In the first part of the year I was involved in several Flex projects. The first project was a generic product selector build in Flex that was used by a very well known laptop manufacturer. It was used for a short time because the client decided to go for an AJAX version and my very generic product selector got replaced by the AJAX version. The other project was an internal time tracking interface that used Flex and AIR. We build this tool on top of the Basecamp API. For now the application is only used internal at Nascom, who knows what the future brings. I also released my first open source application Airbob.

Then I put on my other hat and did some Java development using Java, Spring, Hibernate and BlazeDS. We used the OpenAMF library for our server-side communication with Java, but BlazeDS makes the implementation a lot easier. You still had to code the Spring bindings yourself, but the good news is that Adobe is working with SpringSource to build it into the Framework. The other big project I worked on for most of the year was the footballfan.be community site. My role was building the HTML front end using SpringMVC. In a lot of ways it was an interesting project.

In between I did a Silverlight Research project, that has not been upgraded to the Silverlight 2 RTM version yet. The problem is that I used the agTweener library and the source has not been updated after Silverlight Beta 2. So for the time being Benny’s Bus Stop is no more. It might come back in the future if I find a decent tweener library.

So what’s up for 2009? I am reading the book “Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK” so that will be a challenge for next year. There are some cool Flex projects in the pipeline, more on that possibly later on. Will there be an interesting Silverlight project? Only Steve Ballmer knows

Happy Holidays and see you next year!

• I recently discovered the Remember The Milk service where you can manage your todo lists. It’s yet another service that tries to take over the numerous Todo applications out there. But the difference is that it integrates nicely with your Google Calender and they also have mobile clients. The iPhone RTM application has become one of my favorite apps. Check it out here.
• If you have an IM account and you want to chat with your contacts there is not a lot of choice in decent IM applications. Recently Nimbuzz released an iPhone version. You will need an account, but then you can add multiple accounts (MSN, Google Talk, Facebook, …) to chat with your friends.
• Shazam is one of those great free applications. If you hear a song on the radio, just launch the application and hold it a couple of seconds next to the speaker and you will get the artist and name of the song. Yes, it actually works!
• Microsoft released their first application for the iPhone. It is called Seadragon Mobile and it is a product of Live Labs. What is allows you to do is to browse a large number of high resolution images. It’s not a very useful app, but it’s interesting that Microsoft is not completely ignoring the iPhone platform. Maybe a Live Messenger for the iPhone in the future?
• And finally I just had to buy Tetris. It brings back memories and it also works great with the multi-touch.

I hope to have more time next year to play with the SDK, because apparently you can earn a lot of money with building iPhone applications. Read this article that describes the success story of the developers from Smule who created the very popular Ocarina application. The app already had 400,000 downloads the first month and with a 0,99$ price tag you can do the math.

Earlier this week Christophe Herreman announced on his blog that the Prana Framework has become an official Spring extension. The new name is Spring Actionscript and one thing I like about it is that it can be used together with existing frameworks like PureMVC and Cairngorm. I have worked with the Spring Framework on several Java projects in the past and I might use it for a Flex project as well. And let’s hope that in the future there will also be support for annotation based dependency injection. With annotations you need a lot less XML configuration. You can read more about annotations here.

Today Christophe Coenraets announced on his blog that Adobe is working together with SpringSource on enhanced Flex / Spring integration. From the press release:

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that it is working with SpringSource to simplify the development and deployment of rich enterprise Java(TM) applications through a collaboration that will provide integration between the Adobe(R) Flash(R) and SpringSource platforms. This collaboration will make it easy for Java developers to create enterprise-class rich Internet applications (RIAs) using Adobe Flex(R) software, a cornerstone of the Adobe Flash Platform, and Spring, the de facto standard for enterprise Java.

So now we can use Spring completely front to back. That will deffinately make the code more readable across languages.

My top 5 sessions:

1. Anatomy of a Seriously Sophisticated Adobe AIR Application: Definitely the best session for me because it showcases the power of Adobe AIR. The presenters Rick Williams and Adam Creeger were involved in the Fiat ecoDrive project. We got a high level presentation about how they organized their development team by using Unit tests and Continuous Integration. The application also added a community aspect by uploading the data to ecoVille, an online community by Fiat.

2. Looking ahead to the next version of Flex: The session was a demo about the new FXG format that is going to be used in the new version of Flex. This basically means that we can represent graphics like shapes, paths, strokes, … in MXML. Also the new components will be based on this new format. Flex will also have better text support. For more information about the new component architecture click here.

3. Looking ahead to the next version of Flex Builder: The next version of Flex Builder (also called Gumbo) will have a lot of new features. The most important features are productivity improvements like generating getters/setters, FlexUnit integration, auto generate event handler functions and more. Te also added Data Centric functionality like being able to use the Client Side Data Management without LifeCycle DS. And last but not least the Network Monitor is back. You can download the Preview version of Gumbo here.

4. Introduction to Thermo and the Next Generation of Flex: Well actually it’s not Thermo anymore the new name is Flash Catalyst. We had a quick feature tour of Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder Gumbo. Exciting times are coming for the Flex developers. Unfortunately the Preview version of Flash Catalyst is only available on Mac for now.

5. Flash Lite3: Learn to Package and Distribute Mobile Content: This session made it clear to me that building Flash Lite application is one thing, getting them deployed on all the different devices is a challenge. We saw a demo of the Adobe Mobile Packager Beta that makes it easier to create packages that can be deployed on Windows Mobile and Symbian.

Some of the other sessions I attended were a bit disappointing because they did not matched my expectations. Maybe this is because Adobe MAX is a commercial event where Adobe showcases their new technologies and products and they don’t want to scare people off, but for me it could have been be a lot more technical.

I had a good time in Milan, got to know my colleagues Rien, Michael and Sakri a bit better. We ended each day with a Johnny Walker at Hotel Johnny. Hopefully until next year somewhere in Europe.

Nascom has been an Adobe partner for some time now. And because of this partnership we were asked to join them at their booth on Devoxx (formerly Javapolis), the java community conference. I will be there giving a demo of an AIR application we build using Flex. The application is used in house for time tracking and has been build on top of the Basecamp API. Fo the moment the application is not available for download, so if you are interested please come and see us at the Adobe booth on 10/12.

• Introduction to Thermo and the Next Generation of Flex
• Adobe Roadmap: Rich Internet Applications
• Get It from the Source: Visualizations by ILOG Elixir R&D
• Advanced Papervision3D
• Anatomy of a Seriously Sophisticated Adobe AIR Application
• Designer Best Practices with Flex
• Monetizing Applications with Adobe AIR
• Experiences That Scale Across Devices
• Building Enterprise Applications Using Flex, Adobe AIR, and LiveCycle ES
• Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex Builder

See you in Milan.

“Ensemble Tofino for Visual Studio is a plugin that enables .NET developers to create Flex front ends for their applications in the same IDE that they normally use. Instead of using a separate text or XML editor and manually invoking the compiler, they can move smoothly between MXML and .NET file types within Visual Studio, and invoke Flex build and run commands from Visual Studio menus.”

Other interesting stuff:

• Cocomo was announced. It is a Platform as a Service that allows Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA (rich Internet applications).
• Thermo is now called Flash Catalyst. More info here.

Next month I will be attending Adobe MAX in Milan and hopefully I will get some more information about all these announcements.

Anyhow, the iPhone is available again in Belgium but this is not what this post is about. I wanted this gadget because I like the development platform that is available. Unfortunately my knowledge of Objective C and Cocoa Touch is not that great and once again I will have to start learning something new. But there are a lot of good resources available on the internet.

Here you have some of them:

• Apps Amuck: this site contains 31 app examples.
• iPhone Atlas: a site with articles and tutorials.
• and “The Really Big List of iPhone SDK Development Links“.

The first thing I did after starting up the device was testing out some of the third party apps. And I must say that it surprised me that a lot of what I would think of being a usefull app is already in some form available. I will give you a list of useful/cool third party apps from the app store that i have installed:

• Twitterific: I think it speaks for itself that this is by far the best iPhone twitter application.
• Yammer: Twitter for companies. I find the iPhone app better than the AIR Desktop client
• Evernote: Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient. With this service you can centralize you notes and information.
• Facebook: if you are into Facebook, this application is a must have. It keeps you up to date what your friends are doing.
• ShoZu: Stay connected to over 40 of your favorite websites like Flickr, Facebook, Blogger, … I use it to upload pictures to my Flickr account.
• GPSKit: One of the best GPS applications for tracking your hikes, bike trips, etc. It’s not free and was the first app I payed for. I already tracked a short hike, but my first test with my bicycle still has to come.
• Spore: the best game so far for the iPhone. I don’t have it on PC, but playing it on the iPhone is fun and works great.
• AroundMe: this is one of those apps that finds the closest restaurants, supermarkets, etc around your current location. It also works great in Belgium, and not only in the US.
• LinkedIn: useful, but in my case I always have to enter my credentials every time I start the application. I don’t know if it’s a feature or a bug but I would prefer that the application would remember me like all the other apps.
• and last but not least Ocarina: this is for sure the most original application in the AppStore. It turns yout iPhone into a musical instrument. Checkout the movie on YouTube.

Other great news is that I became father of a beautiful son two weeks ago, and you can checkout his website (made in Flex) here: robbe.hufkens.net

Up to now this is not possible, but there is good news for those who want to start developing Silverlight applications and are currently working on a Mac. I just read an interesting blog post about a project called eclipse4SL, a collaboration between Microsoft and Soyotac. The purpose of this project is the creation of open source tools integrated with the Eclipse development environment. This means that developers using Flexbuilder/Eclipse can start exploring Silverlight in their own environment. You still need to wait until spring 2009 for the cross platform capabilities (see the roadmap on the website), but there is already a CTP version available for Windows.

The other big news today is that Silverlight 2 has been officially released today. You can read the press release from Microsoft here. This means that I have to hurry and upgrade the Benny’s Bus Stop app