Open dialect – IDE for building flash 9 movies, AIR apps in Linux!
After I found out about gnash (blog article here) – the open source Shockwave flash player, I thought why FOSS people are not programming an application to build flash movies so we can have it running on Linux. I was wrong, they’ve already built one… and it’s one of the best! It’s core is based on open source Adobe Flex language. IDE is written using C# (.NET Framework) and ported to Linux by mono and GTK#. Look the below screenshots to see how nice it is..
Open Dialect 0.6 running on mono 1.9 in FC9
It’s easy to use as the flash, and this gives people the ability to build flash contents very fast which would be put on the internet. It’s flash-like because, it has all those programming components (buttons, sliders,text boxes, labels etc…) with the drawing components (circles,lines,squares,tables etc..); and it has the noticeable time line too. All of these can be dragged and dropped like in flash or VB. There are wizards for beginners like in MS Office, but If you need, you can switch to the flex code right away. This program is like power point because it allows transitions between “slides” like in PP.
The most important 2 features of this program is:
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It can export Flash 9 SWF’s
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It can design & compile AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) applications
Anyone knows how flash and AIR rocking the internet these days. This makes open-dialect a FOSS community priority, as it may be the only FOSS applications to handle both these types. Some people already say open dialect is the future of flash IDE’s.
Building a AIR application using OD
For more information, you can visit their home site at this link.
Installing
It’s easy as ABC as pre-compiled binaries are already avialable. Download the version 0.6 from this link. Double click on the compressed .tar.gz file and drag and drop where you want them to be. Run the file opendialect. In the command line use the command ./opendialect (Please notice that your Linux distribution should be new enough for this).
Sameera said,
June 16, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Damn!! This is really impressive Malshan.. ..
Malshan Peiris said,
June 16, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Yeah, Linux is much bigger than we think….
Keheliya Bandara Gallaba | කෙහෙළිය බණ්ඩාර ගල්ලබ said,
June 16, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Wow..
This is sooooo coool dude… I am waiting till vacation begins to find more about AIR programming. Now I wont have to move to windows to do it.
Btw use wicketbuzzz AIR app to get real time cricket scores while studying.
thanx so much for the tip.
Malshan Peiris said,
June 16, 2009 at 9:26 pm
I feel like I need to put something about AIR too… But thing is I haven’t developed a single program yet… so I can’t ethically put it
Thameera said,
June 16, 2009 at 10:53 pm
It’s the first time to hear about Mono and GTK#. Gotta try it. What can be more pleasing than .Net in Linux!
Malshan Peiris said,
June 16, 2009 at 11:08 pm
I really need to find a FC11 DVD — It’s good bye for FC9 now (end of support)
Mono 2.0 is virtually impossible to work on FC9, because it needs a major system change. There are many programs i just left without testing due to this. (ex: miro 2.0)
And almost everything asks for Qt 4.4 these days (i have 4.3)
Can’t download 4.2GB image with this 1GB free ADSL connection …hmmm : (