We have just posted information about FlashCamp San Francisco, a free developer event that we will be holding in the Adobe San Francisco Office on Friday night, May 29th. This will be similar to the ApolloCamp event that we held for the Apollo Beta launch a couple of years ago, although this event will be focused on the next generation of Flex, including Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, and Flex Builder 4.

Register for FlashCamp San Francisco

From the event page:

FlashCamp San Francisco is a free one night event hosted by Adobe covering everything you need to know about getting started with building and designing rich Internet applications (RIAs) with Flex 4, Flex Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst.

Doors open at 5, and we will have plenty of food and drinks (beer is being provided by City Beer Store!). Kevin Lynch is launching the event with a keynote around 5:45, and then we will move into sessions on Flex 4, Flex Builder 4, and Flash Catalyst (all presented by members of the respective engineering teams).

We will also have a dedicated space setup if you want to chat with any of the engineers or team members of the product teams (this has been really popular in the past).

Here is the current agenda:

You can find more information on the event, as well as register on the event page at:

http://flashcampsf.eventbrite.com/

The event is free, but please register as soon as possible as these event have sold out / filled up in the past.

We don’t have a huge marketing budget (we spent it all on the beer and swag for the event), so I would appreciate any help in getting the word out about the event (blogging, twitter, facebook, etc…).

You can follow the latest news and information on the event via twitter at:

http://www.twitter.com/flashcamp

Prior to the release of Adobe AIR 1.0, I worked on two books about Adobe AIR (then know by its code name of “Apollo”). The books, “Adobe Integrated Runtime for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide” and “Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocketguide” provided an introduction to Adobe AIR, and all of the information a developer would need to get over the hump of developing for Adobe AIR.

In addition to being published by O’Reilly, we released both books online under a Creative Commons license. We were not sure what effect, if any this would have on the book or community, but were pleasantly surprised when the community began to translate and republish the books online in different languages (including Russia, French and Japanese).

Introducing tostring.org

When I began to work on the updated “Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide” for Adobe AIR 1.0, I wanted to provide a way to help support anyone in the community who wanted to give back to the community by translating the books. Well, I am happy to announce a new site that I have been working on called tostring.org, which in addition to containing the entire Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide online, also provides an infrastructure for the community to contribute to the books, both through hosting translated versions of the books, as well as allowing comments on individual chapters.

The first chapter of the book has already been translated to German, and there are community members working on translating the book to Swedish and Polish.

The site is still in beta as I work out some kinks, and clean up the CSS, but it is pretty much fully functional now. I plan to start converting and posting the “Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocketguide” to the site, and then updating it to AIR 1.1. After that, I am thinking about publishing some mini books on the site that do deep dives into specific AIR and Flash Player APIs and functionality.

Why does this matter to you? Well, if you dont care about Adobe AIR, RIAs or the Flash Platform, then it probably doesn’t. But, at a minimum, it now makes it easier to reference / search the book content online. In addition, if you find an issue, or something isn’t clear, you can leave a comment on the chapter to clarify or get clarification.

However, the thing I am most excited about is the potential to start getting more content localized and translated into non-English languages. If you are interested in translating a chapter into a non-English language, then check out the translating page on the site, which describes how to translate a chapter.

Note, that all content on the site is released under Creative Commons licenses, which in essence means that this is the community’s site, and the books are the community’s books. Hopefully, this will help support the community, and generate all around better resources for developers.

Visit tostring.org.

Leave any comments, questions, suggestions or offers of help in the comments.

Here is a quick tip, that I got from Tom Lane on the Flex Builder team. If you do a lot of AIR development, then you have probably noticed that the default application descriptor file in Flex Builder 3 Beta 2, is heavily commented. While this makes it easy to learn the new tags, it can be a little overwhelming, and make it difficult to find the actual tags you need.

Luckily, there is an easy way to edit the default template for the file. Note, this is not supported and subject to change in the future.

Simply edit the application descriptor file in the following directory:

FLEXBUILDERINSTALLDIR/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.apollo_3.0.183654/resources/default-application.xml

Of course, make sure to back up the original one in case you ever want to get back to the default template.

Danny Dura, Kevin Hoyt and myself have been working on a new Adobe AIR book, which has just been published. The book, which is published by O’Reilly, is titled Adobe Integrated Runtime for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide and provides an introduction to Adobe AIR, targeted at HTML and JavaScript developers.

Not only can you buy it from Amazon, but Ajaxian.com has posted the entire book online for download.

The book is released under a creative commons license, and we will also be posting it on labs for download.

Btw, we plan to update the Adobe Flex for Developers Pocketguide for the 1.0 release of Adobe AIR.

As you may have read, we just announced that we are doing an 18 city bus tour through North America this summer, where we will be holding Apollo / AIR Camp events. We have launched a website, where you can find more information about the tour, including cities, dates, agenda and news.

I just checked the latest registration numbers, and the space is filling up pretty quick. So, head on over to the site, find the city closest to you, and make sure to register.

You can find more information on the website, on the bus tour blog, and in this video overview of the tour.

Get more info at : onair.adobe.com.

Check it out. Sams Publishing has just released an Apollo ebook authored by Mike Givens titled Apollo in Flight. The book is seven chapters, and is available for purchase and download from the Sams site.

You can find more information on the book here.

I just finished up a book I have been working on (along with Kevin Hoyt and Danny Dura) that covers using JavaScript and HTML to build Apollo applications. In celebration of finally writing my last example, I wanted to post it here.

Here is a simple example that shows how to use Flash Player and ActionScript APIs directly from JavaScript to play a sound in the upcoming Apollo beta.

<html>
<head>

	<script src="ApolloAliases.js" />
	<script type="text/javascript">

		function playSound()
		{
			var soundPath = new apollo.URLRequest("app-resource:/sound.mp3");
			var s = new apollo.Sound();
				s.load(soundPath);
				s.play();
		}
	</script>

</head>

<body>
	<input type="button" value="Play" onClick="playSound()">
</body>
</html>

It should be pretty self explanatory, and is a good example of how easy it is to use Flash and ActionScript APIs from JavaScript within Apollo applications.

Btw, ApolloAliases.js is a file included in the beta SDK that provides JavaScript aliases into ActionScript APIs to make them easier and more convenient to use from JavaScript.

Kevin Hoyt gives a sneak peak of one of the new features in the upcoming beta that allows you to access an file’s system icon bitmap data from within an Apollo application.

Kevin’s example is in HTML and JavaScript, but the same technique applies to ActionScript.

You can see the entire post, complete with code and screencast over at Kevin’s weblog.

Google announced their Google Gears project today which uses SQLite to allow browser based applications to work off-line. (Ryan and JD have more info on that). Part of the announcement was that the upcoming beta of Apollo will also include SQLite to allow developers access to an embedded database for their applications.

This has probably been the #1 request we have heard from developers since we release the alpha, and with a tons of help from the Flex team, we were able to add it.

We will be releasing more information once the Apollo beta is public on labs (sooner rather than later).

Update: I meant to add that we are working on aligning the Apollo DB and Gears DB apis, with the goal of making it easier to build applications and code that can leverage both API implementations (on the desktop and in the browser).

Christian Cantrell has released and open sourced an Amazon S3 ActionScript 3 Library. This can be used to send and retrieve items to an from the Amazon S3 storage service from an Apollo application.

We posted a video of Christian showing of an appliction that uses the API a couple of weeks ago.

You can find more information here.