Doubts about Adobe Flash CS5 and iPhone development.

I’m not very happy about this project, I believe it will bring much con­fu­sion and prob­lems than else.

• Per­for­mances: the pre-alpha ver­sion cre­ates exe­cutable of about 7MB for appli­ca­tions of about 3 sheets, i develop them, same func­tion­al­i­ties, on about 700KB. Action­script uses a vir­tual machine with garbage col­lec­tor, iPhone OS doesn’t, so who knows if the Actionscript->Source  Code con­ver­sion is the best avail­able, and devel­op­ers will be allowed to fix it?
• API sync: how long it will take to Adobe to release the update to be in sync with the offi­cial iPhone SDK? Weeks, months? And will be bug-proof? i don’t think so.
• Bugs: Apple fixes bugs not so quickly, how long it will take for Adobe to fix theirs?
• Project killed: if Adobe will drop this fea­ture what will hap­pen to the projects devel­oped in Action­script? You will have to learn Objective-C and redo the project from scratch.
• Debug: if the con­ver­sion made by Adobe will cre­ate leaks or crash how the devel­oper will be able to fix them if it cre­ate the final pack­age with­out any Objective-C source? Debug­ger? how will work?
• Com­piler: Adobe uses only LLVM, in XCode you can choose between GCC and LLVM.
• Fast-food pro­gram­mers: the power of Objective-C is his nature of being so close to C allow­ing to develop using object-oriented pro­gram­ming; a well trained devel­oper can use C to speed his applications/game: an Action­script devel­oper will never be allowed to go so deeply (at least for now).
• Black Box: all the con­ver­sions will be hid­den to the devel­oper: he has to trush in the Adobe engineers.
• Mul­ti­thread: AVM2 doesn’t sup­port to develop mul­ti­threaded appli­ca­tions, while Objective-C/C and the iPhone OS yes: did they allow to use this fea­ture or not?

When the first beta will be release we will see hun­dred of appli­ca­tions and games on the Apple Store devel­oped with this ver­sion: bugs, crashes, slow appli­ca­tions, and what else?

Design Pat­terns teach to decrease to the lower level the cou­pling, in this way the devel­oper is cou­pled to Adobe deci­sions and tim­ing: this is really the

I will test it but with­out any real inter­est, I want to have full con­trol on my application/game and to know how in the core my soft­ware works: I’m able to dec­tect and fix bugs in min­utes cause i only need to know the lan­guage. i’ll never t be forced to wait for Adobe to fix con­ver­sions bug hop­ing that they will be fixed in the “who knows when” fix-release.

Io Programmo: iPhone — Popolazione delle tabelle

In questo arti­colo viene spie­gato come popo­lare una tabella, inserendo le infor­mazioni all’interno delle celle.

Adobe AIR 2: many news, and multithread support!

Finally a sim­ple way to enable heavy cal­cu­la­tion oper­a­tions in Adobe AIR, using the new Native process API users will be allowed to call and com­mu­ni­cate with native appli­ca­tions, so pass­ing an com­plex struc­ture and let­ting the CPUs to do the job using C++/C/Java/.NET will be soon allowed.

I faced this prob­lem ana­lyz­ing huge excel logs using an Excel Action­script library, the whole inter­face got  frozen until the end of processing.

I’ll try as soon as pos­si­ble how the appli­ca­tion will work using this new approach.

Athers new really cool addi­tions (copy and paste from Adobe website):

• Server sock­ets sup­port: You can lis­ten for incom­ing socket con­nec­tions. Using the server socket API, it is now pos­si­ble to build light­weight servers that run locally, and to com­mu­ni­cate across appli­ca­tions using TCP sockets.
• UDP sock­ets: You can send and receive mes­sages using the User Data­gram Pro­to­col (UDP). For real-time, time-sensitive appli­ca­tions, includ­ing mul­ti­player games, you may find that UDP sup­port in AIR will help pro­vide a bet­ter user experience.
• TLS/SSL sock­ets:You can now con­nect to a server that requires TLSv1 or SSLv3 for socket com­mu­ni­ca­tions. For devel­op­ers, this means that you have new cryp­to­graphic pro­to­cols avail­able for access­ing sen­si­tive data over net­work that can help you build more secure applications.
• More effi­cient CPU usage: On the Mac, with­out code change, many appli­ca­tions are con­sum­ing 50% less CPU usage when run­ning in the background.
• Reduced mem­ory usage: With­out rebuild­ing the appli­ca­tion, many AIR appli­ca­tions such as Tweet­Deck are see­ing reduc­tions of mem­ory between 15–20%.
• Smaller run­time installer sizes: The run­time installer sizes for Mac OS and Win­dows are smaller than AIR 1.5.

Messagenie is born!

My new Adobe Flex appli­ca­tion is finally ready to be sell: Mes­sage­nie

• It allows, using the inte­grated hard­ware, based on FoxBox devel­oped by ACME SYSTEMS, to send hun­dred of SMS for minute from a really user friendly inter­face (i devel­oped it with the inten­tion to make it look lik an email-manager application).
• The appli­ca­tion needs only a browser and the Flash plu­gin installed!
  
• You can man­age SMS, search text, reply to, delete and print them.
• The appli­ca­tion check at a give inter­val if sms are avail­able (inter­val is freely cus­tomiz­able) so you only have to sit and wait.
• The Wall mode allows you to have a full screen wall­pa­per that shows rece­vied messages.
• You can man­age your con­tacts using a sim­ple address book system.
• You can cre­ate groups of users to send mes­sages only to these groups.
• You can receive MMS and save their attach­ments (images, text, videos, all that is attached).
• You can cre­ate SMS polls to search and ana­lyze text pat­terns inside sms received.
• The set­tings menu is fully of cus­tomiza­tions options, and if you are not sat­is­fied you can ask for a cus­tomiza­tion.

Are you inter­ested? drop me a line at  neogene@tin.it!

UPDATED: I’ve sub­mit­ted Mes­sage­nie to Adobe Graphic Con­test, please vote for it here (req: free reg­is­tra­tion): http://www.adobeyougc.com/Main.html#sez=Gallery;idProgetto=543

TIM — Maxxi Internet iPhone

ATTENZIONE: questa for­mula ha i seguenti difetti:

• Viene ri-attivava entro UN giorno circa dalla sua atti­vazione, quindi, in questo arco di tempo SIETE SCOPERTI da tale opzione ATTENZIONE AL VOSTRO CREDITO; tale carat­ter­is­tica non è pale­sata nel sito, ma c’è un lacon­ico “rin­novo auto­matico”; dopo una dis­cus­sione accesa con l’operatore del call cen­ter, che mi rib­at­teva “non c’è scritto rin­novo auto­matico imme­di­ato”, poiché quando ho fatto il piano non sono stato infor­mato a riguardo hanno deciso di fornirmi indi­etro il cred­ito consumato.

Il nodo è qui, nella FAQ: http://www.119selfservice.tim.it/caring119/o95962/tariffa.do

Maxxi Inter­net per iPhone dura un mese dall’attivazione. Alla sca­denza è pre­visto il rin­novo auto­matico sem­pre al costo di 10 euro, salvo che tu non decida di dis­dire l’offerta.

Morale della sto­ria: dovete dis­at­ti­vare il con­trollo di email e la nav­igazione quando sta per arriva l’ultimo giorno del servizio, atten­dere la con­ferma e riat­ti­vare il con­trollo della mail e potrete nav­i­gare normalmente.

Aggior­na­mento: Ho effet­tuato alcune ricerche; sec­ondo la Delib­era n. 126/07/CONS dell’Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comu­ni­cazioni, pub­bli­cata sulla Gazzetta Uffi­ciale del 30 aprile 2007, arti­colo 3, comma 6:

Nel caso di opzioni o pro­mozioni che a titolo oneroso diano luogo al diritto di usufruire di una quan­tità di servizi pre­de­ter­mi­nata, in ter­mini di tempo o di vol­ume, l’operatore di tele­fo­nia informa il con­suma­tore, in prossim­ità dell’esaurirsi di dette quan­tità, dell’imminente ripristino delle con­dizioni eco­nomiche pre­viste dall’offerta prece­den­te­mente sottoscritta.

Da questo si deduce che la TIM vìola questa delib­era palese­mente, poichè l’utente non viene avvisato dall’operatore, ma deve provvedere autono­ma­mente a ver­i­fi­care che l’offerta sia scaduta.

Updated: ho invi­ato un fax seg­na­lando questa vio­lazione che mi aveva fatto perdere circa 15 euro e pronta­mente me li hanno rimborsati.

Lettori poco “sensibili”.

Alcuni let­tori, che cer­cano di diventare pseudo­pro­gram­ma­tori iphone leggendo i miei arti­coli hanno seg­nalato il fatto che la serie di arti­coli ded­i­cati alla UITable sono troppi, e desider­ano altri argo­menti: saranno accon­tentati ; non scriverò più alcun arti­colo a riguardo, quindi se avranno prob­lemi dovranno cer­care altrove le soluzioni ai loro problemi.

Se non sono stati in grado di com­pren­dere che questo argo­mento è prob­a­bil­mente il più impor­tante su cui si incen­tra tutta l’attività iphone prob­a­bil­mente abit­uati al mondo del mordi-e-fuggi dei mini arti­coli pre­senti sui blog forse è meglio che con­tin­uino a con­sultare questi pseudo-siti online e smet­tano di leg­gere, visto che già alcune pagine hanno destato in loro grandi prob­lemi esistenziali.