Adobe Devnet has a security advisory on the upcoming Flash Player 9 update. The advisory lists a few very important changes to the security model in Flash Player which can possibly impact your existing Flex and Flash applications. The changes are primarily to address the vulnerabilities of the earlier versions of Flash Player (9,0,115,0 and before).

There are four key changes that can possibly impact existing applications:

• A socket policy file will always be required for all socket connections
• A policy file will be required to send headers across domains (This will possibly affect some of the Flex apps that I work with)
• The allowScriptAccess default will always be "sameDomain"
• "javascript:" URLs will be prohibited in networking APIs, except getURL(), navigateToURL(), and HTML-enabled text fields

» Continue reading "Important Flash Player Security Update - Check your applications"

Just saw an interesting article on Engadget that compared iPhone SDK to Windows Mobile, Android, S60 and Toolchain.

What is really interesting is that Windows Mobile along with Nokia S60 supports Flash.

iPhone, as you know, does not support Flash (and won't support it any time soon, given Apple's comments yesterday about Flash being too slow to run on iPhone).

And what is even more interesting is that Microsoft and Nokia have signed a deal to make Silverlight available on Nokia S60 and S40.

So two things really:

1. Adobe needs to do something to get on to the iPhone platform. AIR runtime perhaps?
2. Adobe needs to look at engaging Nokia for AIR runtime.

Here is the article at Engadget: iPhone SDK Comparison Chart.

Just finished my session on Working with Web APIs at Web on the Piste, Queenstown, New Zealand. The presentation was about:

• What are Web APIs
• How do they work
• How to use them
• Creating a ColdFusion and Flex front-end using Flickr API

As with my presentation yesterday on "Introduction to Flex", I had a lot of content, and lots to talk about. The presentation is attached with this blog. It was a light presentation. My session was one of the last few sessions for today and I just wanted to try and keep it simple and fun.

» Continue reading "Working with Web APIs -- Presentation at Web on the Piste"

I took some pictures at Web on the Piste -- the conference on Rich Internet Technologies -- being held in Queenstown, New Zealand, 2007. Some pictures are on Flickr. And some are on Facebook. We all are sure having fun. You have some too... hic...

This morning I gave a presentation on "Introduction to Flex" at Web on the Piste at Queenstown, New Zealand. It went off quite well -- at least that is what I hear from the response to the presentation. I realized that for an hour-long presentation about 20 slides is the maximum, especially when one is going to show code as well. I'm attaching a PDF of the presentation with this blog entry.

» Continue reading "Introduction to Flex -- Presentation at Web on the Piste"

Straker Interactive (where I work) have just announced "Web on the Piste -- The Ultimate Conference for Rich Internet Technologies".

It will be held in Queenstown, New Zealand, 22-23rd August 2007. And will cover topics like Flex, Ajax, Spry and Flash.

Go to Web on the Piste (http://www.webonthepiste.com) site to find out more and register.

But the basic idea is to come have fun on the beautiful ski fields of Queenstown and learn about rich internet technologies.

I like the idea :)

I'll be posting more this in the coming few weeks.

So I started going through my daily dose of information this morning. Found a link to this very interesting music player that describes itself as "desktop web player". It is called Songbird.

Downloaded and started playing with it. Very impressive. Plays music stored locally and on the web with equal ease. Has a very nice feel to it -- and it is still being developed!

But looking at it I couldn't help but thinking how easy it would be to write something like this in Apollo.

Just need to get my hands on it!

I rely heavily on flashlog.txt for tracing Flex code. But I just couldn't get the flashlog.txt to go today -- I am rebuilding my box.

So I started looking at the Adobe technote on this matter "Debugging Client-Side Code in Flex Applications". However, the Flash movie on this technote was not giving accurate information about my Flash player.

» Continue reading "Flash Player 9 Update and flashlog.txt"