I just saw that Michael at www.cpguru.com has just released a post on the new widgets and the widget API. He did a nice presentation highlighting some of the new stock widgets that Cp5 will be offering. I will try to complement his post with some information I learned from my short exposure with the Widgets.

Development Language – AS3

As Michael pointed out, Widgets in Cp5 must be written in AS3. This might be a relief for some developers (including me ) since they will not be asking themselves in which language they should develop their widgets. The downside is that by offering only AS3, some customers might be left alone with their legacy AS2 widgets and don’t have the means to convert all their old AS2 widgets to AS3. However, AS3 has been around for about 4 years now and Adobe had to make a move away from AS2 at some point. Lets just hope that this will not prevent people from moving to Cp5.

Backward Compatibility – Some Issues

Cp5 has been careful in trying to offer backward compatibility for Cp4 widgets. All the functions that were available in Cp4 are there in Cp5. However, there is one major difference that may cause your widgets (more…)

Any developer will need, at some point, to debug his/her widget from within Captivate to see what’s really going on. Since we don’t have access to a debugger in Captivate, the next best thing is to trace outputs. Being a little bit lazy at time (but this can also be a good thing!), I never bothered much and used the Flash trace() function through a logging API. When you have the Flash Player Debug version, all the traces are written to a log file hidden somewhere in your local settings folder.

So, I used the same mechanism to investigate how widgets are working in Cp5 . However, to my surprise, the trace statements are only logged when you publish the project, not if you preview it. That’s strange since it used to work in both, preview and publish modes, under Cp4. It seems that the Flash Player now used for previewing projects from within Captivate is of a special kind. I have my own idea as to why they did that and I don’t mind at all since it will add some very nice functionality for widget developers … but this is for another post

They say that necessity is the mother of all inventions and I tend to believe this. I don’t want to have to publish my project to trace data so (more…)

Wow, I’m really excited! I was invited to be part of the prerelease team for Captivate 5! I also just learned that the code name for it was … Hulk. Nice touch

Keep an eye on my blog since I will be posting some information about the new Widget API in the following days if not hours …

I submitted my new Widget to the Adobe Exchange an hour or so ago. The Exchange was one of the factor that convinced me to build my first widget. That’s a cool platform to promote your work right? So I thought too. However, I have read in the forums that it takes a lot of time to process new entries and that some entries even take months to go through the system. That’s a little bit discouraging! Especially after you have put all that hard work in. With the upcoming release of Cp5, I hope that Adobe will be more prompt to respond to new demands.

So, I will keep you posted on how it goes with the submission process.

Well, it took a while to get there but today, I finally released my first widget. It took a lot more time than I anticipated but at least it’s there. I created a small demo to preview the widget features and have also created installation instruction as well as basic help. You can find everything here.

For those who want to try before they buy, I have made available a trial version that only works from within Captivate.