At Max one of the most interesting announcements was around the BlackBerry PlayBook.   The new device presents a slick 7'' screen and is packed with a 1GHz dual core processor and 1GB of RAM. The device will run BlackBerry's Tablet OS and come stocked with developer's favorite runtimes. Those include Open GL, WebKit, SMP, Adobe Flash, Java, and Adobe AIR.

For us Flash developers, the most important specs are that the device will ship with Flash 10.1 and with Adobe Air 2.5. This means all Flash content on the web will be viewable via the latest WebKit. And Flash developers can take advantage of the Blackberry Tablet OS SDK and a Flash Builder plugin to create ActionScript based projects. The SDK seems to be a custom version of the Flex 4 SDK, but from what I understand, they do not recommend you use the Flex 4 component set. BlackBerry has created their own core set of ActionScript components for general use and to assist with developing custom components that are performante on the device.  

The SDK does support Flex's resource bundles, which means, your application can take advantage of internationalization. This is an important feature considering  the PlayBook will be released in multiple countries in 2011.

Flash in the Can (FITC) is almost upon us (or already happened depending when you read this) and we are really excited to be attending the San Francisco version of this internationally renowned conference.  Aaron and I will speaking on the first day about the Flex 4 component lifecycle and if you are attending the conference we highly recommended swinging by and saying hi.

For attendees we will be handing out a conference code for a 20% discount off our training program, so keep an eye out for our flyers.  There should also be a copy of the flyer in your goodie bag.  If you are not attending FITC, we have a twitter contest going on.  If you tweet about our training with the keyword #devarc you will have a chance to win a free session.  So, get out there and tweet!

Over the last few weeks we have been rebuilding DevelopmentArc.com using Drupal as our new platform.  Prior to the switch over, we having been running Wordpress and it has been pretty good for the last year or so.  Unfortunately, we had purchased a template system that worked well for the launch yet to make it work we had to heavily modify the template and the CSS.

When Wordpress updated to 2.9, this broke all of the tempting systems and the developers had to roll out a new version.  This new roll out drastically changed a lot of the files that we had modified, and this caused us a lot of heartache trying to re-build our modifications in the new template framework.  We are currently planning a Drupal site for a client and we felt that rebuilding our site in Drupal was the perfect exercise.  Small enough to do it between other work and would also free us up from the previous template fiasco since we would be building it from the ground up.

Now that we have ported over to Drupal, our goal is to keep the site in parity to the first one.  Hopefully, you won't even tell a difference.  But now that we control the entire stack, we hope to roll out new content and updates on a much shorter timeline.  That, and we are finally wrapping up our book which has been our main focus for all our work and personal free time.  So, enjoy the "new" site and let us know what issues you all have!

I found an interesting trick with embedding fonts today while working with the Text Flow engine in Flex 4.  What I found out is that you can embed multiple fonts under the same font family name, but set the properties such as font weight or font style to different settings based on the font source you are using.  This may be an obvious thing to a lot of people, and the property name 'font-family' makes a lot more sense now, but for me it was a real 'ah-ha' moment.  By the way, this isn't just a Flex 4 thing, you can do this with Flex 3 and probably AS3 only projects (haven't tried that yet) but the issue became more apparent in Flex 4's new TLF enabled components.

The problem came about because we have a set of fonts that provide each style type in a unique OTF file, i.e. Font-Regular.otf, Font-Bold.otf, Font-Italic.otf, and Font-BoldItalic.otf.  In the past, we just embedded this with unique font-family ids (font-family: "Font-Regular") and then just bound them via CSS.  This approach becomes a significant problem when starting to work with TLF's selection management and Text Format.  We are building a simple Rich Text Editor in Flex 4 (since its not available yet in Beta 2) to allow a user to set their text to bold, italic or underline.  Simple enough, right?