O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Today Adobe released SwitchBoard at Adobe Labs. SwitchBoard is a way to connect AIR with the Creative Suite. SwitchBoard comes in two pieces: the SDK for developers who want to develop AIR applications that leverage the Creative Suite and the SwitchBoard installer itself which enables AIR applications to talk to CS applications. This opens up many new options for AIR developers.

There are a couple of great new resources for new or aspiring AIR developers: the online AIR Cookbook and the upcoming AIR Cookbook published by O'Reilly which will be coming out later this year. The great thing with both of these resources is that they both need community involvement!

The final leg of the On AIR European Tour took us through Prague, Munich and Milan here are my thoughts. On this stage of the tour we were joined by Adrian Ludwig from AIR Marketing, Andrew Shorten an Adobe Evangelist from London and again by Dion Almaer from Google.

Since diving back into PaperVision3D in my last post, I've been having some fun playing with 3D concepts. I forgot how cool 3D visualizations can be, but at the same time, they can get really confusing and really complicated very quickly. At the same time as they are getting complicated and confusing, they also start creating abstract shapes that are intriguing.

Alexei White just released NitobiBug, it's a handy little cross browser logging and object inspector. Think of FireBug but cross browser.

Ted just posted some screenshots for Thermo. Thermo is a highly anticipated tool that will allow designers to create UI designs much like they would in Fireworks then output Flex apps and MXML. The promise that designers and developers to go back and forth in between Thermo and Flex in a nice seamless workflow.

Silverlight 2 beta 2 released last week. The new beta is a huge improvement over beta 1 and makes Silverlight a much more practical development environment. Among other things, the new beta features a lot of new UI objects to play with and makes skinning much easier.

I haven't touched PaperVision3D in a while, and some of the recent articles here on insideria.com motivated me to dive in and take a look around. Here's what I came up with after sitting down with it for an evening...

Overview When you think about writing efficient code, the first couple things that come to mind are speed and memory footprint. Although keeping your applications responsive and quick while maintaining a reasonably small memory footprint is definitely a key consideration...

Ted Patrick announced the open-sourcing of his DARE Adobe AIR server last night both on his blog and in comments on our last DARE post here on InsideRIA. Ted's looking for some good Python developers to take the project over and move it to the next level. Interested? Download the source and get started.