In Lynda.com’s course titled “InDesign CS5: Interactive Documents and Presentations,” the Unitus Annual Report was shown as a case study for building interactive Flash presentations right from InDesign documents.

You can see it here. Look under “Trends in Digital Design” > Annual Report Case Study: Unitus.

You can see the annual report here.

As an aid to education and fundraising, this multimedia version of the printed Unitus Annual Report was developed in 2009 using the Adobe InDesign-to-Flash export format in order to closely match the print version of the report.

It turns out that garbage collection won’t be automatic, but rather, the SDK will feature a compiler-level feature called Automatic Reference Counting, which at the very least, will make memory management much easier for iOS developers by automatically inserting retain and release commands.

So while not officially automatically collecting garbage for memory, it still is very good news and will remove one of the biggest headaches for iOS/Cocoa Touch development. See the notice for “Automatic Reference Counting” on Apple’s iOS5 for Developers page.

Being new to iOS development myself, I’m also personally excited by “Storyboards” and the new version of “Instruments” in XCode.

Until now, I’ve always used local XML documents, had access to the server where the XML was being served and could put a crossdomain.xml file in place, or had access to a public API that provided an XML feed and had a crossdomain.xml file already in place. But an application I’m working on now uses XML from a server where I have no access or ability to put a crossdomain.xml file.

Enter the PHP proxy and the ActionScript escape method. A PHP script handles the URL for the API call, but you have to encode that URL with its arguments before handing off to the proxy.

Example:

Here’s the code for the PHP proxy file, which goes on the same server as your SWF.

$post_data = $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA;

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
print curl_error($ch);
} else {
curl_close($ch);
header( 'Content-type: ' . $response_headers['content-type']);
print $response;
}


(Thanks to xmlrpcflash.mattism.com for the PHP script.)

Now, assuming you are using a Loader with a URLRequest to pull XML into your application, and your xml_proxy.php file is in the same directory as your SWF, you have to escape( ) on the URL call to the API server, then tack that on to the end of your URLRequest to the PHP proxy, like this:

var myXMLLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();

myXMLLoader.load(new URLRequest("xml_proxy.php?url="+API_URL));

Voila! No security sandbox error from Flash Player.

At any rate, one of the better primers on HTML5 right now looks to be HTML5rocks.com. And be sure and check out their slide presentation on the new features.

A while back, I upgraded to Coda. I really love the interface, and it has nice built-in tools for FTP and SVN. But I want robust JavaScript functionality, and while the code completion is satisfactory (aside from some minor built-in typos), JQuery support isn’t what I was looking for.

I had given Aptana Studio a quick look as a helper for building AIR with JavaScript. But I recently gave it a full test drive as a JavaScript editor and I really love it. The code hinting and auto complete is great, JQuery support (as well as the support for other frameworks) via easily installed plugins is fantastic. There’s also debugging, robust HTML/CSS code assist, live preview, aq DOM outline view, and FTP. What’s more is, having built a ton of ActionScript applications with Flex/Flash Builder, the Eclipse-style interface is very familiar to me, even though it’s more cluttered than Coda.

Not to mention: it’s open source! Check it out.