Introducing Adobe WeatherLab Beta

Adobe WeatherLab Beta

This latest release from Adobe will surely change the way we see the world around us and how we interact with it. Adobe WeatherLab Beta is a the latest addition to Adobe’s impressive line of Adobe AIR-based tools, and it boasts some pretty innovative features!

Adobe WeatherLab Beta allows you to communicate directly with whichever skygod(s) you please via RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) in either XML, AMF or JSON. Adobe WeatherLab Beta boasts an expansive, extensible API for changing the weather in realtime and – most importantly – it integrates with all of the CS4 and upcoming CS5 products.

Finally, you can adjust your environment to suit your specific needs. If you’re more of a sunshine and beer kind of person, simply call the Weather singleton and change it to sunny by using the constant Weather.SUNNY (code samples to follow).

Insiders at Adobe have revealed that they have been working on improving the feature-sets of applications such as Illustrator, Flash Professional, Flash Builder & Flex SDK and Photoshop, but found that these applications were just getting to the stage where no more work could be done on them

“We wanted a new challenge. We had reached a point where we realised that our applications were near perfect, aside from a few bugs, and we needed something to throw at our engineers. Luckily, one of our engineers knew how to rain-dance and this set off a chain reaction of events, all leading up to Adobe WeatherLab Beta“.

Much work has still to be done on this application, but engineers over at Adobe have assured me that any bugs in the system will not cause any universal constants to go out of whack.

When I first heard of this innovative and – let’s face it – ingenious application, I was skeptical. My skepticism was soon lifted when I used the mapping API from Google to pinpoint a parade which I subsequently used Adobe WeatherLab Beta to rain on.

Here’s the code I used:

// Code snippet for changing the weather
 
import com.adobe.weatherlab.Weather;
import com.adobe.weatherlab.Geography;
 
public function changeWeather():void
{
        var weather:Weather = Weather.getInstance();     // get weather singleton
        weather.change(Weather.SUNNY, new Geography(37.433868, -121.884155));      // target weather change
}

To download Adobe WeatherLab Beta, click here.

It’s been quite a fascinating year thus far; Adobe has really started getting serious about Flash, Flex and the developers involved. This year, we have seen two amazing additions to Adobe’s web-dominating arsenal – Adobe Flash Catalyst (now in beta 2) and Adobe Flash Builder 4 (now in beta 2). After some preliminary buggering around in both of these, I came to the conclusion that working with a beta version of any software to create enterprise applications is putting yourself on the edge of the cliff, and working on a version 1.0 beta is hiring somebody to push you over the edge.

This raises an interesting catch-22:
When a massive piece of software is released, the community has the onus to test it and give feedback on any bugs, requested features and expedience tips – however, if your beta software tends to be very buggy (and how could it not be? The SDK is huge) then how are you going to get developers to test your software on real, enterprise projects?

In any case, Adobe has really been playing the part this year. This year we have seen the release of the Flex 4 SDK, major advancements in the Open Screen Project, Flash Player 10′s penetration rate to 93.5%, AIR surpassing 100 million installations and the introduction of Flash Player 10.1 most recently. Other great things i’ve seen are WorkflowLab, BrowserLab, Project Squiggly, Slider previews, Flash CS5 sneak previews and Community Help.

For all of those unlucky and miserable enough to miss Adobe Max this year (myself included), there’s an entire channel dedicated to Max 2009 Developer talks… Go check them out!

Oh, and if you have any luck getting these videos to play in Adobe Media Player, let me know. That app is more full of bugs than a salad in Nigeria.

Personally i can’t think why developing a version of Flex Builder for Linux would be so difficult. Flex Builder is built on top of (and as a plugin for) Eclipse, which is Java-based and therefore cross-platform. I’d imagine that it does have something to do with the Flash Player as Tom of rachaelandtom.info says. Can anyone shed some light on the situation?

The reason for Adobe’s suspension of development is:

“The project is currently on hold. There is not enough requisition for the product to continue its development” – Ben Forta (Adobe Senior Technical Evangelist)

Please show your support and vote for the continuation of this amazing project! Go to http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053 and vote!!