Adobe announced today that they have teamed up with Google and Yahoo! to provide the means to search flash content on the web. This was one of the biggest drawbacks to sites with large amounts of flash content, so it is a welcomed announcement to everyone. The method of searching does not require anything different to be done by developers and allows old swf content to be searched as well.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Read the press release here.

The Open Screen Project was announced by Adobe today.  This is a pivotal point in Adobe's history.  You can read about the details here: http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/

Here's what this will mean for Flash®:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Note that this is not making Flash open-source.  It is making it possible to put the Flash player on mobile devices without a fee (even though the fee was small to begin with) and significantly reduces the potential development cost to make it work on a device.  We'll be able to create Flash content for mobile devices and eventually we'll see Flex and AIR apps on them.  This is the stuff dreams are made of.  Ok, maybe not all dreams, but I still love it.

The strategy behind it is brilliant as well.  It will ensure there aren't multiple variations of "flash players" out there that don't work the same.  We don't want to have the headaches we had when dealing with CSS inconsistencies. This also will get Flash out there as the platform for rich content.  Sorry Microsoft, but you haven't been very "open" so what's your move?

Ok, so Flex 3 and thus AIR 1.0 are now out to be used and abused. You'd think I would have been posting like crazy as soon as they hit the shelves. So what have I been doing? You guessed it - using them. I've been deep in the world of Trees, ContextMenus and MVC design patterns. I've been learning how to use the File class and drag and drop functionality for the desktop. I also broke down and became an Adobe Certified Flex Developer, so now I have something to work in conversations at dinner parties.

I would feel bad if I wrote a post and didn't provide a tidbit of usable information for the flex community, so how about something I learned about AIR application icons.

To give your AIR application an icon, which you should always do to avoid the default icon being used by the OS, you need to specify the image location for the icon in the <application_name>-app.xml file that will be in the root of your AIR project folder. There are four tags for the icon, and if you don't use one, you need to remove it. That's something that got me, although it seems fairly obvious looking back. The compiler won't automatically look at a tag without an image reference in it and say "hey, I should ignore this". So either create a png image to use for each of the 16px, 32px, 48px, and 128px icon references it has OR specify one of them and delete the other tags. I recommend creating an icon for each since it's really not that much more effort and will allow you to tweak the icons to look better for smaller and larger sizes.

Have you wondered how AIR can make icons for both the Mac and Windows platforms? Well, the icons aren't created until you install the application. At that point, the installer knows what platform you're installing to and will generate the appropriate icons at that point. Because of this, you won't see your icon when you're developing and debugging the application. The icon will only show up when you install the application from a release build.

I presented this at the Seattle Flex User Group Tuesday night, soon after finding that there are some methods used in this component that are unnecessary. I won't go into it, but here's what this is and why I created it.

This component is a canvas wrapping around an ArrayCollection of httpServices. There is another ArrayCollection used for the queue. Use the public call method to give it a url, the callback function and anything you might want attached to the AsyncToken like so:

var usefulNotes:String = "remember me!";
myQ.call("http://www.somedomain.com/service?arguments=foo", myResultHandler, usefulNotes);

The target use case for something like this is not where you make one call and are done. I created this because I found a scenario where I would end up making hundreds of http calls at once. The browser won't allow you to send them all at once so I wanted to track the progress of the calls. This allows you to add items to the queue and thus, see how many are waiting to be sent out.

It needs a lot of work so I welcome all feedback on this. If you improve upon it, please let me know. I'd love to see what this evolves into for others!

You can find the sample app here.(provide your own url - it'll break without a valid one). It's up mainly for the source code so you can play with it yourself. Enjoy!