Adobe Education Leaders

I’ll be at Adobe’s San Jose headquarters this week for the Adobe Education Leader Institute – and thought this will be a great time to run a little contest in promotion of my book! I’ll be giving away a couple copies of the eBook version through Packt.

The eBook version is great; I’ve been using this myself, as I go about my mobile work for quick reference and it’s been delightfully helpful. Very easy to do a quick text search or pull up the table on contents and so forth.

All you have to do to win a copy is visit https://www.packtpub.com/flash-development-for-android-cookbook/book and leave a comment here about a feature that interests you. Then, just link to your comment on Twitter – use the hashtag #FlashAndroidBook and be sure to follow me or it will not count!

The giveaway will run for a week and I’ll pick winners at random on Sunday the 31st! Spread the word!

Incidentally; for those interested in reviewing the book, contact Shaveer Irani (shaveeri – AT – packtpub.com) with the subject line of “Flash Development for Android Cookbook – Review” and the publisher may just hook you up!

The University of Denver held a TEDx event today. We fed an RTMP signal through a VBrick unit to an internal Flash Media Server for authentication to be distributed over CDN and exposed to viewers through the Open Source Media Framework Strobe Media Playback.

I was curious how the feed would look over a variety of devices. Here are the results

Microsoft Windows 7

BlackBerry Tablet OS

Google Android

Excellent!

Adrian Pomilio interviews Joseph Labrecque at 360|Flex in Denver, CO – April 2011.

I was interviewed for the Runtime Expectations internet radio show while at 360|Flex in Denver. It was great chatting with Adrian and we touched upon many subjects over the course of the interview. Quite a bit of the discussion focuses on education and the challenges that come with teaching technical subjects and the complications that come with teaching online classes. Jump to around 19:50 in the recording to listen to that portion, specifically.

Also discussed during the interview: music composition, book and tutorial authoring, the AEL and ACP programs with Adobe, mobile development, and the sad state of tech journalism.

I encourage anyone interested to  check out the other interviews from 360|Flex including John Wilker, the Nielsen Company, and Mollie Rusher of On3!

What is Runtime Expectations?
Join Ben Farrell, Adrian Pomilio, and Bucky Schwarz as they broadcast live from Cuban Revolution in downtown Durham, NC with a beer in one hand and a mic in the other.  They’ll be covering all the aspects of software development that compel them to put a beer in that first hand. Shows feature both live guests and call-ins.

Follow Joseph on Twitter: http://twitter.com/josephlabrecque

Follow Adrian on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adrianpomilio

Flash Development for Android Cookbook

My first book is now available for preorder over at the Packt Publishing website. Not only can you preorder “Flash Development for Android Cookbook“, but it is also being included in the RAW program. This means that even though the book is not yet finished (the draft is finished- working through rewrites, currently) you can preorder the eBook or the print book and access the draft chapters online before the book is truly published!

For those wondering about the content, whether it leans more toward Flex or pure ActionScript; while there is a bit of Flex sprinkled throughout a few of the chapters, the code examples are almost always written in nothing but pure AS3 to allow anyone using any framework and toolset to implement the recipes easily. Full AS3 class downloads will be available through the Packt website.

So please spread the word, and place a preorder if so inclined! Note that even though the publish date is marked as September on the website, this was an original projection from last year and the true print date is more likely May or June.

Description from Publisher:

Flash has now arrived to Android — the fastest growing smartphone platform. This offers massive opportunities for Flash developers who want to get into mobile development. At the same time, working on smartphones will introduce new challenges and issues that Flash developers may not be familiar with.

The Flash Development for Android Cookbook enables Flash developers to branch out into Android mobile applications through a set of essential, easily demonstrable recipes. It takes you through the entire development workflow: from setting up a local development environment, to developing and testing your application, to compiling for distribution to the ever-growing Android Market.

The Flash Development for Android Cookbook starts off with recipes that cover development environment configuration as well as mobile project creation and conversion. It then moves on to exciting topics such as the use of touch and gestures, responding to device movement in 3D space, working with multimedia, and handling application layout. Essential tasks such as tapping into native processes and manipulating the file system are also covered. We then move on to some cool advanced stuff such as Android-specific device permissions, application debugging and optimization techniques, and the packaging and distribution options available on the mobile Android platform.

In a nutshell, this cookbook enables you to get quickly up to speed with mobile Android development using the Flash Platform in ways that are meaningful and immediately applicable to the rapidly growing area of mobile application development.

Take your Flash applications beyond the desktop and into the emerging world of mobile application development!

 

X-Defender: Gameplay

The 2011 Global Game Jam took place January 28th through the 30th; a single 48 hour period in which teams would have to come up with and develop a game using the platform of their choosing.

48 hours, 44 countries, 170 locations, 6500 participants, almost 1500 games, one weekend, one theme (“Extinction”).

At the University of Denver, students David Fogle, Daniel Kjellerson, and Stephen Rice formed one such team in an attempt to develop a game using the Adobe Flash Platform. The three students are all dual majors studying in the Animation and Game Development and Digital Media Studies programs at DU. The idea for their game is an interesting concept as it immediately appears to be a regular 2D shooter, but is actually a little more complex than that… if you start shooting at the approaching aliens out the gate, they will retaliate- but if you choose not to start a fight, a peaceful outcome will occur.

Why Flash?

Taking into consideration the rich visual history behind Flash, the ubiquity of the platform, and some prior ActionScript experience, the team decided that the Flash Platform would be a good choice for their project, X-Defender.

X-Defender: ActionScript Class

“We participated in the Global Game Jam in order to further develop and practice our game development skills in an amazing environment. We found ourselves using ActionScript and Flash due to our prior experience as well its accessibility and ability to meet our needs.”

The two classes that were most influential in their decision had been Topics: Introduction to Game Design which is focused on game development theory and creation, and Programming for Play which deals with game and toy development which is taught using ActionScript as the development language.

Software used by the team included Flash Professional, FlashDevelop, Photoshop, SumoPaint, and Acid for sound composition.

Results

All of the games created during Global Game Jam are in various states of completion due to the rushed nature of the competition. X Defender though, is actually playable with animated cut scenes, full player control, enemy attack patterns, a boss battle, and background score.

It is certainly a testament to rapid game development enabled by the Flash Platform, and is a stand-out project from a conceptual standpoint as well.

X-Defender: Cut Scene

Meet the Students

David Fogle:
Designer, In-Game Artist, Programmer, Music Development

Daniel Kjellerson:
Concept Artist, Cutscene Artist, Code Consultant

Stephen Rice:
Designer, Programmer

The University of Denver team was coordinated by Rafael Fajardo.

Resources

• Interested in playing the game? You can download the full source code from the Global Game Jam website.
• Learn more about developing games with Flash technology over at the Flash Platform Game Technology Center.

I’ve been wanting to take control of my personal blog theme for some time in order to both simplify how everything was being displayed, and to obtain a greater degree of flexibility over time. There are a lot of great themes out there for WordPress, and I’ve been fairly happy with many of those I’ve tried – but they still were not exactly what I wanted.

I decided to come up up with something of my own by creating a child theme of the default WordPress “TwentyTen”. Seeing as how I don’t need many features on here, and that “TwentyTen” is a modern design that supports all the new 3.0 features, a child theme sounded perfect. I also tend to shift these around over time, and this would allow that as well.

Adobe Fireworks

The first thing I did is sketch out on paper a sample of the sort of layout I was looking to create. I then created a basic measured layout in Fireworks, followed by a number of textured image segments for the navigation menu, page background, and content area. Fireworks is great for stuff like this, due to the robust texturing system available.

Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver CS5 has extended support for PHP-based CMS and blogging systems like WordPress. During prerelease, I was playing around with these features quite a bit but had actually never done any work with the final release. It’s actually very convenient to be able to view and interact with the live website files (on my testing server, of course) while designing and tweaking elements of the theme. Dreamweaver can also be enabled to provide code-completion for core WordPress functionality, although I didn’t need it in this case.

Most of what I did was remove a lot of the header stuff I didn’t need, and create a custom navigation menu along the top of the page. The rest of the work was just a lot of CSS hack and slash to get things looking right, setting up new elements, and skinning everything with my exported images. It actually went a lot more smoothly than anticipated.

Adobe BrowserLab

Most of the cross browser rendering checks were done on my local machine using Chrome 8, FireFox 4 beta, and Internet Explorer 8. I have other machines I could log into and check browsers like Opera or the IE9 beta, but don’t have a way to test on OSX from my home. Anyone familiar with DropFolders knows the snails-pace I take when it comes to doing any Apple stuff… So I fired up BrowserLab and was able to check my basic design rendered on what must have been nearly 20 different browsers across Windows and OSX.

It is interesting to see how relatively similar the design rendered across browsers. The most trouble that I noticed was lack of support for my embedded fonts in older browsers. You can also see in the above image that we definitely have some shifting going on in regard to the positioning of elements on the page, but nothing so terrible to render the design unusable.

I’m very pleased with both the resulting design, and the simple, unified workflow involved in getting to this point. There are lots of little things that will probably come up which I’ll modify in the future… but it’s great to know now how very simple it will be to do so.

Check it out over at http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/!

For the past two years, Serge Jespers (@sjespers) has developed a widget to draw attention to the upcoming Adobe MAX conference that involves both video and community collaboration. Last year’s widget allowed users to post a short message on why one would want to attend MAX. This year’s widget allows users to record acceptance speeches for MAX Unawards and the whole process behind it is a great read!

So… we have a few Adobe Education Leaders who have received MAX Unawards! These are listed below and I encourage other AELs to submit and be added here…

Tom Green (@TomGreen) won the award for ‘Crustiest Tutorialist Of The Year‘

Joseph Labrecque (@JosephLabrecque) won the award for ‘Most Frustrated AIR Developer‘

David Egbert (@DaveEgbert) won the award for ‘Best Un Acceptance Speech‘

Think you deserve an Adobe MAX Unaward? You probably do – give it a shot!

Sunday, October 24 – Education Summit at MAX – Los Angeles Convention Center

If you are involved in education and will be attending Adobe MAX this year, I highly encourage you to check out the full education rundown and especially the preconference Education Summit!

Registration is reduced significantly for students and educators!

As an aside, I’ll be speaking on OSMF! Check out the full agenda!

Open Source Media Framework for Education
Joseph Labrecque, Senior Multimedia Application Developer, University of Denver

Whether your institution provides progressive video streams over simple HTTP or leverages the full streaming power of Adobe Flash Media Server, when deciding how to implement playback, the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) is clearly one of the best choices available. Join Joseph Labrecque as he provides a brief overview of OSMF and demonstrates a range of customization options for developing media playback clients within the framework for educational needs. This presentation covers both functional concerns and custom skinning mechanisms to implement your institution’s unique branding requirements.

During the last week of July, ~90 Adobe Education Leaders from around the world came together at Adobe HQ in San Jose, California for a week of networking, sharing, collaboration, and numerous other activities. Since having the opportunity to begin work as an AEL in late 2008, I always look forward to this event. While completely exhausting by week’s end; there is really no other experience that comes close to this!

Monday evening marked a great reception at the Fairmount. Great to catch up with other AELs that were present last year, new AELs or those I hadn’t met previously, and many of the good people at Adobe I’ve worked so closely with over the past year.

Tuesday was full of information and presentations from Adobe product managers, creative directors, and platform managers. This marked some of my personal favorite sessions as we were given the opportunity to learn details on upcoming products, the general roadmap* and outlook for the Flash Platform (impressive!), and even demo sneaks of some KILLER upcoming technology enhancements. We also were treated to an excellent presentation on some items the Adobe XD team is working on.

Wednesday is reserved for AEL sessions; over 80 hours of these presentations were recorded and will be made available on the Adobe Education Leader AdobeTV channel later this year. I gave my talk on Using Collaborative Media Services with Flash in University Applications and it was very well received. Really, all of the talks I attended were quite compelling and covered a wide range of areas – looking forward to catching up on those sessions I missed.

Thursday consisted of some longer sessions on industry and product-specific hands-on trainings. I attended the industry track all day and there was some really compelling stuff presented. Some of the highlights include an update from SoDA and an overview of how the upcoming digital publishing workflow for devices will be done (Yeah, the WIRED iPad stuff!)

On Friday morning we had our quarterly meeting followed by a wrap-up session. Those AELs who were not physically present in San Jose were able to attend through a live Connect session.

This was my second Institute and was the fifth overall. What an absolutely stellar time! Many, many thanks to the Adobe Education Team and all the AELs who helped make this event so memorable. Some of you reading this might think I am being far too positive about such a “corporate relationship” and perhaps some corrupting influence is being spread at events such as this. As fellow AEL, Phil Ice, has written: “I am certain there are some who are reading this blog who believe that the purpose is to turn people in education into marketing machines – nothing could be further from the truth.” It’s a beneficial relationship for everyone involved and Adobe does HIGHLY value the education community. Thank you again, Adobeans, for listening to us and being receptive to even our harshest criticisms! I do hope to see many of you either at Adobe MAX in October, or at some other event very soon.

* Don’t let anyone tell you Adobe is “lazy” when it comes to Flash Player and the overall platform. Things are about to accelerate beyond anything we’ve seen in the past couple of years!

The new Adobe Education Exchange is a web-based community that allows people to collaborate, share resources, network, and generate ideas and discussions around using Adobe solutions in and around the classroom.

Members of the Adobe education team, along with input from a group of Adobe Education Leaders, have been working on this project for months and are thrilled to announce that the project has now been officially launched and is available for anyone to access and use!
This is a resource for all facets of education: K-12, Higher Education, Colleges, Universities… admins, faculty, staff… whoever is working with Adobe technologies in education.
You can see a small subset of materials and resources available by visiting http://edexchange.adobe.com/, but to truly get the most out of this resource, you will want to sign up with your Adobe ID and fill out your personal profile.