Sharify: Shareware-ize your Air/Flex Apps

 With Sharify, you can earn money from your Adobe Air/Flex apps, by monetizing them through a shareware, and set licensing fees according to your business propositions. Pretty cool...

By simply integrating their swc library into your application, then calling a method to listen for an event and handling it, you can choose your own payment methods and only pay 3% of each of your license-issuing to Sharify and keep the rest. It's a lot better than what you may get at Apple, and with the Android platform also looking to include Air capabilities, you look set to sell cross-platform and gain maximum exposure.

With Sharify, you also have a neat control panel that will allow you to manage your licenses, transfer licenses (if a user for example changes computers), issue free and beta testing licenses, view stats on users, how many are on trial, how many have upgraded and so forth. They are currently in alpha testing, and are allowing users to test via invite only, but I dare say watch this space, as I can see some really neat things coming out of it.

Filed under: Adobe Air Flex Web Development
 

Top Flash Misperceptions : Flash is a CPU Hog at Mike Chambers

Top Flash Misperceptions : Flash is a CPU Hog

This is one of the most prevalent misperceptions associated with Flash. Basically, the myth is that Flash uses an inordinate amount of CPU compared to other, similar technologies.

Before looking in more detail at this misperception, I think it is important to point out that when one makes the statement “Flash is a CPU hog”, they are making a comparison of Flash CPU usage to some baseline. This then begs the question: Flash uses a lot of CPU compared to what? By comparing Flash CPU usage to other similar technologies and content, it becomes clear that Flash CPU usage is not excessive for the type of content that it displays and executes.
 
If the comparison is between Flash based dynamic, multi-media content and static HTML documents, then, of course, Flash content is going to use more CPU. It is doing a lot more stuff, potentially including loading data, playing audio and / or video, drawing and animating content, responding to user input, and so on. The nature of multimedia content is that it is doing more, and thus requires more CPU resources. Thus, if the comparison is against static web documents, then yes, Flash does use more CPU, although a more apt statement would be “Multimedia content uses more CPU”. However, this only answers the question whether Flash uses more CPU than static HTML documents, and does not address the misperception that Flash uses an inordinate amount of CPU for what it does.

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Filed under: Adobe Web development
 

Unit Testing Flex – Mocking « compactcode

If you have experimented with unit testing either recently or in the past you will be aware that sometimes it can get difficult. There are many challenges you might encounter including the following:

  • You need to ensure something happened, without going into detail.
  • You have to do too much to write a single test.
  • You need to test something that you don't have control over.

In this post I want to show some ways to get around these common unit testing roadblocks using a concept called mock objects. Basically a mock object is just an object that can simulate the behaviour of another object in order to make unit tests easier to write.

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Filed under: Flex Web development
 

Flash Builder/Coldfusion Builder IDE Free

The three amigos, ADOBE Flash (Flex) Builder, Coldfusion Builder & Coldfusion 9 Server are free!. That's right, if you are unemployed, or a student, you are able to obtain these babies for free.

I think it's a fantastic initiative by Adobe, to promote their Web Development tools whilst ensuring that those who are unable to afford the tools, would still be able to learn and teach themselves to become more proficient in Rich Internet Application Development, and hopefully get themselves to a situation where they are able to afford things! Gosh, takes me back to the old days as a high school student where I had to fork over $200 bucks to get a C++ compiler from Borland.

So, to look at getting one of these tools, head on over to:

Filed under: Flex Web Development
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