Adobe Technology from the Venezuelan Perspective

I have had the pleasure of getting to know a great guy that is also in the technology sector over the last year that I now call a friend. His name is Eddwin and he lives in Venezuela. Eddwin originally contacted me via my website regarding micro controller programming. Since that time I have talked to him about several different subjects regarding technology and have gotten to hear first hand about a few of the hardships regarding technology development in Venezuela. Eddwin recently interviewed me on his website, eddwinpaz.com about the work I did in Adobe Flash at Hershey's Create Your Own Candy Bar for work. In turn, I interviewed him about his project he did in Adobe Air for a hospital advertising campaign. I have modified some of the interview as Eddwin asked me to fix up his "Tarzan English". He has great English, but I have modified some of it.

Eddwin, how did you first get interested in Flash/Air/Flex technology?

In 2008 by mistake. I needed a tool to enhance the user interface but at the time AIR was unstable and barely documented. I needed a tool to be able to harness some of the advantages of the Internet. PHP GTK wasn't giving that much so i kept trying on that tool.

How did you get involved in developing an AIR application for a hospital?

Well the hospital was making a new advertising campaign and wanted to give added value to its members, so I wanted an application that was near them at all times to provide directory information such as the medical, hospitalization plans and addresses of their offices with constantly updated information. The hospital conducted a feasibility study to see the possible solutions that would allow the best of both worlds. Undoubtedly web and Adobe Air tools are very helpful because they allow the integration of each other. So what I wanted they also wanted.

So this AIR application updates in real time with certain information?

Of course, this application is synchronized with a php generated xml file as the content management system has no such feature in particular. It also shows the climate of the city of Caracas which is the capital of our country Venezuela, which comes from the weather yahoo API.

I am fascinated by the fact that this application has no visible Windows/Mac containment window. Can you talk a little bit about how you achieved the unique look?

Well first the design was done in Adobe Illustrator, then taken to the new Adobe Flash Catalyst tool. This allowed us to transform all the layers from Illustrator into interactive components inside the Adobe AIR environment. When we were past the wireframeing phase of the project, we proceeded to use another tool called Adobe Flash builder which allowed the project to import directly from flash catalyst. This allowed us to add special features to buttons to make the interactivity with the content which came from the Internet. What I love about this set of tools is that it involved a minimal amount of programming because it was all generated by flash catalyst.

Finally; how do you see the future of Flash?

I don't like flash at all. but it is necessary because it is one of the best tools to develop the best user interfaces in record time. In my opinion flash will have a great future outside the browser with new platforms like the Air Runtime, that undoubtedly is less time consuming that Silverlight and JavaFX.

I think the probability of this technology catching on is greater than previous mentioned tools because Flash Builder lets you package your application for multiple platforms like Mobile, Web and Desktop with just a click. This is a feature that Silverlight does not have and JavaFX is missing because it needs it own SDK. The learning curve is also much greater on those tools rather that Adobe RIA tools.