360Flex Keynote - Matt Chotin from Adobe

Matt Chotin from Adobe gave the opening keynote presentation at this year's 360Flex conference in Indianapolis. The keynote is in an interesting ballroom room in the historic Union Station here in Indianapolis. He discussed the future of Flex. He showed a dashboard that they intend to release to track the Tour de Flex showing real-time access to Tour de Flex usage. Last night they went over the five millionth view of Tour de Flex samples.

He discusses Flash Catalyst first among the products. Catalyst is targeting interactive web designers and interaction designers, information architects and graphic designers or creative directors. When a designer finishes a Catalyst design and import it into Flex (er...Flash) Builder. The developer can then wire the Flex application to data and make it work. Matt shows a demo built entirely in Catalyst that is a Sushi restaurant finder. Finally, Matt walks through building an application in Catalyst using a comp built in Illustrator. After importing the comp he adds interactivity to visual elements on the application. For example, he clicks an element and turns it into a button or click another one and indicates it should be a text input. In another example. he modifies another element to turn it into a scrollbar that controls a list. Finally he adds different states to the application simply by dragging and dropping. This is similar to the demos of Catalyst many of us saw at MAX though the IDE itself does look much more polished.

Matt states Catalyst required a new component model, so they introduced a new version of MXML. They introduced the Spark component model based upon the Halo. In Spark, the component is not responsible for its appearance which is contained in the skin. Spark and Halo live side-by-side in MXML 2009. You can mix and match the 2006 and 2009 namespaces within the same application (just not within the same file). They added compile-time graphics to Flex called FXG which are static and optimized for the compiler. Additional improvements in Flex 4 include 2-way binding and advanced CSS.

In MXML 2006, Matt says states were difficult to use and optimize. MXML 2009 improves the language-side of states with a much simpler model for handling states. In addition, there is a new animation engine for transitions. You can animate objects that are not UI components, including arbitrary properties (like color). They added auto-reverse transitions, Pixel Bender integration and an improved timing model. Layouts are now runtime assignable and support 2D and 2D transformations and every layout will support smooth scrolling. Next he shows the new New York Times reader built in AIR and use it as a means of mentioning the new text engine in the Flash Player. The Flash Text Engine and Text Layout Framework which allows you much more control over text-layouts that are flexible. Matt moves on to show some sample applications including the "next generation" Flex store. The layout was built in Catalyst including some nice transitions.

Matt discusses the branding change which has been heavily discussed recently on the blogs. As you probably know, Flex Builder is becoming Flash Builder. The underlying Flex Framework name is not changing. The idea is about separating the tool from the framework in terms of marketing and branding. Matt then moves on to discuss the features in Flash Builder 4. He says the focus was on brining together the tools for design focused and data centric application development. In addition, they are adding Unit Testing into the builder and he announces that FlexUnit 4 is available today as a beta. Matt shows an application built by Cynergy which was built in Catalyst and Flash Builder including a number of features such as video.

Matt opens the application he was working on in Catalyst in Flash Builder. He shows how you connect to a ColdFusion server and import components which are then introspected and added into Flash Builder. Unfortunately, he runs into the classic demo breakdown and Builder refuses to connect to his component. This brings a premature close to the session after he breezes through some mentions of other features. He does mention a possible public beta in June.