I start to get the whole concept 😉 First i was not too overwhelmed with the new Gumbo stuff. Drawing with mxml did not looked too appealing – but it totally makes sense. By seperating the skin from the actual component in a clean way with it`s own format (fxg) it will be very easy to build a great toolset for the designer <-> developer workflow.

You can get a first impression if you check out the Fireworks beta on adobe labs. It has an export script that generates fxg out of your vector drawing – very cool! 
I think Fxg is really the missing link between designers and developers and it seems once again Adobe is getting it right. Ultimately Adobe will use this in Thermo and I think that Fireworks 10 will only get limited support for fxg. Maybe it will just be this little export snippet.

This is where i`m not so sure. I think the hardest part in getting developers and designers work together are the designers tools. From my experience it`s very hard if not impossible to make a designer switch to a new tool. They love their Photoshop and maybe a little fireworks for web stuff. 

But getting them to use a new tool like Thermo can be hard. Just look at Expression Blend from Mircosoft. I don`t really see designers using this tool and if – they are forced to do so 😉 So maybe it would be a better strategy to include the Thermo stuff into Photoshop or Fireworks. Or make it integrate so super smooth that they don`t realize that they are using a different tool. You have to trick them Maybe even call it “Photoshop Interactive Designer” (Na that does not sound Adobeish).
Anyway some interesting links to get started with fxg:

Get Gumbo (Flex 4 SDK)

Skinning A Button in Flex 4 Using FXG

Jumping Into Skinning with Flex 4

Gumbo (Flex 4) Skin with Transitions

 Flex 4: Neue Grafik-Library (German)

Fireworks 10 Beta (2 day trial – more if you`ve a FW9 serial)

Man can`t wait till I can use this in production 😉

Last week my client Stephan Janssen visited me in Berlin and we finalized a first private beta of our publisher for parleys.com. We prepared a little talk including demos and an overview of the capabilities.
People that have seen my talk at the Adobe AIR tour will notice that some funky stuff is missing but it will be included when it`s more stable.

Check out the demo talk at parleys.

I finally found some minutes to do a critical update for RichFLV. The files produced with previous
RichFLV versions contained a small error wich prevented playback when streamed over RTMPT with FMS.
With the help of the Adobe FLV Check Tool I was able to finally fix that.
It should also handle flv files with variable framerates better now.

!!! Important notice: Because I`ve changed the certificate you`ll need to uninstall your previous RichFLV
installs manually before you can update !!!

Get the new version here:

[airbadge]RichFLV,http://www.richapps.de/files/richflv/RichFlv.air,4.2,http://www.richapps.de/files/richflv/richflv_preview.jpg[/airbadge]

Let me know if you have any problems.

I was just experimenting with some animation techniques when I tried one of the old school flash 5 stuff in Flex. In general I`m not a fan of the build in effects in Flex and most of the time I just do the animations myself with Tweener . I just think it`s smoother and more flexible. One thing that I find difficult to achieve is animating targets that change often and abrupt. For these types of thing the build in effects and even Tweener does not work very well. I got the idea when I saw Chet Haase example here. It`s a nice app but I don`t like that it only changes the interface when you release the slider. Would be much cooler and intuitive if live dragging was possible. So I did a dirty little example that does not use the fancy effects or Tweener but good old onEnterFrame exponational function (think that`s how Andries Odendaal coined it back then!?) tweening. It`s not a nice approach with some drawback but I think it just gives the sweetest result.

Take a look at the video and if you like download the AIR app (View source enabled)

[flashvideo filename=http://www.richapps.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/screenflow.flv /]

So this is maybe not how you would do it in a real world app because the ever running loop is not so nice but the smoothness of the animation is just unbeatable – or? How would you do this in a clean way?