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Hardware Hijinks @ Adobe MAX 2009

There has been a significant increase in the number of developers blogging about connecting Flash to peripherals, devices, gadgets, and whatnot over the last six to nine months. Alchemy is in full bloom on Adobe labs and Merapi was recently released to open source. Is it time to start thinking about Flash as a contender / foundation for interfacing with hardware?

Supporting software can be a pretty difficult task. Trying to visualize / recreate a specific condition that is throwing a troublesome exception might have you reaching for tums. Hey... I have an idea - just create an error reporting dialog that sends you an email with the details!

In the world of hardware... peripherals / devices can be roughly lumped into four groups along a continuum that represents the amount of difficultly you might experience when trying to communicate with them from Flash...

Do you remember the cute Sesame Street skit about the child that needs to go to the store for a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and a stick of butter... how along the way the requirements got crazy and in the end the little boy reconciled his implementation using FlexUnit. Yeah... that one.

So... I'm betting that David Zukerman would do an impression of 'Ask a Ninja' if we asked nicely. Perhaps with a topic of 'Why the New Debugging Tools in Flash Builder 4 are Like Apple Pies.' I'm just sayin'

With a little creativity and a dash of HID you can package Flash, Flex, and AIR applications with some sweet hardware goodness.

Does browsing the samples at www.degrafa.org make you weak in the knees? Planning to name your next child or pet commitProperties? Experimentation leads to discovery, discovery leads to inspiration, and inspiration leads to more experimentation... a delicious cycle that can result in a dangerous addiction to which profiling is the only cure.

A blessing or curse? Here are five bytes to help you cope with the loss and pave the way for a better builder.

If you've ever worked with forms/user input in Flex... you've probably found yourself scratching your head once or twice with edge-case input validation.