News.com ran an article on Central, this morning a large section of which is a rehash of Jesse Ezell’s previous pronouncements that “Central is failing”. Not much new information is brought up in the article, although this did catch my eye:
Macromedia hasn’t done enough to establish the benefits of Central to justify the cost of developing for it.
Well, I agree nearly 100% with that. We are building out the platform which is something that is going to take some time. Does the developer’s release have everything that developers want? No, definitely not. That is why we have been very active in talking to developers and asking them what they want. It is why we are working on the next version of Central and adding the features that developers have been asking us for. It is why we are working with developers to help us revise the licensing. Our primary goal is to build a platform that developers want to and can use.
The single most requested feature for Central has been File I/O support. So, how would you want File I/O implemented in Central? What would you use it for? What features / abilities do you want?
How would you rank the following in order of importance / usefulness?
Post your feedback in the comments section.
I have just uploaded the 1.0 version of the Stand-alone Central Trace Panel for Mac OS X. This is a wrapper for the Central Trace panel included on the Central SDK.
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The Central Trace Panel includes the following features:
You can download the application from here.
You can download the source from here.
If you have used the Central trace panel, you may have noticed the “App Name Filter” text field in the bottom left of the panel. This is used to filter trace messages coming from Central so you only see messages coming from your application.
So, how do you use this? It is actually pretty simple.
First, you need to set a global variable in your App / Agent / Pod that tells Central your application name. This is done using:
I just finished an article on using the Central Accordion Tab component. It will be on the Central DevNet Center in a week, but I thought I would go ahead and give a sneak peak.
Below is an excerpt from the article that shows how to manage application views using the component. Note, that this has not been edited yet, so may contain typos, grammar mistakes or code errors. If you have any questions or run into any problems, post them in the comments.
I have released a new version of the Central developer chat. It is still a “beta” version, but I think you can see we have made a lot of progress.
Lots of new stuff in this version, including:
You can install the new version by clicking on the Install Badge on the right of the page.
Last week at the MAX Keynote, AOL and Macromedia announced that it would be opening it IM (AIM / ICQ) network to Central developers. This is the first time that AOL has ever opened its network up to outside developers. Throughout the conference we showed a number of applications using the Presence SDK (the AIM / ICQ functionality). These apps included an early working version of a Central AIM / ICQ client, as well as an auction application that allowed buyers and seller to directly communicate, and a modified blog reader application that allowed readers to send comments to writers.
I have created a simple shell that allows the Central Debug panel to run outside of the Flash IDE. Among other things, it allows you to set the panel to always be on top, which makes it easy to watch trace information from Central.
Requirements:
You can download the installer from here.
Note, this is something that I did in my own time, and is not supported by Macromedia. Use at your own risk.
Wow! Things have been crazy the past couple of weeks. There have been a ton of announcements coming out of Max. I am too tired right now to list all of them, or point out the ton of new Central related content on the website, but I did want to point that we have released the “Developer Release” of Central today.
What exactly is the Developer Release, and what does it mean? The Developer Release means that Central is ready for developers to start making applications. The API is stable and the SDK is complete. The licenses are final, and you can get all of the license types (including try / buy).
A couple of people have noticed that there is a new version of Central available, but have run into some issues with it.
Well, here are the solutions:
Beta product ids will not work in the final version of Central. The current version of DevChat has a beta product id, which is why it won’t install in the new version.
You can install it with a different product.xml file that works by:
