Devoxx: Then and Now

I'm starting to prepare presentations for the ~8 hours of talks that Romain and I are giving at Devoxx in a couple of weeks. "Preparing" generally entails mostly worrying, followed by a mad rush of writing slides and code at night, on the long flight, after beers, between talks, and sometimes during the talks. It's a busy time of year.

I realized that the organizers of Devoxx had recently released all of the recorded talks from last year into the wild (read: they're free on parleys.com), so it seemed worth linking to them in case anyone wanted to see what we had to say last time around.

I'll give a plug for the conference and the Parleys site here. If there were an ad banner, it'd go here. Not because I'm paid (I would make a poor ad salesman, apparently), but because I think that both the conference and the parleys site rock. The organizers do a great job of putting it all together, and the recordings and presentation of the talks on parleys.com is the best I've seen by far of any conferences I've spoken at.

Yes, that young man on the pedestal is
throwing a hand. It's an Antwerp thing.

Parleys is a subscription site; after the annual conference, you can join for the year (for a fee of 79 Euros) to watch all talks given at the conference. During that year, the talks are made freely available, one by one, then at the end they are all free. That year has passed, so the 2010 talks are all available now for free. If you enjoy them, consider joining parleys next time around to see them earlier. Or better yet, join us in balmy Antwerp, where the beer is good and so are the fries.

Dive into Android, Part 1
Romain talks about layout. This talk includes live-coding a custom layout, which is a good lesson in how to do it yourself (although you probably don't need to do it on stage in front of the cameras to make it work the way you want).

Dive into Android, Part 2
I talk about custom graphics. This is kind of a Filthy Rich Client talk, but more focused on the core principles and approaches of doing custom graphics in Android applications. nothing over-the-top filthy, just good stuff to know about Android GUI development.

Android Graphics and Animations
We cover lots of architectural details about the Android platform, including the view hierarchy, classes used in custom graphics, and pre-3.0 animations (remember: this talk was given before Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) was released).

Android UI Development: Tips, Tricks, & Techniques
This talk consists of a smattering of tips that will help you write efficient Android applications. We discuss the various tools that you should use, techniques for avoiding unnecessary garbage creation, and various performance tips.

Flex 4 FunThis is my swan song for the platform that I worked on prior to Android, and for my Flex 4 Fun book that was published last year. I cover various things from the book, including graphics objects, filters, states and transitions, component skinning, and (of course) animation effects (the area I worked on for Flex 4). Lots of demos and code.

Flex 4 Fun: The International Tour

The international book tour for Flex 4 Fun began last November in Antwerp, Belgium (the home of diamonds, chocolate, and GUI toolkit programming books). It was a gray a rainy day, which is unusual for Antwerp except for the months between September and June.

The tour began as all such things do: parties dripping with scantily-clad programming celebrities, mobs of teeming fans fighting for autographs and shreds of clothing, and all-night hacking orgies. It was unforgettable, it was a blur of over-caffeinated memory, it was ... just another book tour.

The tour came to an abrupt end. I can't confirm that it was because of overcrowded venues and rabid crowds that overwhelmed Interpol forces. I can only say that I had to leave the town anonymously, quickly, and with only 10 pounds of chocolate as a memory of the experience.

Or...

I gave a talk on Flex 4 Fun at Devoxx. The presentation gave an overview of some of the graphics and animation features in Flex 4, and worked through an example of skinning a component to show some of these new features. This was one of several talks I gave that week, although this was the only one on Flex. In fact, it's probably the last such talk, since I don't have a lot of opportunity to do Flex development in my new Androidal life. Call it my final Flex fling ... 4 fun.

Instead of embedding the video, I'll encourage you to go to Parleys.com to watch the presentation, and to check out the many other videos from the Devoxx conference. Parleys has a subscription model (79 Euros to watch all videos from Devoxx 2010), but there are a few talks available for free now (like this one) to whet your appetite.

Enjoy the video while I continue to recover from the tour.

Flex 4 Fun 4 Kindle

By popular demand, Flex 4 Fun is now available for the Kindle!

If you order the eBook on the Artima site, you can download the Mobi as well as the PDF version. In fact, if you already bought the eBook, you can log into your Artima account and download the new Mobi version. Once you have the .mobi file, you can copy/email it to your Kindle device and start reading.

Shaka Devoxx

I'm back from the annual Devoxx conference, a fun and thoroughly exhausting week in Antwerp spent presenting, attending, and generally hanging out. It's always a great time, despite the weather and the overall grayscale cityscape.

This picture from the show was taken during one of my sessions when I was either talking about a GUI frame or saying hello to my Hawaiian friends.

I presented in several sessions, including 4 sessions with Romain Guy about Android and UI programming and one on topics from my book, Flex 4 Fun. I spent most of the week either on stage or writing slides and demos to present on stage. There's nothing like procrastination to keep you busy at the last minute.

For anyone that missed the presentations, see below about their availability on parleys.com. We may also post the slides someday, although it's always better to get the full deal (slides+audio+video). Also, I intend to post a couple of the demos I showed in the Android talks (the Flex demos are already available on the book site).

The sessions this year were, as always, recorded and will be released on parleys.com, an excellent site for viewing presentations with lots of content from previous years as well as other developer forums. The talks are released incrementally during the year for free, or you can buy a subscription to view them all for 79 Euros. In fact, parleys just announced that the 2009 recordings are now all available and all free. The talks and the recordings are of very high quality, so you should check out the site..

Anyway, thanks to Stephan Janssen for another great conference. Shaka!

Amazon Restocks Massive Shelves

Flex 4 Fun is finally, once again, in stock at Amazon.com. It's been "Temporarily out of stock" for the past coupjle of weeks for reasons that escape me, but which are probably one of these two possibilities:

• Amazon is really new at this business of selling books and is still learning how to keep appropriate amounts of inventory on-hand.
• They lost all the copies they had and had to rewrite the book from scratch, based purely on the cover picture on their website. I hope their version is as gripping as the original.

In any case, you can now order it in peace. At the same time, they bumped the price a bit, to $26.60. This is fantastic news, of course, for two reasons:

• The book now costs just about a cup of coffee more than it used to on Amazon. This means that you may have to forego that cup when you read it, thus preventing unfortunate spills and mess.
• Even better, the new price means that the book is just over Amazon's Free Shipping limit here in the U.S. That's probably the thing that a lot of you were waiting for in order to finally purchase it.

So go ahead. It's ready. Now. Go.

Speaking of Flex...

I'll be joining Jacob Surber from Adobe this week to speak to the local Flex user group, SilvaFUG (which I think stands for "Silicon Valley Flex User Group." Or maybe it's "Silver and Fugly"). We'll be in San Francisco on Tuesday evening (the 12th) and San Jose on Thursday evening (the 14th).

The topic is "Fun with Flex Skinning." I'll start off with an overview of the visual aspects of Flex 4 (which, by bizarre coincidence, are exactly the topics covered by Flex 4 Fun. Funny how that worked out). Then I'll walk through an extended example of skinning a simple component to show how these visual elements are used to enable easy development of very custom-looking components. I promise there will be much more code than bullet-points. Jacob will then go into more detail about skinning, including possible workflows and tools for design and development of custom components.

More information about the events can be found on the SilvaFUG site.

I hope to see you there; it should be a Flex 4 Fun evening. Both times.

Flex 4 Fun: Only n left-- order soon!

Flex 4 Fun is finally available for purchase at Amazon. First, it went from looking like this on their site (with the depressing "Temporarily out of stock" message):

to looking like this, after they were finally ready to ship it out (I figure they probably wanted to dust off the copies first, then put them on the shelves to see how nice they looked):

Then for the past few days, the amount of stock appears to continuously change. In fact, they seem to have a hard time figuring out how much stock to keep on hand. Here are some screenshots from the Amazon page over the past few days. (Not that I've visited the site that many times or anything. After all, I already have a copy, so why would I need to? That would be silly.)

Get yours soon. Who knows when they're going to run out completely?

Oh, and don't forget about that free shipping for orders over $25 thing. Amazon toyed briefly with a price just over $26. And I mean briefly. I saw it at that price just once over the past two weeks. Now it's down at $24.39 (below the $24.93 price before it was in stock, in the first image above). Apparently the book is like pork bellies or flax futures and the price fluctuates with demand. Or their clerks just get the numbers transposed occasionally. Since it's so close to the free shipping limit of $25, you'll probably want to bundle it with another relevant, yet highly affordable book, like When I am King.... I'm just saying....

Book Montage

I ran across Flex 4 Fun in the wild this weekend and managed to get some photographs. I thought that it might help you to understand how you might benefit from the book. Here are some ways that others have found it useful.

First of all, the book makes a lovely objet d'art, and was being displayed alongside other great works of art when I encountered it here:

It also makes a nice decoration for some household areas, such as this aquarium:

This person apparently found the code recipes useful in the kitchen:

At 280+ pages, the book is a perfect size for some household tasks, such as leveling this piece of furniture:

A good graphics algorithm is always music to the ears:

This family apparently found the book more interesting to watch on a Friday night than television or a movie:

And of course the book looks great on a bookshelf, where it fits naturally with both the great works of literature:

and the less great works of children's literature:

But the book won't stay on that kids' shelf for long:

Even the family pet may enjoy the book - everyone wants to be an RIA developer:

And finally, this Flex developer was so excited by the book's arrival that he bought two:

As you can see, there are plenty of uses for the book. What will you do with yours?

Done? Done. It's Here.

For anyone that doubted the outcome (including me), I offer the following physical proof that Flex 4 Fun exists. I received a few of the early copies today, and I took a picture of one in its natural habitat. I wanted to capture how nice the book would look on a random bookshelf. Here, you can see it surrounded by a few of my other favorite books:

This is probably as good a time as any to call out to some of the many people that supported me in this huge and questionable effort:

• Romain Guy: Thanks for the ideas, the help, the beautiful pictures (including the lovely and bizarre sea dragon on the cover), the foreword, and the encouragement. I only regret that you didn't actually write the book with me instead of just making me get started on it to begin with. But I'm learning that there's not a lot of time outside of Android development to take on that kind of project...
• Daniel Steinberg: Thanks for helping me get the project rolling at first and giving me some great advice and editing assistance. I'm sure it's a better book for your help.
• Bill Venners (a.k.a., the publisher): Thanks for taking the book on and getting it out there in very quick order. Making it available early in online form that close to the Flex 4 release was important, albeit painful and nearly impossible.
• The academy: For voting for me and sucking up to me throughout my Hollywood career, I thank you most of all. Always thank the academy.

The books are being sent out to distributors starting this week. Amazon still shows the book as "Available for pre-order", but I expect that to change next week as they start receiving their copies. Assuming they can bear to part with the little darlings.

(By the way, this blog entry is reminiscent of an earlier one. My, how the time flies when you're too dang busy working on code and writing books about it...)

Final Article: Effect Choreography in Flex 4

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun. Check out Effect Choreography in Flex 4 for an introduction to using composite effects in Flex 4 to create more complex animations.

For anyone that's tired of seeing Flex content on my blog, you're in luck: this is probably the last bit of such material for the foreseeable future. This article is the eighth and last in a series of articles that were, er, borrowed from the book.

(Then again, if you're tired of my Flex content, I have no idea what you're doing reading this blog to begin with).

If, instead, you're pining for more content, might I suggest picking up Flex for Fun? The online version is done and the printed version is so close I can almost taste it (although I hope it reads better than it tastes).

If you're hoping to see some Android content, be patient. I'll get there eventually. I'm a tad swamped in actually writing SDK code and learning the platform first. I'll eventually come around to posting some geeky how-to developer content here. Because that's what this blog is all about.

Skinning Components in Flex 4

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun. Check out Skinning Components in Flex 4 for an overview of the awesome new component/skinning architecture in Flex 4.

Flex 4: Get some skin in the game...

Linear Gradients in Flex 4

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun. Check out Linear Gradients in Flex 4 for an overview of using linear gradients in the new graphic primitives in Flex 4.

Flex 4 Fun: Amazon Existence Proof

There's a basic philosophical question that is fundamental to so many situations in life:

• If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
• If you tell a joke and nobody hears it, is it funny?
• If your children respect you, are they really teenagers?

The equivalent in the book world is:

• If your book isn't sold on Amazon.com, has it really been published?

I'm happy to say that Flex 4 Fun now passes this last existence proof; the book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The book is at the printers now, supposedly available in hard-copy in mid-September. At Amazon's discount of 34% off the list price of $36, it seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Notice that the Amazon price of $24.39 is just shy of the $25 you'll need to reach for free shipping. Which is probably just the excuse you were looking for to finally pick up When I Am King....

By the way, if any reader is so inspired, it would be great if you posted a review on Amazon (and elsewhere). I know how I feel about my books, but I'm slightly more subjective than you might be. Besides, I already used up my quota of words in the books themselves. It's time for me to shut up and let someone else talk. Briefly.

Flex 4 Fun: Final Post(PrePrint)

As promised, the eBook of Flex 4 Fun has been updated to the final version of the text, which was uploaded for printing last week. So if you bought the eBook already, a fresh download will give you the final bits.

If you didn't buy the eBook version already, what are you waiting for? Oh, you want the hardcopy version so that you can enjoy its graphical goodness in the way that Gutenberg intended? Well, you'll still have to wait a bit for that. Even now, armies of typesetters are setting up printing presses to make a run at printing the tome. Look for the book in bookstores and online in mid-September.

Fills in Flex 4: It's What's on the Inside that Counts

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun. Check out Fills in Flex 4 for an overview of fills for the new graphic primitives in Flex 4.

printf(Flex 4 Fun);

If you listen closely, you can probably hear it; the slight rustling of hundreds of pages, the chuckles of the shop foreman as he reads the section headings and subtle footnote humor, the collective sigh of the machinery as it mass-produces page after page of graphics programming wisdom.

After months of writing, followed by many more months of editing and revising (it's still unbelievable to me, and more than a little depressing, to know how much you can continue working on your own text and still find things to improve), Flex 4 Fun has gone to print. It's a bit like being put out to stud, except that books are self-reproducing and there's little chance that one of the offspring would win the Triple Crown.

If all goes well at the printer, there should be hardcopy available in mid-September, right before the JavaOne conference, and in plenty of time for your holiday programming-book-giving needs. Just imagine what your mother will say when she opens that completely unexpected gift.

For anyone that bought, or is thinking about buying, the online version, the PrePrint will be updated soon with this version of the text. I'll post something here when that happens.

Stroke of Genius: Drawing Lines in Flex 4

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun. Check out Stroke of Genius: Drawing Lines in Flex 4 for an overview of the stroke object, used for defining the properties of lines and outlines for the new graphic primitives in Flex 4.

State Transitions in Flex 4 for Intuitive UIs

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun. Check out State Transitions in Flex 4 for Intuitive UIs for an overview of using transitions to animate changes between states in Flex 4.

Yes We Candroid

In case anyone's wondering when the next Flex CodeDependent video/demo is coming, the answer is... probably not anytime soon.

After a fun and productive Flex 4 release, I decided to get small; the time had come for me to do some mobile development. In particular, I wanted to work on Android. So a few weeks ago, I joined Google to work on the Android SDK. For starters, I'm working on animation support (surprise, surprise), but I'm sure I'll end up tinkering throughout the UI toolkit and graphics layers. You know, the fun stuff.

By the way, if you want to know more about this personal career decision, I'll try to answer all of your possible questions here, in no particular order:

• Flex is awesome, Flex 4 is even better. Honestly, I wouldn't have wasted the last year's worth of weekends and evenings writing Flex 4 Fun if I wasn't totally jazzed about Flex 4 as a great client platform.
• Yes, but only on Tuesdays.
• The coffee is better.
• Of course the comedy at chetchat.blogspot.com will continue! I'm not dead yet!
• No
• Maybe, eventually
• Blue
• Dental floss

Adobe's doing great things with Flash on Android and Flex on Android. But that's not what I'm doing here at Google, so I won't be posting much new Flex/Flash content here (although I still plan on doing some book-related articles and conference/user-group presentations). It's that finite-time thing - I'm going to be pretty busy just working on what I need to do for Android. I don't know if you've heard, but there's a lot of these devices out there these days; that's a lot of users that need even more awesome UI toolkit software...

For anyone interested in Android development, or in UI/graphics/animation development in general, stay tuned to this blog: I plan to post content here about all of that kind of stuff.

Flex 4 Fun: Real Soon Now

How credible would a software book be that didn't slip the schedule? That would be like sugarless dessert, or nonfat bacon, or an effective politician; it's just not believable.

So in keeping with the tradition of all software since 1954 (the original launch date of Windows Vista), Flex 4 Fun is hereby slipping its schedule.

But not by much.

The original goal was to have the hardcopy printed and available in early August. Failing the invention of a time machine, that's not going to happen. However, the book is actually done, at least from my perspective. In fact, the content that's been in the PrePrint copy for weeks is nearly final itself. The editing phase found many little things to clean up (it always amazes me how many times I can edit my writing and still find errors. It's as if I'm human) and resulted in some amount of reorganization. But most of the recent changes have just been about finalizing the layout in order to get it to the printer.

I don't have a final date yet, but I'm thinking it's sometime in September, just a few weeks after it's sent to the printer... which the publisher assures me is just about to happen.

In the meantime, check it out online or do like I do; wait impatiently and completely ineffectively.