Adobe AIR Developer Derby winners
Adrian Ludwig
The Adobe AIR Developer Derby featured more than 120 entries across 5 categories: Best Business Application (HTML and Flex), Best Community Application (HTML and Flex) and Wild Card, which included applications that use Adobe AIR functionality but didn't fit any of the other categories.
The judging panel included four developers who have extensive industry experience and a variety of perspectives: Robert Hall, Grant Skinner, Andre Charland, and Chafic Kazoun. They were impressed with the quality, quantity, and diversity of submitted applications. And the winners are...
Grand Prize Winner and Winner—Best Flex Business Application
Agile Agenda is a project management application designed to make managing projects a whole lot easier. With an automatic schedule optimizer that takes multiple tasks, dependencies, and resource constraints into consideration, project managers will know when a project will be completed and which tasks are ahead or behind schedule. They can manage milestones and reassign or reprioritize tasks at any time.
Of course, project management is also about communication so Agile Agenda allows online viewing by any of the project members and also includes the ability to generate a PDF file with a detailed project status update and individualized task list for all members working on a project.
Winner—Best HTML Business Application
ORA Time and Expense is an application for tracking timesheet tasks and expenses. It can also generate and export reports such as timesheets, expense reports, and invoices. It uses the webcam APIs assist in the filing of expense reports by taking pictures of receipts and including them in the expense reports.
Built using the Ext JS Ajax framework, the user interface includes wizards to help with data entry. The wizards smoothly slide in from the edges of the window allowing the user to maintain context while navigating the application. A timer in the upper left discretely logs the amount of time that has been spent on a specific task making it easier to keep track of billable hours. Data is managed using the local embedded database and reports are written to the local file system in HTML format.
Winner—Best Flex Community Application
SearchCoders
Developers: Tom Bray and Robert Cadena
www.searchcoders.com
The SearchCoders Dashboard makes it easier for Flex developers to find answers. It provides a search engine to search the 60,000 messages from the FlexCoders mailing list—results are returned almost instantaneously using Flex Data Services. The Adobe AIR application also combines a wide variety of ways for accessing information that a Flex developer (or someone looking to hire a Flex developer) would find useful, including a forum reader, blog reader, a chat client, a notepad, and bookmarks.
Some of the unique features that Adobe AIR enables include a live preview of the application directly on the SearchCoders website, mixing of multiple network data sources, and a sophisticated user interface that appears to float just above the desktop.
Winner—Best HTML Community Application
Spaz is an Adobe AIR based desktop client for Twitter. It provides users the ability to customize the user interface with multiple themes, user CSS overrides, event sounds, and access to extended features of the Twitter API (follower management, message deletion, and so on). With all of these features, it's one of the most sophisticated Twitter clients around. Its tabbed interface allows a user to keep an eye on what their friends are doing, as well as what others are up to.
On the technical side, Spaz runs on Adobe AIR using the Spry and jQuery JavaScript frameworks. It uses the local file system to store preferences in XML and connects to the Twitter web service.
Winner—Wild Card
The wild card category really was wild. There were great games, creative tools, media experiences, and a few things we can't begin to describe. In the end, one application that stood above the rest was a really polished five-track audio mixer called Digimix.
Digimix takes WAV files and allows them to be blended together to create an entirely new audio experience. In addition to five-track audio arranging and editing, Digimix also provides an extensible architecture for audio effects such as feedback and track separation. All of this is implemented in Actionscript 3.0, providing a great demonstration of the speed and power of the virtual machine in Adobe AIR.