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.

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WorkflowLab Beta Released

January 13, 2010

wlBetaI’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!

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wlBetaPreview05

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

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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

wlBetaScreen05b

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

wlBetaScreen05c

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

wlBetaScreen05d

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!

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WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Duration-Based Grids

January 8, 2010

A workflow takes place over time with a starting point and an ending point. The alpha version of WorkflowLab didn’t give you any visual indicator regarding how long that workflow actually took, making it difficult to understand the workflow’s scale and scope.
With the beta release of WorkflowLab we have added the ability to customize the [...]

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WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Workflow Item Links

January 7, 2010

Another feature that was originally planned with the alpha but wasn’t able to make it was the ability to associate web links with workflow items. With the WorkflowLab beta, we have been able to get that feature in to give workflows added annotation and documentation capabilities by linking them to external resources or materials.
Within WorkflowLab, [...]

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WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Task Status

January 6, 2010

With the addition of the categories feature, we looked at other requested capabilities that could use parts of the underlying categories engine within WorkflowLab. The request that stood out was the ability to track workflow item status.
After speaking with the community regarding WorkflowLab, a number of people were excited with WorkflowLab as a great way [...]

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WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Categories

January 5, 2010

When working with complex workflows, it can become difficult to visually discern different types of tasks from each other, or to have a way to group items as related to each other. With the WorkflowLab beta, we added custom categories that you can use to group and organize your tasks into customizable category names.
By default, [...]

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WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Custom Tools

January 4, 2010

The biggest request we got from the community was to have the ability to build a workflow using third party tools. With the alpha release, WorkflowLab was filled with dozens of Adobe tools that you could associated with the various phases, steps or tasks of your project workflow. The issue was that if you used [...]

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WorkflowLab Beta Preview

January 4, 2010

After several weeks of hard work, the upcoming beta release of WorkflowLab is just around the corner. Throughout this week, I’ll be previewing a number of the new features we have added into WorkflowLab for this release, a majority of which are from people in the community that submitted ideas on the Adobe Labs forums, [...]

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Call for Beta 2 Projects

November 18, 2009

The Flash Catalyst team is working to do some testing on real-world projects that you have been building with Flash Catalyst Beta 2. This will help us perform better testing around performance and other areas of Flash Catalyst that is appropriate for normal sized projects.
If you have projects that you are able to share with [...]

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