Last year at MAX, we announced and sneak peeked the new multi-client support in LCDS. LCDS will soon provide native client libraries for iOS, Java, Android, HTML / HTML 5 (with WebSockets support when available), and Flex. The engineering team has been hard at work on this. My friend Mete Atamel has been leading the charges, and he recently recorded the screencast below showing six different clients connecting to an LCDS server.
Three Platforms, One application: MobileTrader for iOS, Android, and PlayBook Source Code Available
May 17, 2011 By 13 Comments
My recent video, Flex on the iPad, has generated a lot of interest. The same application runs on iOS, Android, and the BlackBerry PlayBook. A number of you have asked me for the source code. Now that Flex 4.5 has been released, I’m able to share it: you can download the project file here.
NOTE: The shipping version of Flash Builder 4.5 provides full support for Flex projects on Android. Support for Flex projects on iOS and the PlayBook will be available in a June update. More information here.
Usual disclaimer about the source code: This is a sample application, I intentionally cut some corners, etc.
Scrollable and Touch-Friendly Flex Charts
April 22, 2011 By 13 Comments
After I posted Flex Charts on the iPad, a few people asked me how to enable some specific gestures on these charts to make them small screen-friendly. One specific question was: “How can we make a chart scrollable to show a lot of data on a smaller screen while making sure the vertical axis is always visible?”. Here is a very simple implementation. You can customize and polish it in many different ways. For example, you could use AnimateProperty on the Axis minimum and maximum properties to animate the scrolling.
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Flex Charts on the iPad
April 20, 2011 By 26 Comments
I continue to see a lot of interest for dashboards applications on mobile devices (particularly on tablets), and I think that interactive data visualization applications are really a sweet spot for Flex. As an example, I built a simple dashboard aggregator using the out-of-the box charting components available in Flex. The same application can run on iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch), Android devices, and on the BlackBerry PlayBook. If you are an existing Flex developer, this will look very familiar: these are the same charts you also run in the browser or on the desktop on traditional computers. Check out the video:
For more data-visualization applications built with Flex, check out the Mobile Trader and the Sales Pipeline applications.
Usual disclaimer: I’m not a designer, so this is mostly developer artwork. You can of course polish, customize and style the out-of-the-box-experience.
Flex-Powered Multi-Touch Data Visualization on the iPad, Android, and the BlackBerry PlayBook
April 15, 2011 By 10 Comments
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve visited many enterprise customers to spread the exciting news and discuss their mobile strategy. I found it interesting that most of them were focusing primarily on tablets (instead of phones), and that the application they were focusing on was almost always a dashboard or at least involved a lot of charting components. It is true that tablets such as the iPad, the Xoom, and the BlackBerry PlayBook are amazing devices for data visualization.
Flex-based iPad Trader App now on Android Market
April 7, 2011 By 19 Comments
The “Flex on the iPad” video I posted two weeks ago generated a lot of interest. Because it is built with Flex, the application with all its richness (interactive charts, collaboration, videoconference, etc) is automatically cross-platform: You can run it on mobile devices on the iPad, the iPhone, Android devices, and the BlackBerry PlayBook, as well as on traditional computers in the browser and as a desktop app, and even on your television using Google TV.
If you have an Android device, I just posted the app on the Android Market. This is the exact same application as featured in the iPad video. To install it, just search for “Mobile Trader” on the Android Market, or access the following URL from your device’s browser: market://search?q=pname:air.MobileTrader, or scan the barcode below.
Flex on the iPad
March 23, 2011 By 96 Comments
Here is a video showing a sample Flex application running on the iPad. This Mobile Trader application shows chart manipulation and drill-downs using touch events, real time market data updates (in lists and charts), as well as video-conferencing (with your financial advisor) and screen synchronization between clients (“simulations” and “what-ifs” collaboration use cases).
In addition to the iPad 2, I also show the same Flex application running on an iPod Touch and on an Android tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab).
This application was built with the current engineering builds of Flex and AIR with iOS support.
Tutorial: Flex for the BlackBerry PlayBook in 90 Minutes
January 7, 2011 By 15 Comments
My new “Flex for the BlackBerry PlayBook in 90 Minutes” tutorial is now live on the BlackBerry Developer Site.
Flex and TripIt Integration Example with OAuth Authorization
December 15, 2010 By 15 Comments
I have been playing with the TripIt API yesterday. TripIt provides typical RESTful services to access your travel data. Like other Web APIs, they use OAuth (Open Authorization) to allow third-party applications to access your protected TripIt data without requiring you to enter your TripIt credentials in the third-party app.
The authorization workflow goes like this:
- Get a Request Token. The third-party application invokes a TripIt service that returns a “Request Token”. At this point the token is “unauthorized”.
- Authorize the token. The third-party application opens a browser window (navigateToURL) with a specific TripIt page where you can authenticate and grant access to the third-party application (aka authorize the token).
- Obtain an Access Token. The third-party application invokes a TripIt service that returns an authorized “Access Token”.
- Access protected resources.
The key point is that you never provide your TripIt credentials to the third-party application.
Since it required a little bit of work to implement this in ActionScript, I figured I would share my example. The good news is that I didn’t have to create my own OAuth client implementation in ActionScript. I found the oauth-as3 library on Google Code (Kudos to Shannon Hicks). Even though this is a TripIt example, you should be able to use it as a reference for integrating with other services using OAuth.
Flex Mobile Trader Application running on the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the BlackBerry PlayBook
December 6, 2010 By 15 Comments
After the Employee Directory video I posted on Friday, here is another example of a Flex application deployed to different mobile devices. This one is a Mobile Trader Desktop showing the progress of your investments and real time market data streaming running on both the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the BlackBerry PlayBook.
If you want to learn how to build these applications, check out my 90 minutes Flex Mobile Tutorial.
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