WWDC2003 Session 731

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en welcome to session 731 internet application development my name is Ursula Wrangham I'm a partnership management here at Apple computers a developer group today's session is going to cover macromedia central the new product that will be releasing later this year we have two people from man can we use development team for central David Cal price and Michael Williams and we have a third party developer who's created some applications that work with central Alex right so now I'll turn this over to Dave Cal price thanks for luck all right so here we're going to teach you a little bit about Max media central we're currently in beta right now at the new product under under development so see here so we're going to learn about is central to this new environment for Internet enabled apps I'm going to talk about also how a macromedia in general views Internet applications so what we're going to learn is we're going to get a little bit of a situation overview kind of where the state is of apps in general and talk about Central and of course the process for developing apps for Central and we're gonna talk about rich internet app XML soap Wiz dull and force flash so first of all a little bit about the vision macromedia division currently our vision all right now is all about experiences we feel that great experiences build great businesses and this is this doesn't just pertain to application development pertains to pretty much anything whether you going out to see a movie or drive a car or get a cup of coffee people want will pay more and and expect great experiences so macromedia is all about helping people deliver on these experiences so in order to do that we are promoting this idea of what we call rich internet applications which has been become very popular lately what they tend to do is combine the best of a contradiction desktop application so we're talking about things like the usability and user interface that you get with desktop application the availability of desktop applications you can always access them regardless of whether you're connected or not and also the integration with the operating system as well as the best of web applications web applications are great at you know accessibility to data they're all they're connected you can also have the most up-to-date information and also communication are starting to see a lot of communication used in applications lately and this is also something we feel is really important to improve the user experience so we're talking about things like not just sort of text-based chat and I am but also a two-way or n way video and audio communication so all of these things for combined together to make what we call rich internet app so what is central and what are the issues that addresses so right now most of the internet is document-centric so essentially this is grown out of the history of the web you know based on HTML in the web browser most websites are our page based and document-centric and and so most applications as well are also document-centric and from page based you you also have to click through multiple pages to perform a task and this is sort of a step backwards from actually in sort of the early 90s or even late 80s when you had much more rich user interfaces in a desktop application another problem that central is trying to address as an application platform is that the the installation of applications from the internet is often very clumsy typically you know if you want to install an application you have to download an executable file find out where you downloaded it to on your desktop double-click it may be run an installer I go through a few screens and also have to worry about download a virus or something like that so this is also a problem that we're trying to solve with central additionally applications in general don't work very well together unless they were designed ahead of time to to cooperate such as in the studio or sweet applications are pretty much developed as independent silos and apart from maybe copy and paste there's very little interaction between its applications they have a little very little way of sharing data and so that's also something that we're trying to improve the central next offline use typically web applications we go to a shopping application or any sort of application on the internet you know if you are disconnected if you become disconnected from the net that information is no longer available to you you know browser pretty much becomes useless as long if you're no longer connected and so that's also something that we're trying to solve a central and finally applications you know often have many different ways of notifying the user of events some you know bounce the icon in the dock other one thing up little windows and so there's not really very much consistency about how events are essentially communicated to the end user and so we're trying to also provide some consistency in a framework for notification as well so just coming back to the basics of what central is its environment for collecting and managing applications we call it United because of the applications work together cooperatively and unplugged meaning that you can still stay productive even when you don't have the web connection so from the customers point of view what's good about central again it combines the best of desktop interactivity and sort of the availability and usability of desktop apps with web-based deployment and also the ability and all the time up-to-date information from the internet the applications in central are cooperative and can work together and share data this delivers a much more efficient experience for the customer because rather than them having to go to indeed one application and sort of get a result from one application for example if you're doing some shopping and you want to look information of a product and have to go to another site to find a review on that product that's sort of inefficient workflow and so with central of the applications can work together and actually share this data even if they weren't designed to work together when when they were built next fast and easy installation I mentioned the force of the clumsy nature of the installation process currently for applications on desktop platforms you with central you can build an application and with a single click from a web page can be installed and running on end user's machine and this sort of mechanism makes it office or leads into this tribe I mechanism which I'm gonna talk about here there's a commerce system also built into central this is a very important aspect of the platform that as a developer you can create an application posted on your website and connect with our commerce system and sell your application and get money fed into your own merchant account without having to set up all the infrastructure to handle all the credit card transaction processing that kind of thing all by yourself that's infrastructure that Mac community provides as part of building for Central and because of the trial system and the try by the purchase system is built in central it's consistent across all the different applications the third party apps and macromedia applications that run inside the central and so the end user has sort of an expected experience they're not going to be afraid of trying to download new applications try them out purchase and purchase them and so on they have to be afraid of you know different types of purchase mechanisms something that they can trust finally you can use applications online and offline this is the course up to the application developer to support both modes but since central is not tied to a web browser you can actually have applications that store data for offline use to make it available when you're even expected and finally on applications built for central will run on OS 10 as well as Windows and also in future handheld devices they're all based on the flash player technology so to develop form a community central you you just use actually to flash MX which is our shipping flash authoring tool and the central SDK which is currently in beta right now and then later this summer or early fall will be available for public release use existing components that ship with flash and are also other components UI widgets and other types of components are available from third parties you can use those as well as we some additional components that we've built just for sense goal to provide a consistent look and feel across application also you can build on top of web services and other structured data so central includes built-in native support for soap and whistle so you can use web services directly from the central clients to talk to a server and the environment of the mentioned four it's all built on flash technology so if you can develop for flash then you can develop for central so you've got the development as a developer you have the benefits of a very widely supported development tool there's built-in support for the transaction infrastructure for download and installation of applications services for exchanging data to servers as well as between applications running locally on the client as well as auto updating technology so if you build an application for Central and then a few months down the road you want to push out a new version all that infrastructure is already there for you in Central and so you don't do any special works to port auto update and finally a macromedia is going to provide an application finder which is the global directory of all of the applications out there available for try and buy and you will you can become listed in this application directory called the app finder and then everybody who has Central has this directory always available on their machine that's part of the central runtime environment so if they're out there looking for new applications they can find them and we'll show you a little bit of a demo of that in the screenshot in a minute so it's a really good way to get exposure to your application and of course the benefits of just being based on the flash technology the ubiquity of the flash player distributed virtually all desktop systems over the last few years so people have a current / 6 player already have the capability of for downloading installing central and central applications and so there's already some millions of develop and users out there with that capability yet the community of 750,000 flash developers worldwide today so there's a very large developer base and a support network set up for people developing for flash got the portability across platforms as I mentioned before as well as the ease of development of the flash and space of the space file format and architecture and finally / is a multimedia player and so in additional that was a good stuff you've got support for things like video audio animation you know anti aliased vector graphics images interactivity and so on so here's a screenshot of the user interface of central so what you see here in the main window here is what we call the application window pointers not working too well in the application whether this is the main area where applications inside central run and at the very top you'll see kind of a toolbar with icons on it and that's the launcher area and so each application you install has an icon and it becomes listed at the top there in that in that toolbar and simply the end users are simply clicking on that icon launches the application and you can bring up multiple with these applications if you want just like a web browser it's a very simple sort of easy to use interface you know you get an icon you click on it and runs the application the rest of that window space in that window is the is for the application itself to run and that's up to you as a developer to decide you know whatever you want to put in that space like I said before we'll be providing a set of components that you can use to handle a lot of the common user interface functionality on the right side of the screen is what we call the console and this is a kind of a toolbar that can display optionally small miniature versions of these applications that can be there sort of a persistent presence on the users desktop as an option so for example here we've got a traffic camera showing all the time and a weather satellite map and so you can imagine other types of things like stock tickers or news information other types of feeds they can run as little tiles in this toolbar and this is also where notifications appear as well if application wants to present a notice to the user that some event has occurred a price of a product that they're interested in is dropped to a certain amount but then the notices will can appear there in the console as well and these windows can be open or closed independently so you don't have to have any of these windows open and you can just be running in the background or you can be interacting the main application space where you just have that console up if you just want to have a small bit of real estate used just to show this information on your desktop so those are the basic elements of the central you I so as far as the installation goes I mentioned before you can install directly from a website so here's an example of the company called pricegrabber which has a shopping site so lets you compare prices for different products online and we've been working with them to build an application for central and so here's an example of what their website could look like with a central installation button on it so essentially I like to do is put a small flash movie in your website with a button on it to install all these guys to do is click that button if they don't have central installed it's automatically downloaded and installed then the application itself is automatically downloaded installed and it's launched this all happens in a matter of a couple of seconds and then they're up and running with the application outside of the browser so that's installing from a web page and then the alternative is you can also install from the application finder and probably too easy to see with this Escalade but it's essentially a directory of applications and you can the end user can sort by different categories there's there's a whole rating system where people can provide feedback to applications and rape them I'll get all the information on whether it's a free application whether it's how much it costs what the list the trial period is and so on there's different ways to browse through the whole directory of applications and this is available like i said its built-in component of central and for all users and there'll also be a version of this on the website so you can access it even outside the central if you want so next I'm going to bring up Alex Wright who is an independent developer he's been working with us since the conception of central helping develop applications and helping design the look and feel of our application and he's going to give some demonstrations of some apps run inside centre ok great thank oh thanks Avery alright so Steve much i'm going to show you a couple of examples of some central applications that we've been working on for the last few months and preface this by saying a lot of us is work in progress are going to give you peek under the hood and show you some of the some of the apps or curling development but first I just thought I'd say a word about central sort from my point of view as a third-party developer coming from a background in web development which is what I've been doing for the past several years working on web based applications you know I think central represents a really interesting opportunity for developers and two reasons for that primarily one is it's just a much better more responsive environments for creating user interfaces in than a web browser they take well if you talk to a lot of UI designers they would tell you that the webs are to set them back about 10 years in versus sort of desktop OS UI design and the reason for that is you know the web browser is basically kind of a dumb client it's you know a lot of ways to sort of equivalent of a green screen interface to a server me there's no runtime environment there's no session state you know you really give up a lot of the advantages the performance advantages that you have versus you know it's developing desktop based application so I think what you know the first thing that I think is really cool about Central but it does give you that runtime environment it gives you a session state where you can build applications that can actually talk to each other share data and you just are able to reduce the latency in the interface by taking advantage of this runtime so you're not sitting there dependent on you know packaging up a request and sending it to a server and getting it back just inherently there's a big advantage there just with the flash runtime environment the other interesting aspect I think is the built-in web services support gives you an opportunity to do some really interesting things to do it in a much more efficient manner than you could do with a with a traditional web based application so so on that note let me just well cut to the chase here and show you what we've been working on some so this is the current beta release of central that I just went out today this morning yep so it's just hot off the presence of hope it works so they've already gave you a preview of the UI so I'll just let this load quickly that's price grammar over here okay so you see here's the application window here's the console and we've got a couple of applications loaded into the app finder here so what I'm going to do first is just walk you through a couple of the applications and sort of show you how they work so um will we will come back the upfront or later maybe but i'll start with one for pricegrabber which they showed you a sort of a snapshot of so again pricegrabber is one of these services that provides comparative pricing data on consumer products so they have something like I think it's something like 15,000 products in their catalog and they get prices from a lot of different retailers on a daily basis and you can get sort of like my Simon or there's several services like that and their business models they basically syndicate this data to other sites like I think white goes uses them a few others do so really there well they do have a website that you can do it going you know search for prices on what they're really in the business of its indicating this pricing data so what we wanted to do was see if we could create sort of a better interface to comparative pricing data using the central environment and this is what we come up with this is actually sort of a first bill that but we're actually working on a next build it'll actually be a little more sophisticated and have some new features but i'll show you some of the basics here so one thing i can do here is just do a search so let's say i wanted to search for an ibook so i'm going to click the submit button and what's happening here is the application is putting together singh a request that gets sent out via HTTP to the pricegrabber server what happens to the pricegrabber server responds with an XML file that we read into the application that contains all the data that you see here so basically what it came back with with three matches for apple ibook and what it's showing you is the best price for each of them and they'll get I think up to like 20 different prices but don't make at least in our application will show you the best price and then it shows you sort of where that search results fits in this product hierarchy or texana me that they've got which I can also browse around and explore here if I want to for instance do this you can see it's pretty responsive every time i'm clicking on the every time I clicking on something on the screen it's going prodding up sending a request off to pricegrabber and bringing a data set back you can see just in the process of sort of clicking around here so this is a much more efficient interaction that it would be saying a web browser where you'd have to go you know web page to web page to web page get a whole chunk of HTML back with every one of these requests this was with with central we're able to put together a request and very efficiently just request the exact pieces of data that we want to get back and read into the application a couple other things we can do with the using some of the standard components that macromedia is developed this is one called the datagrid that lets me do sorting very simple you know very familiar or sort of desktop a less convention but again if you compare this to the experience in a web browser you know there's no easy way to do this in a web browser without going off to a server where this is all happening locally inside the application oops we didn't see that okay so as I'm going through here I'll just move on through the application a little bit and that goes Oh what do they do okay I wanted to do that all right tell you what okay and here we go okay so here's another feature or central remember where I was when I just shut down came back to the application it preserves the state remembers exactly where you left the application when you come back so see if I can pick up where it left off okay so as I go through and browse of these items you can see what's appearing down in the preview pane is sort of a thumbnail image displaying the you know a product shot some basic data about the product specs we also get user reviews that are also provided by pricegrabber now if I see a product that I like I can add it to my favorites list and what happens here is it gets added you can see it switched to another tab here where I can keep sort of a short list of product we're also creating features where you'll be able to set a price notification so if the price drops you can get a notification in Central that will tell you that the price went down so those are just a couple of things you can do with it and another thing we're working on is the ability to do feel to do some more advanced searching based on specs and filter you know basically looking at different criteria respects around the product be able to do more advanced searching and filtering around up stuff anyway so that's pricegrabber i'm going to show you another example of an app we've been working on and this is a stock ticker app so the first thing you'll see here when this comes up when i run it this is an example of the tribe I feature so this basically is sort of an example of how this would work if you're a third-party developer and you launch an app you release an application on Central you will have a built-in try by facility so that you can put an application out for trial for as long as you want and then put a price on it and then the user can either try or buy so soon as the prop here expires they'd be forced to buy it or they wouldn't be able to use it anymore let's say I'm still in the trial period still hit try and this is basically just a fairly raw prototype of the application but once this will do what they want to look up a stock quote I'll put in that's these guys and this is going queering a third-party web service pulling back you know the stock stock load data so it gives me current a current quote change date and then some additional detail down below select that so it's fairly straightforward to me nothing you know sort of lead expect a stock ticker to do but again a little more efficient than you could do with a web-based application but what's interesting about this is I can also set an alert so that if I wanted to set a target price or sort of a stop price on a particular stock I could set up a notification and it would proact if it if the stock hit that price it would proactively notify me in the console using a notification feature so again a way of making the application a little smarter a little more aware and you know adding a little bit of value for the user so let me show you quickly we haven't talked much about the console yet i'll show you the think this is a good example here since this is such a lightweight sort of you know concise little application it's a good candidate for sort of what we're calling tiles or pods or these these things that appear up in the the console so this is just a sort of boil down version of via of the application considered jetblue is doing so get some more sort of thing just give you a very nice little you know handy little utility application that you can use to just go quick queries legs up let's see so let's keep moving along here here's a prototype of a weather application we've been working on and so using accuweather so what you get here is basically you know again fairly straightforward you can just look up weather for you know any location and it'll still accept alpha numeric strings or zip code so let's a look up the name for the weather in my neighborhood using San Francisco gives me the five-day forecast and I can have up to I think it's up to 10 weather forecast you can see if I flip through these it's fairly efficient because this is all happening on the client side so once this is this data is cash in the application it's all at all this is happening locally now let's say I want to just keep an eye on the weather what I just did was like hit tile here and I could launch a little version of it so I can basically just take this little weather forecast sort of pin it to my desktop and keep an eye on it and it'll automatically refresh you know and it's that interval so you can see now has got two things going on in my in my console here I've got the accuweather application and the stock application and you can have sort of an indefinite number of these things over time so it gives you a way of you know creating applications that can you know have a little persistence on the desktop and you know give the user a little take advantage of the runtime environment to do things like polling and notification just create a little more of a rich experience for those for the user and I think what's really the really interesting opportunity with these applications is the ability cuz you're in this single session state in the central environment opens up all kinds of possibilities for these applications to talk to each other and to share data with each other you can actually permit one application to expose its data to another application so for instance if you were looking up a movie time you could add it to your calendar very easily so you could take you know and calendar be another application that might exist at some point and there are all kinds of opportunities like that for instance let's say you're thinking of I don't know traveling somewhere you know you might be able to look up the weather and get a map so to do a location and you know add that to a to a shared calendar that you might uh so naps people so there's all kinds of opportunities to share data and Korean basically give you an environment where applications can talk to each other and be sort of aware of each other which is something is just very difficult to do with web traditional web based applications where you're really in much more of a siloed mode where each application needs to exist separately so so those are just a couple of examples we talked about the app finder so I thought I'd just show you the working version of this real quick this is just a sort of sample couple of applications that are in there now this is a sort of a demo prototype for a homeland security application and I don't know if this will actually see the light of day or not but it's sort of the idea you could just get a Tom Burgess days and getting a notification if the threat level goes out so then if you want to do so that should be a good candidate for a tile application where you just put that on your desktop and you can even set a notice if it goes too high some reason then you could get a notification on your desktop so for what it's worth okay so so that's where we're at these are just a few of the applications hope this gives you some idea some of the things that are possible these are all you know somewhat prototype be there's several other applications that are currently in development that should ship when the final version of central goes out but please do somebody at some of the things that we're thinking about if we can come up with better ideas in these so you like so think that's all I've got I'm going to turn it over to Mike here who's going to tell us a little more about developing a central thanks Alex can I go back to the slides thank you so what I'm going to do is give you a little overview of how all of this works and and show you a little bit how to build a really simple application using the central framework in environment first of all I want to give you an overview of what the file format of flashes if it's called Swift which stands for a small web format that is what kind of basically is the heart of flash and when you create something using the flash authoring tool you're actually creating a swift file it's basically the native format it's a compiled binary file that contains bytecode and media that's been compiled by the authoring tool and so there's a number of different tools that create Swift content macromedia is kind of like these the keeper of that format currently and it's an open format that that has you know basically become the de facto standard for doing rich media on the web and kind of central is our you know our next step to taking things outside of the web browser and more into the desktop environment and the primary scripting language of flash is act what we called ActionScript it's based upon ECMA 262 with extensions for the flash document object model or dom and it's some of the same exact scripting language that you would use for javascript inside of a web browser so the essential application architecture is made up of four major parts there's the application shell the console the central user interface components and a number of different Swift files that kind of broker that data back and forth for you as a developer so that you don't have to do kind of a lot of the dirty work needed to make these applications and pieces work to go to give it properly so the main central parts are the main application that you create the tiles and these things that we call it agents and agents are kind of like invisible background processes that allow you to kind of broker data back and forth between all these different parts so all of this was built as I said before on top of the flash player with some with some things added on top of it and those things are first of all something that's very exciting the mac users is we added a lot of performance enhancements not only on windows but on the macintosh as well to make it run a lot better we vet out the vet enhancements for for graphics and alpha channels and things that in the past have been significantly slower on the mac and now we have parity between windows and mac for that for that kind of performance that's something that makes mac users very happy we've added native web service API so that you can call Wiz DeLand you can make direct soap calls without having to go through as you today as you do today through flash remoting or some type of a gateway on the server side we've also added because of the fact that we don't have to worry so much about the size of the flash player we've added regular expression a pianist as you can do lots of more advanced string manipulation that you have to do when you're bringing in large data sets from the web and we've also made it so that because you're not in the browser you don't have the ability to kind of cache data we've given you api's where you can manually cash that data and we've also made it so that we have a direct connection to an e-commerce system so if you want to sell your applications or do transactional processing we do that for you so this is kind of a visual overview of what the central application architecture looks like it's made up of like i said before three two major issue this two major visual areas which are the application window and the console on the console contains both tiles and notices tiles are the kind of assistant areas where you always have an application running and notices they're kind of things that come up and tell you that something has changed like your stock price has gone way below where you want it to be or before it's gone up and that's a good thing and all that stuff kind of goes in that area and you kind of have control over that as a developer through your application and the API is that are going through agents so those agents have been connections to web services on the internet or just xml data feeds and or local data storage which is in flash or called shared objects so you can basically take any object that you have inside the ActionScript DOM and store it locally on the disk so if you want to store like the paid last page visited like you saw on that application before it's easy to do and then the next time the person comes up and opens the application they immediately get back to that at that point excuse me so here's a quick kind of stack diagram that shows you know what's actually going on inside flash so at the most basic level is the native operating system Mac Windows a device such as pocket pc or any other device that comes along that can run the flash player such as the kind of Nokia handhelds all those kind of things that we had the flash player running on and the next thing up is the flash standalone player and it's basically taking the runtime version that you have inside the browser and it's wrapped around and executable that kind of brokers and holds this data and sitting on top of that is something we call the controller which is a swift movie that then kind of that does all of the the controlling of you know what messages are going to be sent between what windows opening new windows opening new consoles getting data from the server side storing preferences and sitting on top of that is kind of the the primary areas as a developer where you can build something so as a developer you can build your own application that sits inside the app shell you can build your own tiles that's it inside the console and you can build your own agent that's it inside the agent manager they kind of deals with all these kind of invisible persistence background processes so like I said applications contain three primary parts there's an XML product definition so there's an XML file called the product XML that says this is what this file this is what this application is it contains this size this whip these contents the next part of it is the actual Swift that you compiled using the authoring tool that has all of your application logic your graphics your video your audio all the things you can do in flash and the last thing is kind of the icon that represents that inside of our inside of the central application runtime kind of hard to see but this is basically an example of what a product XML file is and whatever is NC kind of gives you data upon you know who created at what time it was and all the things that that represent your application so to central this is your application this is kind of the metadata that wraps up what is application that you built and you know what is the application need to do so any time we add something to the central framework you will define it using the product XML file and that's how you kind of tell the system what you want to do and how you want to build it so basically the tricky thing that came along when we tried to kind of build this environment where we have multiple flash movies all communicating to each other was people have never done that before typically when you build some flash content you're building a single flash movie running inside of a web browser and that's all you're worried about you might be doing some animation you might building a banner you might be building some type of you know simple web service application but you're not really worried about having two different movies communicate and share persistent data so in order to solve that problem in Flash Player six we added something called local connection which allows separate flash movies to then communicate each other over kind of eight a global space so you can actually have flash movies that running on top of the desktop or they could be running inside the browser and they can then send data back and forth to each other so this allows us to then have multiple elements of enough of a flash you know kind of run time that are written entirely in a scripting rather than us having to build everything in kind of a very low-level language like C or C++ we can actually build it in the na in our higher level actionscript language so that things are more portable and changeable so we can write our framework at once and it will run on multiple platforms we don't have to worry about having to report everything to Windows and Mac and a device everything will work exactly the same way so basically everything that you write as an application developer it's the same kind of framework that we have to go through at micro media to build this so as we add more and more frameworks and more and more abilities the central framework becomes more powerful for us and it also becomes more powerful for developers as we start drilling down more into the operating system so that drilling drilling down is actually being done entirely by the controller and the controller the one that actually talks to the flash player and that's what talks to the operating system so if we want to send a notice and we want to make the icon in the dock bounce you do that through an action scroll if you want to do that if you want to add a new application we do that through ActionScript rather than you having to write that in kind of a a lower level language it's all done in our higher level language and the controllers does that and as we expose more and more AP is those get exposed through the controller and through kind of all the standard API is that we document that's part of our SDK so it manages what application shells are running you know what it's currently focused all the kind of dirty work of what's going on in making an application behave like an application that often people have to deal with and kind of manage we kind of do all that for you inside the controller so all you have to worry about is building a really great experience not to worry about making sure that you have application focus and dealing with all these kind of little dirty things that you have to do to make an application work well so the next thing is part of the framework is agents and agents are basically they have no visual representation their background processes that allow you to make script only connections to data services on the web and let you have persistent data for your applications so I'm going to build a weather application and I want to hook it up to my calendar and say you know we're only going to go out on Saturday if it's sunny and warm I can make it so that they you know the calendar application knows it talks to the weather application and says that the weather is over 80 degrees booked this trip and booked this you know event with my friends and send a notice out to them so all that kind of communication is going through agent so each application has its own agent and each one then can communicate with others so they can open up kind of channels of communication to each other and that again is managed by the controller and something called the agent manager and when you're in your product XML basically if you want to have an agent you just define this line here and you're saying I have an agent it's got this name and this is the Swiss that contains that logic the next major part is the console and this is kind of a screenshot it's actually an early a later version of the prototype than what we showed up there kind of our current thinking of what it's going to look like and basically it's your persistent area where each application lives and kind of resides in my desktop the same ways you have any other kind of persistent application running on your desktop you can build that kind of environment and run it here and if you want to give people information and the latest kind of up-to-date data that's what goes here same thing with notices they go inside of this kind of persistent area that runs on your desktop and that's kind of fully controllable over you of where it lives and how big it is and what what's inside of it as and what we call each of those elements first part is called tiles and that's basically the framework for consistent desktop presence and for instance you could have a weather chil that shows your local weather and basically in or you have any type of application and those tiles are basically configured over what you see inside them could be either configure within themselves or configured by the application that created them so I've have whatever at weather application and I'm looking at the weather for Chicago and say I want to monitor that I can take care save a tile it automatically excuse me add that tile to the console and it will contain the latest information that you had for Chicago so you're not having to go back and forth and we can figure it that data can be sent along and persisted across from from different elements of the central framework sorry the next part is notices and this is another kind of screen shot of some current prototypes of what we think notices will look like and basically you'll have this kind of information about each application so I basically want to say tell me when the animatrix DVD comes out and it'll come up and say the Animatrix DVD is out so I kind of notice it'll open up that application and give you all the data maybe you could buy the DVD you could go check out get all the latest information so it's really giving you kind of up-to-date the latest information and they can be triggered and those are all triggered by events within an agent and the last part is the application shell which is kind of your primary representation of where you build an application inside Central and it's where not only your application resides but the end user where they store their collections of applications so if they've gone all over the web and they found a whole bunch of applications they like that's where they're always going to go to get them that's where they launch their applications that's where they find new applications and we provide api's within that for changing the window size the position of it getting the events from the user when they resize the window so you can deal with layout getting the information about when they're typing certain keyboard events so you know the index of your tab ordering the other information over the status bar preferences knowing when the window opens and closes you also have notification as to when the network connection is lost or or open so if you want to build an application that runs both online and offline but you want to make sure that it gives the user some notification of that or you instead of going and querying a web service you're querying local data you can first check and see if am I actually connected to the web with a single call without having to kind of do that yourself as you would have to do inside of a web browser and you can also deal with setting notices agents and creating and these ten removing tiles so after you've gone and through and done all this stuff and you've built a full application thinking next thing you want to do is you want to package that up so that you can distribute it on the web and the way you do that is you build kind of what's called an installer Swift can we give kind of a basic framework for how to do this this Swift resides inside the inside of your website or any website where you want to distribute your application and basically it points at a product XML file which describes what your application is where it comes from the dimensions of it all that kind of metadata about it and when you click on the install button it reads that XML file it then kind of sends a message if it's a player saying do they have the central runtime if I don't it goes and downloads it puts it on their machine app launches it runs it and all of a sudden comes up your application focus forward and you know if you want immediately will be there for them to use and that's the entire installation process it's very straightforward and easy to do and you can build whatever user interface you want for the installation process because all it is is a flash movie that's triggering some native events with inside flash and you can also basically if you don't want to do it yourself and you want to get a larger distribution you can say this is my application put it up inside the macromedia at finder and everybody who comes to macromedia calm the millions of people every day and go and check out your application and you won't have to worry about being the one that's distributed in it it's going to be entirely distributed by macromedia the next major part is the user interface component so this is something that's kind of been involving pretty rapidly in the last year or so with with macromedia and with with flash is people are trying to not just build animation any more than at just building simple multimedia they're trying to actually build real applications that have the kind of look and feel of an operating system and behave the way people spect so part of that was our first initiative to build components and user interface frameworks to make that possible and so part of that we give you a bunch of standard user interface frameworks that you kind of expect so you don't have to go and build them yourself and what we call these frameworks is kind of the name for them as halo and halo kinda gives you a consistent look and feel across not only macromedia tools that all the content is built using them and so you don't have to go and kind of do that work and all these things are hosted by macro mediacom in a in a runtime shared library runtime shared libraries are rather than having all the assets inside of your Swift file are coming from a remote location and then instantiated so rather than you having to go and do that every time it automatically gets it from macromedia and rather than having to download those every single time you automatically get them and when we update them and we change them you automatically get it and it keeps the sizes your applications much smaller so you're not having to include the data for what a check boxes or a radio button every single time you build an application so the way you consume in store data inside central is primarily via XML and that's something that has been in the flash player for several revisions but has been focused and improved upon over the last two releases and in Flash Player six and in the central and player we've add significant performance enhancements to make XML data retrieval and manipulation much faster and much much more the best way to do things that I've been dealing with kind of native objects inside flash which can be cumbersome and we also have given you native web service support so that you can take structured XML data that you're getting from a server from the server and then do something with its intelligent and then you can take that data store it inside of a local shared object and then the final thing that I refer to before was that you can now cash that data locally on your machine so it can be anything it can be an image jpg a video and you can store it locally so someone want to download a movie and watch it you don't have to download it every single time you can say cash that thing once it's finished downloading next time they come on if they're online or offline it's going to give them that data so now I want to kind of show you I think I believe yeah i'm going to show how you actually built something for this i was going to kind of step through what the basics are and then show you some code examples inside the authoring tool so the basics of building something inside central and some of you may be familiar with how you build applications inside flash is you basically want to build inside the first frame of your movie you're going to be putting some action scripts the first thing you do is you kind of tell central where i am who i am that i am a central application and that I expect to be getting messages from the from the overall central framework rather than just me being a web application you kind of have to tell it via this kind of initialization operation you say you know I'm so I'm inside central please start giving me messages and and once you are finished getting those messages and you are fully loaded inside of the central environment central is going to call you with a function called on activate and that's basically going to tell you I'm fully loaded inside of central you can now do whatever you want have fun so for installation what you have to do is you have to create a product XML file one that or you can modify one from the development kit you place your apps with your product XML your icons and your installer on one on your server and you make sure they're all in the same directory or using relative path and then you basically click on that button install it and they get put into sight of the central environment I'll show you how that works shortly and another thing is like I've discussed it for a local connection is really something that you want to be able to you know kind of learn how to use and become more familiar with if you're not already and basically it's a simple API allows you to open up a connection to another file so a bit so to another Swift file and this is kind of a simple example of someone having a agent that's a stock agent you want to make connection to it and you want to call a function that's called get ticker so that's what basically is here and and you're passing it a basic argument and this allows you to communicate between your application and the agent your application in a tile or between the tile and the agent all of that communication goes over local connection you can also use this a debug so if you want to actually have information being sent to another window basically saying the kind of state of your application that is not something visual you can use it for debugging as well so in order to add a tile here's some information about how you add a tile inside a flash basically you create a new swift that represents your tile you set up the phone call the same way as you did inside of the first application you say like basically initialize this tile central goes initialize it calls back saying okay you're done you're loaded now do whatever you want to do on activate very similar to how you build an application and you install basically you add a line about the fact that this tile exists inside your product XML and you can have as many times as you want for application so tiles so here's some examples of things you might want to use tiles for you want to use them for live monitoring of push data such as courage stock prices current scores any type of persistent constantly updating data and you can use it to get you know a subset of an application of functionality rather than rather than having to go into the full application you want to give just a little bit information about like my latest calendar data that's where I can show it to you rather than having to launch the full app some ideas of what not to use tiles for they're not necessarily the main application they're not always going to be the best way for you to interact entirely and you don't want to make it so that you are constantly trying to be the number one tile you're always kind of pushing people are pushing other tiles around you want to make sure that this is kind of a an environment where you're not going to object with the user's environment you're going to make it so something that people want to use and want to have there all the time and you basically you don't want to use it for notification because you're going to use that what you're going to use is agents and notification to do that and basically to add a agent the same kind of stories same thing you basically initialize an agent given on activate and you add it to your product XML same thing use agents for persistent monitoring of data and this is the actual data set that you're getting from that you're going to be giving to your tiles and out locations the actual tiles are more like the view and this is kind of the model like going back and forth and the controller that's kind of giving you all that data and it's pushing it into a tile or it's pushing it into an application and you can also use agents for communications with other apps not only apps inside central but asked inside of a web browser as well you don't want to use them for processor intensive tasks because these type of things like things like iterative functions that are going over and over because the user can't see these things they're going to be running if you create some slightly you could be creating an invisible process that is slowing the entire machine down and the user has no way to stop it without quitting Central and you're basically going to muck up the entire environment so here's a little bit of code about how you actually would create unnoticed and basically you create a new notice object and within and this is basically a call back from the notice manage the agent manager that basically says you know this isn't what this is basically going to say I'm going to add a notice that says this data saying this is really simple it's just saying I notice came up and it has no data in it so this is a really simple thing it's not actually giving you anything it's just a kind of core framework for how you actually create a notice and you want to use them to notify users and you don't want to use them to display errors and only use them to display connection notifications like 4440 fours and you want to be polite with them you don't want to be constantly coming up with notices you can also create custom preferences with inside of your application so if you want to be setting certain particular information about your application and make it so people can configure notices configure tiles configure what all the kind of persistent things that they have no control over you want to give them a way to visually do that and as a full you know kind of framework for how you do that with inside central and you don't want to use preferences to create references that are already done by central essential already has kind of a core preferences where you can set up global things like your location and your information and that information is then persistent and available to you so once the user defines their name and information you can query that and get their email address and all if they've made that available to you so offline data management I've said this a little bit before stem was shared objects and each application has a limit of 100 k in the taken store for their application if you want to store more than 100 k if it comes over the dialogue and says this application wants to store more do what to allow it and basically that data kind of sits persistently on the hard drive and never goes away and it's basically best for the kind of internal data that you're storing that you want to make sure that always comes up in the type net applications loaded and stored in kind of in a textual way local internet URLs is basically anything that you can pull off the internet you can store you can even pull things down that aren't even readable by flash so it's kind of it's a very open way for you to cache data and cache information and there's a limit of how much you can store it by default the 20 megabytes same story with if you go over that limit it's going to warn you say you know this application is trying to request more data than you need and you currently have set and you want to allow that and this is a short example short explanation of how that API works it downloads it begins once you call it immediately starts making that call you can access it through normal ActionScript message saying is this loaded when it's done do something with it so it's the same way that you deal with any type of a loaded data same way you deal with loading XML say no you still loading an image inside flash the same way you deal with that inside of Central so if you know how to do it in flash same exact skills and just kind of telling you basically in the first beta each request is a new HTTP stream and basically in beta 2 we start queuing that up like the browser does it's important also to show that your application is requesting data because it's not something that we automatically come up with a progress dialog and say you know you're downloading a bunch of data so your application may seem like nothing's going on you need to make sure that you actually are showing progress of your application and giving the user free back and we're actually we do provide a p is for you to set some information in the that is bar that of the current status of your application how much is loading what's going on and we really encourage we use that to give the user kind of a consistent method of feedback rather than you having to do that every single time yourself offline behavior talked about this a little bit already you basically will get a call back and you're going to check to see whether or not that the network has gone online or offline and you can use that to properly set up your application to make sure that when that callback gets notified that you either switch to using local data or you make sure that you're not making requests to the server side it's fairly straightforward and sharing data between apps you're going to be using an agent server local connections and updating your application is very straightforward all you have to do on your server where you have your product XML increment your version number from one to two or any any number above every week the central environment down the person's machine will go and check that product XML if the number is greater it's going to go and download your new version so all that kind of update functionality that's fairly difficult to deal with is all handled by the environment itself so now I'm going to switch over to the computer and show you how to build a really simple application okay first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to open up the flash authoring tool and I'm going to open up a simple application here so this application here is very very simple application all it does is has two text fields and n 2 button and the way that you do that inside flash if you want to add text fields or buttons as basically you have one second here you have a text control here and you can basically dragged out and create new text fields as you please and then you can define them give them instance names everything you want to do so I already have two created here one is input text and want to stock info that's right right here is define their instance name so that's how I'm going to access it via ActionScript to know how to give it information how to change it and i also have to push buttons components here one is going to actually make the request to get the stock information and this one is going to like just test that I've properly created the notice and you can see that I've also given both of them instance names when you add new components as you over here you have the Flash UI components panel and you can simply click and drag new user interface elements and we give you a bunch of pre-made ones for central they give you that look and feel and have all the kind of proper functionality for you deal with remote shared library so you don't have to deal with any of that work so if i go over here into the first frame of my movie and I open it up and say actions I can see all the script that makes up this movie and explain it to you Hanson and everybody see that I'm right there actually terms of the far side so basically the first function that you're going to have here is called on activate and this is what gets called when your application has been fully loaded into the central environment basically you get a callback that basically gives you a shell object and that she'll object contains all the api's that make up central so when you're inside this environment you always refer to where you live as the shell and in this particular example the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add an agent and that agent is the stock checker so inside of the product XML I defined a stock stock checker agent and I can refer to it now within my script within the in scripting environment and say add that agent and that agent is another Swift file which I'll show you in a second and basically I'm referring next thing i'm doing here is i'm referring to the button that I named here which is the ticker symbol which is basically going and checking to see if as a new ticker symbol and telling that button when I when it's released it's going to make a new local connection and it's been going to call a function inside of the agent call it where it says to app underscore agent called get stock so it's basically saying to the agent call a webservice method that's going to get the stock data and then it's going to return it so that information I'll strong a second here if I go through this and this is basically all of the information for displaying that data so once i get that data back i'm going to then take that text field and fill it with data that i got back from the local connection which is what this is your stock info text the text value of that stock info text field i'm going to give it the value of the price of the stock that I got back from low service and right here this do test notice button is when i click on the test notice it's going to actually go through the process of adding a new notice and giving a really simple notice it just says new test notice and this is kind of all the different properties of that notice whether or not it's going to show an alert in the tray and whether and this is basically setting the progress excuse me the progress bar at the bottom of the shell and this is a same thing if I get a notice event I'm going to set the progress bar to be back to way it was and also there's a little example here of the actual logo that I'm using inside it here is a little central logo I'm saying take that thing first time it loads up add it to my local internet cash so I can give it any type of path to a file and we'll store it locally on my machine and then in the future all you got to do is refer to that pertain path and if it's locally cached already rather than fetching it from the web it's going to fetch it from my cash first so it's always whenever you do a load movie call and flash rather than in the way it was in flash where I would always go out and fetch the data the first thing it does is it checks the local internet cache and then it goes out to the web and then the final call here is basically saying that this is the first thing is going to be called when the application is first loaded is going to say hello I'm an application call me back in a second when I'm loaded so that's enough the application so when you actually build an application in flash so now I have to actually publish this movie and so I'm going the same export movie which is going to take this with file and export it and I'm going to export it so now it created that movie it's not going to run inside the environment so what I want to do now is take that actual application and then I want to install it into Central so way I do that is I have this this saber Swift that I've created and basically inside of that favor Swift i define the path to the product xml that defines its application so if i open up this it shows the product xml for this very simple empty application it just says you know what the version of it is what's the information about it who made it what's the name of it whereas where is this icon and also like where is the source of this application the primary application is called empty underscore apt up for it which is what I just created and i also have defined that I have an agent and a tile and so basically what i have now is i open up this savory HTML and click Save it goes and launches central and it will go and ask me do I want to install that application and it uses all the data from the product XML saying this is a virgin this is the version of it and what domain it came from i could say okay it now installs it so and then immediately takes me to that application so here's the application if I have so when that application first started is actually also initiated an agent so I can right now I should be able to say give me the current stock price of macromedia it's going to go out talk to that agent get some data from a web service and return it back to this text fields here assuming that I did it correctly so the first thing we're going to do is this application doesn't have the right to do that under our security model so it's going to come up and say so I want to allow my local machine to access this URL so I'm going to say yes allow it to do that or I can tell it to always allow that and then if it's allowed it's going to make the request come back and then feed that data into this text field absolutely what do their goes so there's the current macromedia stock price so that's basically a very simple application that I built so let me show you really quickly how the actual agent was built so if I open up this app agent flaw this is the one that's being called by the local connection in the other movie basically it says it's the same thing i was showing before the way you build it easy say on activate when this thing gets loaded it gets a call back with the agent manager it's going to start an interval which is set interval it's going to say recursively go through and say load some data for me from the server and make a local connection to that up to the application that created it it's going to make a web service call so this is the api's that have been added to flash rather than in the past you have to kind of do it yourself you can now directly make call a webservice you just say new web service give it a Wizzle file and that will come back to you with a objected has all the callbacks of that wisdom file so you to say stock service that do company info which is the callback of that web service you give it in this one in particular has a user ID and password of user in a user any password give it a ticker symbol that I entered in that text field call it when I get a result back the same way as you deal with any result from an XML file I'm then going to send that local connection back to flash into the other movie from the agent into the the hosting application and I'm going to say call the function received ticker with the current price and that's the the other function that they had inside there was called receive ticker that then receives the data puts it in a text field so that is basically a very simple stock ticker application and if I want to also in that application i can say test notice so there i just added a new notice it if i had sound you could hear it you can also see that the doc item bounced for a second and i get notification basically through the operating system as well and right here on notice keep up staying here in New test notice that's the same notice information that I set up inside the application goes and does that go through the framework uses the same data that you set in there so there we are I'm also have an advisory that Homeland Security has been gone to elevate it so that's how you build the basic elements of central and from there you can build the whole wide range of application and those are kind of the really basic things so can I go back to the slides so I think given that basically want to give you a quick idea of where the state of the project is currently like Dave said we're in beta we just got beta through today after a lot of work and we're undergoing a lot of kind of usability and interface looking feel and like figuring out the best way to do this and we're going to have a public release of the SDK and the environment for all people to develop for this in the end of the summer 2003 and we're going to launch the platform for end users towards the end of the year and if you want to get more information about this you can go to the macromedia central development center and which is listed up here or you need to go to macromedia calm and look up central and that's where you can sign up for this DK and here's our contact information and for information all in here so if you have any questions