NUI Suite Snowflake.

The Cairngorm project, lightweight micro-architecture for rich Internet applications built in Flex or AIR, is now hosted on the Adobe Open Source website. Milestone builds, documentation, and the latest source code are available for all to use. Cairngorm is now evolving towards a project that will invite community leaders and enterprise adopters to partner with Adobe Consulting in the ongoing development of Cairngorm.

The ASDoc API reference for Flex Gumbo, the next version of Adobe Flex, is now available at http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/gumbo/langref/. Adobe will be updating this reference approximately every other week.

Please use the Adobe Forums to comment on the API reference.

The next version of Flex, code name Gumbo, is now in active development. It is has 3 primary themes:

• Design in Mind: provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer.
• Developer Productivity: improve compiler performance and add productivity enhancements to language features like data binding
• Framework Evolution: take advantage of new Flash Player capabilities and add features required by common use-cases

Next steps

1. Watch a presentation on the Gumbo plan (~14 mins)
2. See Ely Greenfield discuss designer/developer improvements
3. Read a longer description of the Gumbo themes
4. View and comment on the specifications

Download builds of Gumbo from here

Milestones

These milestones are very much a work in progress:

SWF Object is an amazing script for wrapping their swf into a HTML page. For those of you using it (and you should), Oleg built a nice SWF Object template now updated for version 2.1 with supports HistoryManager and DeepLinking.

The new eclipse integration in Enterprise Architect now supports Flex through their Model Driven Generation feature according to Mike Rankin. I love EA so this is exciting news.

When I first read Luis's entry on ColdBox Beta 2: Flex/AIR Integration this is pretty much that immediately went through my head ...

Gotta be honest: at first I didn't buy into it... You have to be careful on separating your logical layers... if ColdBox is a front-controller, why would a Rich Front End talk to it? It should talk to your Service Layer... and your Service Layer doesn't need ColdBox ...

However, after talking to Luis I discovered, what if, what if you make ColdBox become your enhanced service layer manager? What if your ColdBox Handlers become part of your Service Layer API? What do we have? We have a Service Layer with built-in environmental settings, logging, error handling, event interception and chaining, you name it ... Now it all makes sense...

This is good; real good ... perhaps you'll see a full 60 or 90 minutes presentation on this at CFUnited or CF.Objective() 2008.

Keep it up.

I blogged about Pownce yesterday, and I'm liking it a lot... I just wish that since it's built on top of the Flash Platform, it took advantage of server-side push technology such as FCS, FMS, LCDS, or bare XML Sockets... instead, it pulls every few seconds, which is extremely annoying. I understand that XML Sockets require additional server components, though most php, .net, j2ee servers have that capability built-in ... and it requires using a none-standard port ... which since the initial connection is triggered by the client, it shouldn't be a problem, and if it is, you can always fall-back to polling ... It would be much more efficient in the server load; much better than having thousands of clients polling every few seconds.

BTW, while debugging some applications today I happened to debug all Pownce traffic and it seems like their public API is very straight forward... maybe there's an opportunity of building another piece of software that makes use of such nice free public services?

Papervision3D moves from private testing to a full public beta. It's very easy to use and to integrate into your Flash 8, Flash CS3 and Flex projects.

It is released under the MIT Open Source license, which means it is absolutely free for any commercial use.

Source code
The project is now hosted in Google Code, where you will find all the downloads, the very latest source code via Subversion, issue tracking and project workspace. Existing users must use this new svn address.

API
Here is the documentation of the AS3 public classes and methods. It is also included in the source code download, along with examples to get you up and running right away.

Wiki
If you are not sure, this is the place to begin. Includes many examples, tutorials and tips, plus our Getting Started FAQ with detailed download and installation instructions.

Discussion
If you have any questions, you can subscribe to our OSFlash mailing list or access it via our Nabble forum.

This reel is a little review of what we have seen so far. The Papervision3D team can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it next. [source]