Today, Once again We came up with interesting meeting series. Instead of just one speaker, We are including many speakers who have expertise in different topics. As mentioned in the meeting topic, Here are the modules we are planning to include in whole series of meetings:

1. Basics of AIR.
2. Basics of Protocol.
3. Basics of IMAP.
4. How to understand any protocol specifications from specification document / RFCs.
5. Basics of Socket Communication in Flash Action Script 3.
6. Handshaking with IMAP Server.
7. UI - Login Screen.
8. UI and Event Handling.
9. Authentication with IMAP Server.
10. Retrieving Folder Structure from Server.
11. UI - Displaying Folder Structure.
12. Retrieving Email headers for given folder (From, To, CC, BCC, etc.,).
13. Retrieving Email data for given email.
14. Separating Email Body and Attachments from email data.
15. UI - Displaying Email Body.
16. Decoding Email Attachments in to file data.
17. (Not Sure - For Now) Scan the file via anti virus tool before display it.
18. UI - Displaying whole email.
19. UI - Replying email.
20. Basics: Sending an email via SMTP.
21. SMTP specifications and normal procedures.
22. Handshaking with SMTP.
23. Sending an email with SMTP.
24. Final touch up to the application.
25. Lessons Learnt by each attendee.

I hope, all of us will really enjoy this series and it would be meaningful add on pack to the knowledge of everyone of us:

As usual, Sponsor for Event, Place and Equipments is Avinashi and FlashBrain.

Part 1 - Venue and Time:

FlashBrain Unit, Avinashi Systems.
Seminar Hall, 2nd Floor,
Kohinoor Complex, Saiyedpura,
Surat - 395 003.

User Group Manager - Ashvin Savani
User Group Co-Manager - Naresh Khokhaneshiya

Here is the agenda for the today’s Adobe User Group - Gujarat meeting

Agenda:

1. Basics of Internet Searching and Optimization
2. Adobe Flash and Search Engine Optimization
3. Normal Searching
4. Google Introduction
5. Searching with multiple keywords

Venue:

Avinashi Systems Pvt. Ltd.
1st floor, Kohinoor Complex,
Chowki Street, Saiyedpura,
Surat - 395 003.

Date and Time:

July 05, 2008. 4:00 pm

Venue, Equipments and Content Sponsors:

Meeting Updates : We are happy to inform you that we reached highest attendees in this Adobe User group - Gujarat meeting and hope to increase more.

Also request all the members to suggest us the meeting topic so that we can explore maximum knowledge from the Adobe User Group - Gujarat Meetings.

We thank our sponsor Flashbrain for hosting meeting at their premises and providing us projectors, computer and internet.

Also we thank Linda.com for providing us contents for the training/meeting.

Attendes :

1. Ashvin Savani
2. Jignesh Dodiya
3. Naresh Khokhanesiya
4. Manish Patel
5. Preeti Jariwala
6. Hetal Chandlekar
7. Nency Jariwala
8. Ankur Diyora
9. Vijay Kanse
10. Amit Patel
11. Hitul Parekh
12. Chirag Patel
13. Vasim
14. Mahendra Kakadiya
15. Manveer Singh
16. Mitul Golakiya
17. Sailesh Tundiya
18. Mehul Katrodiya

Thank you all the attendees for attending the Adobe User Group - Gujarat Meeting and hope to make upcomming meetings more interesting with the knowledge.

We will update Photos related to this meeting later on.

My Personal View:

This is really a good news for me personally and of course it’s good for all flash developers and who have content in Flash SWFs. So far everyone was trying to optimize their flash applications and other techniques to read XML content to give somewhat assurance that Google or Yahoo! will find something from their content. But now Google and Yahoo! can search and in fact view virtually SWFs and click at every links, menus or buttons like their robots / spiders are doing it with normal HTML content in web pages.

SEO Industry Perspective:

This news means a lot for SEO industry as well. Most of my clients were doing argument that, If we are making this whole application in Flash, don’t you think that searching the content would be a problem? Or I will not get much hits through search engines and blah blah. So now, all the flash and flex developers can answer their clients with single sentence that Flash is now search-able too.

So in deep view, what exactly it does and how everything is possible now and why it was not there before? These are the main question everybody should be asking to their own and trying to find out answers for the same. Here you go:

Why searching in a Flash content was not possible till now?

The reason is simple. SWF is a binary file, not an ASCII file where a spider can read it like it is reading some text file. But still, Google and other search engines were trying to read somewhat information about the SWF through the comments posted in HTML file. These comments were generated automatically by Adobe DreamWeaver or by Adobe Flash IDE, while you are generating SWF file or embedding SWF file into the HTML or other scripted pages. So at that time, these IDEs were trying to find out all the static text contents from the SWF files and it was creating a string of all these contents and putting that as comments inside HTML file. So Google and other search engines were able to read that much part of SWF and whatever content was there. So the searching functionality was there but it was too limited. It was not there at all for dynamic contents you are dealing with inside Flash content, which is very common for all the Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Why searching in a Flash content is possible now?

Now Adobe is trying to open boundaries by opening SWF file format and some other protocols. Adobe wants that more and more third party vendors use Flash SWF as part of their platform, solution or services. So part of that whole strategy, Adobe provided some special version of Flash Player to Google and Yahoo! which they can integrate with their current searching technology tools and spiders to search and store the static and dynamic content in to their database. So with direct help of Adobe, Google and other search engines can virtually surf the Flash content. They can virtually click on various links, menus etc., inside SWF and can store all the data comes in between. So, SWF works like a HTML page and search engines can store the data like they are crawling the HTML pages.

What I need to do if my site contains SWF files to make them search-able by Google?

Absolutely nothing! That’s the great part of the deal. Adobe gave Google and Yahoo! a special version of Flash Player and Google already integrated that player into their searching tools / spiders. It also automatically available for all the flash player versions. Means, it really doesn’t matter that your SWF is compatible with Adobe Flash Player version 6 or 9.

Here is the video from Ryan’s Video, which we can consider as official Adobe statement:

Other Interesting Links / URLs:

• Official Adobe Devnet Article about Flash Searchability
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog post about Flash Indexing and FAQs

To handle such key strokes in ActionScript, while running an application in Flash IDE, go to swf’s Control menu and tick ‘Disable Keyboard Shortcuts’. Now ActionScript will listen all the key events which are shortcuts in Flash IDE Environment.

- Naresh Khokhaneshiya

Adobe Dreamweaver Beta includes following new features ::

Live View

View your web pages under real-world browser conditions with the new Live View in Dreamweaver — while still retaining direct access to the code. The new rendering mode, which uses the open source rendering engine WebKit, displays your designs like a standards-based browser.

Related Files

Manage the various files that make up the modern web page more efficiently in Dreamweaver. The Related Files feature displays all the documents associated with your current page, whether CSS, JavaScript, PHP, or XML, in a bar along the top of your document.

Code Navigator

The new Code Navigator pop-up window shows you all the code sources that affect your current selection. A click in either Code or Design view brings up the Code Navigator pop-up, which displays CSS rules, server-side includes, external JavaScript functions, Dreamweaver templates, Library files, iframe source files, and more.

CSS best practices

The Property inspector’s new CSS tab shows the styles for the current selection as well as all the applicable CSS rules. Hover over any property to view a tool tip with jargon-free English explanations of CSS principles. New CSS rules can be created and applied in the Property inspector panel and stored in the same document or an external style sheet.

Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks

Write JavaScript more quickly and accurately with improved support for JavaScript core objects and primitive data types. Work with popular JavaScript frameworks including jQuery, Prototype, and Spry.

HTML data sets

With HTML data sets functionality, you can create your data in a standard HTML table, a series of div tags, or even an unordered list and then choose Insert > Spry > Spry Data Set to integrate that data into a dynamic table on the page with sortable columns, a master-detail layout, or other sophisticated displays.

Photoshop Smart Objects

Photoshop and Dreamweaver integration has evolved to the next level of compatibility and functionality. Drag and drop an Adobe Photoshop® PSD file into a Dreamweaver page to create an image Smart Object.

Subversion integration

Dreamweaver integrates Subversion software for a more robust check-in/check-out experience with file versioning, rollback, and more. Once you’ve defined Subversion as your version control system, you can update your site to get the latest versions of its pages directly from within Dreamweaver; no third-party utility or command-line interface is required.

Adobe® AIR™ authoring support

Create multiplatform desktop applications from your Dreamweaver HTML and JavaScript sites with new Adobe AIR™ authoring support.

New user interface

Work faster and smarter across Dreamweaver and other components of the next version of Adobe Creative Suite® thanks to a new level of integration and common user interface elements.

Read the release notes for additional details regarding the Dreamweaver beta.

mklink /D [virtualDirectoryName] [TargetDirectory]

Where,

/D indicates the target is a directory, by default it would link to target file

[virtualDirectoryName] is the name of the virtual directory in the wamp/www folder

[TargetDirectory] is the target directory to which you want to link the virtual directory

For example, if I want to create a site using name ‘mysite’ and I want to link this virtual directory to the directory ‘d:\somefolder\sitecontent’, then, assuming the location of wamp as ‘c:\wamp\www’, I will create symbolic link as follows :

mklink /D c:\wamp\www\mysite d:\somefolder\sitecontent

I think it would be very useful to create virtual directories in wamp so that you would not have to put all the content into wamp/www directory.

Following is the code to change the width and height of the stage at anytime (runtime) using actionscript in AIR (Flash) ::

stage.stageWidth = {numericValue};

stage.stageHeight = {numericValue};

Of course, we can change the width and height of the stage in Flash (normal) using JavaScript or some other external script which controls the container of the swf file.

Regards,

Naresh Khokhaneshiya

Great work Mike and his team. Keep it up.