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Snow Effect – Flex Container:

Any content you place in the container will interact with the snow and still maintain their usability. The snow flakes interact with the pixels so you can even put fancy text inside and the snow collect in the right places. A plethora of options to have fun with as well.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), are the next generation of Web applications. RIA is also called as Rich Internet Clients(RIC) . RICs provide the usability, responsiveness, and reuse of client/server applications with the deployment, manageability, and availability of a traditional Web application.

Benifits of RIA:

RIAs offer organizations a proven, cost-effective way to deliver modern applications with real business benefits:

• Offer users a richer, more engaging experience.
• Keep pace with users’ rising expectations.
• Increase customer loyalty and generate higher profits.
• Leverage existing personnel, processes, and infrastructure.

Why Rich Internet Applications??

What is an RIA anyways? Well HTML applications are state-less. Application servers maintain state by using cookies and session variables to keep track of users, but all the logic is on the server. So while a user is looking at a page in their browser, the application is unable to do anything until the user commits an action that sends data from the page back to the server for processing. The code processes the data, and generates resulting HTML that the browser loads back in.

A simple example would be a report or search tool that queries a sales/CRM database based on various criteria from the user such as deal time frame, product group, and sales executive. The user enters these values, clicks on a submit button, and the browser goes blank while it waits for a response from the server and loads the resulting HTML which would be a tabular list of records that match the criteria: For eg

Time Frame From To Product Group All Adapters Routers Hubs Switches Sales Exec All Jeff Smith Bob Gordon John Sykes

Look familiar to anything you’ve done? Now if the user wants to change the parameters, or perhaps sort on a particular column, typically the page would need to be sent back to the server where it rebuilds an up to date report based on the new criteria. Pretty standard stuff for Coldfusion, JSP, PHP, ASP, or any other servlet language.

In the Flex world, your application wouldn’t need to post a request to the server every time the user made a change. Instead of the logic living purely on the server side, your presentation tier is all on the client. So imagine changing filters or criteria, and the table automatically updating as a result. Imagine clicking on a column title and the column automatically sorts without reloading the page. This saves hits to your web server, application server, database, and network. For one user this may not be a big deal, but what about 1000 users, or 10 000 users?

HTML based applications are a series of HTML web pages; Flex applications are LIVE applications. A simple analogy is imagine Word or Excel being an HTML web application; vs the real application itself. It could be done; but the real application is aware of your mouse movements, every key stroke, and provides much more feedback to the user by using sound, animation, and other visual queues

Web Devolopment standards Changing:

Flex and competing technologies such as JavaFX, Ajax, and Silverlight are pioneering today’s changing approaches to Web development and have played a significant role in changing how users like to visualize their data. Flex and its rivals are relatively nascent technologies and are still in the process of overcoming issues such as portability across browsers, security, limits on client-side caching, and so on.

One of the most significant competing technologies to Flex is Ajax. Their capabilities overlap some, but they also fill substantially different niches. Flex excels at targeting rich and complicated graphical structures, while Ajax is used primarily for text-based content. Ajax works closely with HTML, and its data is transferred in XML (or JSON) format, while Flex can support XML, JSON, and even a binary format of data transfer. The fact that Flex supports binary data transfer probably puts it far ahead of Ajax in terms of data transfer rates and compactness.

FLEX:

Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. It provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript™ 3, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic. Flex also includes a rich component library with more than 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs), as well as an interactive Flex application debugger

Flex uses a combination of a tagged based language called MXML, and an object oriented language called Actionscript 2.0 (the language of Flash).

You build your main files in .mxml, and can build custom components and objects in .as (ActionScript). The Flex Application Server (a J2EE application) will compile your code into a Flash file (.swf) which the browser then loads. The Flex App server provides other services such as being a gateway to RemoteObjects (eg CF CFCs) and WebServices.

Adobe Flex is at the forefront of those tools that help you create RIAs, whose features often include rich charting, drill-down animations, 3D effects, and a new level of responsive user interaction. Such features are especially important in the burgeoning areas of business intelligence (BI) and Web 2.0 content creation and delivery. Core Web 2.0 requirements typically include asynchronous processing, doing away with the request-response paradigm, content aggregation, and so on—things that applications like Flex can help you do with less effort and in less time.

Flex isn’t billed as RAD (Rapid Application Development); it’s geared towards Enterprise Applications where the real-time interactivity and rich workflow are the primary ROI. However developing in Flex is by far faster than developing productivity tools in Flash natively; on some accounts there are development speed gains of 10X.

HOW FLEX WORKS:

Flex IDE is developed on Eclipse and can be used as a stand-alone Integrated Development Environment. Flex IDE offers powerful features that include rich editors, a versatile debugger and in-built objects

USE:

Imagine dragging and dropping an item for sale into a shopping cart instead of clicking on the old school [add to cart] button. This type of functionality is easy to implement. Or the whole realm of sound; where you can provide audio guided applications that talk users through their first time in the workflow.

Advantages of Flex:

Flex delivers many significant benefits that are worth noting. Many (but by no means all) of Flex’s most significant benefits derive from the fact that it is built on top of and extends Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash Player. Key benefits of Flex include:

1. Complete browser portability. Any browser that supports Flash Player—and that includes almost every browser—also supports Flex and its scripting language, ActionScript (AS). This is in distinct contrast to Ajax, which is affected by the incompatible implementations of JavaScript implemented in different browsers.
2. Consistent look-and-feel. Flash Player is well known for delivering the same look-and-feel to all operating systems and browsers. Flex utilizes the Flash Player engine, so it benefits from that same consistent look-and-feel.
3. Robust security. Flex leverages the highly tested Flash Player security model.
4. Rich UI. Flex benefits from Halo Skins, gradient fills, vector graphics, and other Flash Player features.
5. Scalable vector graphics (SVGs). Flex stands out from most other RIA-based technologies because it supports vector-based drawing and direct embedding of SVG mark-up files. SVG-based images look equally good at any resolution a given browser supports. This is in distinct contrast to bitmap-based images, which can degrade significantly as you scale up a given image’s size.
6. Asynchronous request/response model. Flex offers complete support for asynchronous processing of user requests. Asynchronous processing enables a Web site to break away from the page-centric model, where every user request spawns a time-consuming page refresh.
7. Binary data communication. Flex offers complete support for binary data transfer between a Flex client and any back-end server. You can send this data using Abode’s proprietary Action Message Format (AMF) (now with an open source specification) or any other format you might want to leverage or develop in-house. Flex even supports opening binary sockets from client-to-server, which enables you to achieve “real” data push. Note that this feature might not be able to use a browser’s encryption facilities such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL).
8. Runtime shared libraries (RSLs) and modularization. Flex’s support for these features ensures that you can load modules dynamically, which means you can add new features to an already running application and even make use of RSLs loaded by other Flex applications running on the same client machine. This can help you reduce the start-up time of your application’s features because it shrinks the size of the initial binary.
9. Client-side caching. Flex offers superb support for client-side caching. With the user’s permission, a Flex application can cache unlimited data on the client side, which reduces network round trips if the same data is requested again in the same or future sessions. You can cache any kind of data, including full object graphs, custom classes, maps, and arrays. This support is significantly more advanced than HTML cookies that allow an application to store only String-name value pairs and limit even those to a general restriction of four KBs per Web site.
10. Cross-browser communication. Flex supports communication between applications running in the same type of browser, between different tabs of the same browser, and even between applications running in different browsers on a user’s machine. This feature means many applications can share data among themselves, enabling an extremely rich end-user experience.
11. Streaming. Flex offers excellent support for streaming binary data. Streaming can be a life saver for data-heavy applications that need to transfer large amounts of data to the end user because this approach lets an application display data in parts to the end user as soon as the data arrives.
12. Strong back-end connectivity. From its inception, Flex has featured excellent support for popular back-end technologies such as the Java Platform Enterprise Edition, the Microsoft .NET platform, Cold Fusion, and PHP. This connectivity support has helped fuel the rate of Flex adoption for the client-side layer.
13. Rich Framework. Flex offers a robust framework for component development and contains many off-the-shelf components already built-in for the developer’s convenience. This facilitates rapid development of projects and timely deliveries.
14. Debugging and Editor Support. Adobe has made an extremely smart decision by developing a robust Eclipse-based editor called Flex Builder, which greatly simplifies developing and debugging Flex applications.

This combination of features makes Flex a compelling choice for creating UIs now and for the foreseeable future. Another big plus for developers using Flex: You can create some interesting solutions aggregating and reusing already built components, which fits well within the spirit of Web 2.0. However, things get more difficult if you want to build new custom components from scratch. The power that Flex provides might inspire you to want to create rich, beautiful components that have thus far been solely the province of desktop applications you build with libraries such as openGL. Think about the possibilities of writing a gaming engine on the Web that builds on the concepts of the Electronic Arts racing game, Need for Speed. Or you might want to build an ISP topology with live views of data flows and link usages. I think you will see applications like these and many more in Flex’s future, but the market and toolset aren’t quite there yet. In any case, enterprise businesses have a lot riding on their Web-based UIs, and they can benefit tremendously from the power of Flex.

Similarities to Java Programming Language:

Adobe built Flex on top of its Flash Player, which is a proven technology for rendering rich UIs. Flash Player as it exists now is well suited for graphics designers, simplifying how you create MovieClips, time lines, banner ads, and so on. However, Flash Player applications aren’t so appealing for enterprise developers who are accustomed to developing applications with object-oriented design and components that extend other components. On the other hand, Flash Player’s native language is ActionScript, an ECMA-compliant scripting language that resembles JavaScript, and designers tend to be more attached to XML-tag-based languages. Adobe noticed this gap quickly and bridged it by introducing MXML. Adobe’s approach with Flex resembles the approach Sun™ took with Servlets and JSP technologies. Code written in MXML gets translated to ActionScript code, which in turn gets compiled into something called Action Byte Code (ABC)—not unlike what happens with the Java Byte Code process. ABC is packed into the binary SWF format, which is delivered when users request it over a Web browser. These SWF-based files can run locally as well as in a stand-alone Flash Player plug-in. However, the Flash Security model doesn’t allow local files to access network resources and vice versa

VARIOUS VERSIONS OF FLEX:

YouTube received funding from Sequoia Capital in November 2005 and was officially launched one month later in December. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen proceeded to become the first members of the YouTube management team and currently serve as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer respectively.

In November 2006, within a year of its launch, YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. YouTube has struck numerous partnership deals with content providers such as CBS, BBC, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, NBA, The Sundance Channel and many more.

ADVANTAGES OF YOUTUBE:

1. Proprietary Rights Over Uploaded Content
YouTube Partners own the copyrights & distribution rights to ALL of their own uploaded videos without exception. If you upload a video and are not a partner, YouTube has the right to manage and disseminate that video within youtube.com as they see fit.

2.  Ad Revenue Sharing Makes You Money
The advertising revenue that is generated on your webpage is divided between the AdSense publisher, YouTube, and the YouTube partner providing the video content. Revenue is generally contingent on how many people click-through on your online ads (PPC) and how many people view your video (CPM). PPC means pay-per-click and CPM is a flat rate of $20 per 1,000 views of the featured video. With new features constantly being added such as overlay ads, this is a great opportunity to make some extra cash.

3. Greater exposure
Becoming a partner puts your video at the VERY TOP of video searches. Content will be delivered to the largest worldwide online video community via YouTube and its syndication partners without any restrictions.

4. Skintillating Page Customization
Youtube Partners can customize their YouTube pages with skins. Concordia University matched its skin to its school colors. Businesses who are YouTube Partners can tailor skins to align with their brand for awareness and recognition. Youtube Partners are afforded greater inclusion and control over their content when compared with non-partners

5. Additional Bonuses and Features
As a partner, the “Related Videos” section will be replaced by the “More From” section. The “More From” section will feature only thumbnail links to YOUR videos. Here are are some great tips about partner features and how to optimize your page.

Disadvantages:

6. Must Have Original Content
YouTube Partners’ content MUST be original or have the explicit permission of the person who did create the content to include it in your video and monetize it. Partners must own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload to YouTube with no exceptions.

8. Rule Restriction Red Tape
YouTube has a vast amount of rules that need to be adhered to so that your partnership can maintain a good standing. The amount of rules restricts some aspects of what you can do in terms of optimization and design on your page. Some examples include:
a.) Partners may not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks.
b.) Partners may not place misleading images alongside individual ads

SOCIAL IMPACT :

Before the launch of YouTube in 2005, there were few simple methods available for ordinary computer users who wanted to post videos online. With its easy to use interface, YouTube made it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to post a video that millions of people could watch within a few minutes. The wide range of topics covered by YouTube has turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of Internet culture.

An early example of the social impact of YouTube was the success of the Bus Uncle video in 2006. It shows a heated conversation between a youth and an older man on a bus in Hong Kong, and was discussed widely in the mainstream media. Another YouTube video to receive extensive coverage is guitar, which features a performance of Pachelbel’s Canon on an electric guitar. The name of the performer is not given in the video, and after it received millions of views The New York Times revealed the identity of the guitarist as Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old from South Korea who had recorded the track in his bedroom.

YouTube was awarded a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award and cited for being “a ‘Speakers’ Corner’ that both embodies and promotes democracy.”

TECHNOLOGY:

Technology

Comparison of normal, high, and HD quality YouTube videos played in YouTube and their native resolution.

Video format

YouTube’s video playback technology for web users is based on the Adobe Flash Player. This allows the site to display videos with quality comparable to more established video playback technologies (such as Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and RealPlayer) that generally require the user to download and install a web browser plug-in to view video content.^] Viewing Flash video also requires a plug-in, but market research from Adobe Systems has found that its Flash plug-in is installed on over 95% of personal computers.

Videos uploaded to YouTube by standard account holders are limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 2 GB. When YouTube was launched in 2005 it was possible to upload longer videos, but a ten minute limit was introduced in March 2006 after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films. Partner accounts are permitted to upload videos longer than ten minutes, subject to acceptance by YouTube.

YouTube accepts videos uploaded in most formats, including .WMV, .AVI, .MKV, .MOV, MPEG, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .OGG. It also supports 3GP, allowing videos to be uploaded directly from a mobile phone.

Video quality

YouTube originally offered videos in only one format, but it now has three main formats, as well as a “mobile” format, for viewing on mobile phones. The original format, now labeled “standard quality”, displays videos at a resolution of 320×240 pixels using the Sorenson Spark codec, with mono MP3 audio. This was, at the time, the standard for streaming online videos.

“High quality” videos, introduced in March 2008, are shown at up to 864×480 pixels with stereo AAC sound. This format offers a significant improvement over standard quality. In November 2008 720p HD support was added. At the same time, the YouTube player was changed from a 4:3 aspect ratio to a widescreen 16:9. 720p videos are shown at 1280×720 pixels resolution and encoded with the H.264 video codec. They also feature stereo audio encoded with AAC.

3D videos and viewing

In a video posted on July 21, 2009, YouTube software engineer Peter Bradshaw announced that YouTube users can now upload 3D videos. After each 3D video is uploaded and processed, users have several choices on how to view the video. For users without 3D glasses they have the option to watch the video Cross-Eyed, Parallel, Mirror-Split and Left and Right Image Only. Users who have 3D glasses simply have to chose what color pairing they have on their glasses in order to view the video in 3D. Neither GeForce 3D Vision nor polarized 3D viewing are currently supported

1. Enable grouping of friends and followers:

   Figure  shows tabs that you can use to quickly see tweets in a particular group.

2. Auto Complete in Tweets

Auto complete  is an interaction design pattern that involves displaying a list of suggestions as the user types in text. Auto complete can speed up the process of sending a tweet directed to a particular user using the @username format.

It will also help in times where you’re having trouble spelling someone’s username.

Another application of the auto complete feature is for suggesting #hashtags (keywords associated with a tweet) to make keyword-tagging of tweets easier.

3. Text links in tweets

With a 140 character limit, it’s often difficult to have links in a tweet without robbing yourself out of precious characters. By allowing users to tweet hyperlinked text, not only will it give them a little bit more room for including additional characters, but will also make Twitter feeds look cleaner.

4. Tweets-threading

Twitter is a great source of information and is a wonderful forum for discussing various topics. Unfortunately, the current user interface doesn’t allow you to easily view a conversation between two or more people.

  Figure 3 show how threaded comments could look.

Coupled with the “reply to” feature in the current user interface, threaded tweets can give users the chance to participate in (or follow along with) conversations taking place in several Twitter feeds.

Threaded tweets can also serve as a means for people to find other Twitter users that are interested in similar subjects of conversation.

5. Allow Tweets directed to a group of people (“group tweet”)

Figure 4 shows a possible syntax for tweets directed to a group of users using a double @ synax.

With companies and communities joining in on the fun, the ability to tweet to a group of Twitter users offers a convenient way of specifically targeting a set of people. For example, if you wanted to tweet to your co-workers, the syntax could be:

@@friends I'll be a little late for our lunch date, start ordering without me.

The double @ serves to differentiate a tweet directed to a single user from one that’s directed to a group of users.

6. Display meta data through hover tooltips

A tooltip is an effective graphical user interface element that allows users to view more information when they hover or click on a text or object of interest without having to leave the current web page. They enable information-gathering with fewer clicks and fewer pages to visit.

One way tooltips can be helpful is in seeing the bio information of a Twitter user when you hover over their username on your Twitter feed. If you see a username mentioned in an interesting Twitter update, simply hover over the name to see more information about the user that was mentioned.

7. Use the sidebar more effectively to display information

Figure 5 shows a “Recent @Replies” and “Popular #hashtags” section on the side bar.

Twitter can utilize the right sidebar more effectively by showing relevant information and statistics. For example, a “Most Recent Replies” section or a “Most Used #hashtags” section can be very helpful in showcasing the latest activities and the hottest topics.

8. Add a page that displays tweets mentioning your username

Twitter users (me included) like seeing their names mentioned. Currently, only @replies (tweets that begin with @username) can be seen in the @Replies page. A nice optional feature would be to have a page that lists tweets where your username is mentioned or where a particular tweet of yours is re-tweeted (example: “RT @username”).

A less self-centered benefit for this feature is the opportunity to find people who are interested in what you have to say, enough that they update their own Twitter feed with a tweet of yours, or to see what types of your tweets are popular amongst people who follow you.

9. Highlight specific users, deemphasize others in feed

Figure 6 shows the first tweet as being highlighted, and the second tweet being deemphasized. The third tweet is how tweets normally look like in the current interface.

Users who follow many people run into the trouble of Twitter feed overload where there’s just too much going on and too many tweets to read. The ability to mark favorite Twitter users, as well as deemphasize users that you don’t care much about (but still want to follow for some reason), can give users better visual queues on what to pay attention to first when perusing one’s Twitter feed.

10. Add a Built-in URL shortener

With Twitter’s current user interface, hyperlinks are counted towards your 140 character count limit even if it gets reduced in length by a URL-shortening service like TinyURL.com after you hit the “Update” button.

One way to allow users to enter more text – without having to go to another website just to shorten URL’s – is to have a built-in URL-shortening feature. This would not only save user’s some time, but also eliminates the need to rely on other websites to perform an action that should really be handled within the system.

     Benefits:

  1. Research Tool

                               Example – Let me illustrate this with a ‘live’ example. Lets just say that I’m writing a post on RSS feed subscriptions and wanted to find out how many feeds people were following. I’d post a Tweet like this:

Now I actually posted that Tweet a few minutes ago and in the time that it took me to grab a screen shot of the tweet and made myself a coffee I’ve had the following responses:

2. Reinforce (and expand) Your Personal Brand

3. Promote Content

4. Find Out What People REALLY Think

Another observation that I’ve made in the last couple of weeks while on Twitter is that people have a certain level of honesty and rawness on Twitter that they sometimes mask or hide on their blogs. I’m not sure why this is – but perhaps when confronted with saying something in 140 characters they have to strip away some of the disclaimers and politically correct language and just say what they mean.

The good thing about this is that it gives you a sense of what people are really thinking on a topic. This helps you to get to know them on a new level but also helps you keep your finger on the needs and feelings of your potential readers.

Twitter – API:

trends/current

Returns the current top 10 trending topics on Twitter.  The response includes the time of the request, the name of each trending topic, and query used on Twitter Search results page for that topic.

URL:

http://search.twitter.com/trends/current.format

Format: 

json

HTTP Method:

GET

Requires Authentication (about authentication):

false

API rate limited (about rate limiting):

1 call per request 

Parameters:

• exclude: Optional. Setting this equal to hashtags will remove all hashtags from the trends list.
  • Example: http://search.twitter.com/trends/current.json?exclude=hashtags 

Response (about return values): 

          JSON example (truncated):

{“trends”:{“2009-04-13 20:51:25″:[{"query":"#amazonfail","name":"#amazonfail"},... truncated ...]},”as_of”:1239655885}

Usage examples: 

cURL (about cURL):