The Flex team has released an update to the 3.5 SDK that addresses an issue with the Flex-based AIR auto-update UI packaged within the SDK (SDK-24766). The refreshed build, SDK 3.5a, has only a few files modified in order to fix this issue and this change does not affect the signing and caching of the SDK 3.5 RSLs originally released in December.
We encourage all developers using SDK 3.5 to upgrade their build to SDK 3.5a to continue their development. The SDK 3.5a can be found in the “Latest Milestone Release Build” table here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3.
I’m happy to announce that the WorkflowLab Beta is now live on Adobe Labs. WorkflowLab beta includes lots of new features that make it easier to build, share, and track workflows and get started on new projects using workflow best practices.
WorkflowLab includes the following new features:
- Custom Tool Support: Author workflows using customized tools from a selection of types including applications, frameworks, libraries, services, vendors, people or resources
- Categories: Classify workflow tasks or activities using color coded customizable categories
- Duration Grid: Overlay tasks on a customizable duration grid to add temporal context to workflows
- Completion Status: Monitor and track your workflow progress by applying completion statuses to your workflow tasks
- Rich Text Editing: Enhance your workflow task annotations with rich text editing capabilities and inline web links
- Command Bar: Improve your efficiency in creating workflows using the new command bar for point and click authoring capabilities
- Associated Link: Associate web links with workflow tasks for additional task background or to associate with related content on the Internet or internal networks
- Search for Tool: Search within the Adobe tool list for fast selection of related tools to associate to tasks
- Updated Workflow Starting Points: Revised workflow starting points that take advantage of new Beta features
- Status Bar: Get additional feedback within the application through the new status bar
- Collapsible Details Panel: Maximize your workflow authoring workspace by hiding the detail panel.
- Duplicate Task: Quickly take an existing task and duplicate its associated tools, categories and annotation to speed up task authoring
WorkflowLab was created with Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder and the Flex 4 framework. We’ll be posting more information on how we made WorkflowLab over the next few weeks, and you can submit feedback on WorkflowLab to the Adobe Labs forum.
Also check out my previous posts on the features of WorkflowLab:
I’d love to hear from you about WorkflowLab, send your comments to the Adobe Labs forum and I hope you enjoy the new beta!
This preview post will cover a number of collective enhancements we’ve made to WorkflowLab making it easier to use the application more efficiently.
Collapsable Detail Panel
The first is the ability to toggle the display of the detail panel. This helps maximize the viewing space for the workflow to better work with larger and more complex workflows.
Command Bar
We have added a new command bar at the top of the application window to make it easier to use WorkflowLab with your mouse.
Duplicate Task
When building complex workflow items with several associations, annotations, links and other information it can be tedious to do that over and over again. To help, the WorkflowLab beta release adds a new duplicate task feature that creates a copy of the selected task.
Rich Text Editing
To help give you more annotation options, the WorkflowLab beta adds in a basic rich text editor that you can use when you annotate your workflow and workflow item details. This feature supports basic formatting for bold, italic, underline and font sizes. In addition, you can create web links within annotations that when licked will launch a browser and take you to the link.
The rich text editor is working with the latest text formatting features of Flex 4 and there are a few issues currently with it, but we hope to iron out the kinks in the next release.
The current release of WorkflowLab is available at Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/workflowlab) and uses Adobe AIR. Stay tuned for more upcoming features in WorkflowLab beta!
