Artemis Alpha Released

Artemis is a community focused project aimed at bringing external libraries to the Flex / Flash environment. The goal of Artemis is to provide features in the Flex / Flash desktop application domain that are not currently available. The Artemis framework allows a developer to create their own custom libraries (currently written in java with plans to support other languages) that integrate with a Flex / Flash Apollo application.

 

For Flex Developers:
Artemis provides a way for developers to collaborate on building extension to the Apollo framework. Nearly any java API can be encapsulated in an Artemis Library and exposed to an Apollo application through the Artemis framework.

For Java Developers:
Throw away your Swing UIs. Artemis brings the UI capabilities of Flex to java developers. Look for samples coming to our web site that will compare ease of use and functionality between a Flex UI and a Swing UI. No more Grid Bags!

I am currently testing Artemis and will post my experiences as soon as possible. Please post any comments on your experiences with Artemis here as well.

UPDATE: I was able to run the screen shot application successfully on both Windows XP and Mac OSX 10.4.9. For Mac, you will need to get the Java 6 download from Apple’s ADC site which is free to join.

Same Apollo app HTML vs Flex versions

I just wanted to see what the difference would be in  creating two Apollo applications with the same two boring html files, page1.html and page2.html.  The first one was simply compiled using adt through the console setting page1.html as the rootContent.  The second was a flex application that set the source of an HTML component to page1.html and compiled to an AIR file with Flex Builder.  The results:

They both look the same, although the pure html version will automatically show the page title in the window title.  They both function the same.  The big difference is that the pure html AIR file is 112k while the flex html version is 256k.

Not sure what is to be learned here, it was just more to satisfy my own curiosities.

Here are the 2 applications:

PureHTMLTest.air

FlexHTMLTest.air

Yahoo API’s – A Weather Widget

 

Well I finally got around to building something with the new Yahoo Flex API’s.  In this example, I am using the  Yahoo Weather API to display a few of the many weather properties that are available via this API.  This application uses shared objects to store the user preferences, the Timer class to fetch new results per the user refresh setting, as well as the Distortion Effects from Alex Uhlman.

Here is the application running in the browser

Here is the same application packaged in an Apollo AIR file.

Apollo Cheat Sheets

In case you missed this the other day. There are 3 new Apollo cheat sheets released for free by ActionScriptCheetSheet.com.

Here are the links:

Apollo mx.controls & mx.core Cheatsheet

Apollo flash.display & flash.events Cheatsheet

Apollo flash.filesystem, flash.html & flash.system Cheatsheet

 

Flickrin Apollo Tutorial

Flickrin is a real world application for searching photos online using Flickr API created by Ashwinee Kumar Dash. Currently in version 1.0, the user can do a basic keyword search for thumbnails.

Link to tutorial:
http://flnotes.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/flickrin-ver-10-flex-flickr-apollo-mashup-tutorial/

Link to sources:
http://www.ashwineedash.com/download/Flickrin_1_src_files.zip

Link to application:
http://www.ashwineedash.com/download/flickrin1.0.zip