Bluefire Blog

The EPUB file format is definitely taking off like a rocket for ebooks and text-based “packaged” web content (such as RSS feeds).  But what about rich media?  Well, the format certainly can contain content that includes video, sound, animation, games, apps, etc.   And, Adobe Digital Editions will render that kind of content (if it is Flash-based) and Adobe Content Server 4 can apply copy protection to it (if you need that because you are a library, etc).   Ah, but what about mobile you might ask…

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Tutorial - Creating a Simple Silverlight RSS Reader

Introduction

This is the first post of a multipart blog tutorial explaining how to create a simple Silverlight 2.0 Web Application that displays a grid of thumbnails from a Feedbooks RSS source.  Under each thumbnail is a button that allows users to download an ePub version of the book to their desktop.

Download Source See also: Tutorial Part 2

Feedbooks RSS Browser

See it in Action

In this first part we are going to step through the process of fetching and parsing an RSS feed with Silverlight and then bind the RSS data to a Silverlight DataGrid control.

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Congratulations to our good friends at Adobe for releasing Digital Editions 1.5. (Bluefire provided UX design and Flex development support for both the 1.0 and 1.5 efforts). Digital Editions is a lightweight, rich internet application for reading, acquiring and organizing digital books and other publications. This update adds content portability to protected items in both EPUB and PDF formats. Meaning you can now buy copy protected items online and, well… copy them - to other computers and devices. This portability is enabled by a new feature for authorizing a machine with an Adobe ID.
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Bluefire will be presenting at the 360Flex Conference this Tuesday, August 14, at 1:00 pm at The Red Lion Hotel in Downtown Seattle. The presentation will cover topics of experience design, RIA development and Flex coding relating to our experiences working on the Adobe Digital Editions team.

The presentation and its support files, including Flex source code, can be downloaded here: 360 Presentation Files.

In addition to presenting on Tuesday, Bluefire is helping to sponsor the Northwest Charity Flex Code Jam, a 3-dayFlex-coding event aimed at creating a Virtual Food Drive application for Seattle’s own Northwest Harvest. This event was put together by the Seattle Flex User Group in conjunction with Adobe’s Flex Champions Program and is set to kick-off Sunday, August 12th. Conference goers will have the opportunity to donate their time to this coding endeavor and Bluefire will be on hand as project mentors for this awesome cause.

Drop us a line if you will be at the conference. Hope to see you there.

Today Adobe Systems announced the release of Adobe® Digital Editions 1.0, a new desktop application for “acquiring, managing and reading eBooks, digital newspapers, and other digital publications”. There’s so much that is cool about this app that it is hard to know where to start. But before diving into that, I should mention that Bluefire provided experience design and Flex development services to Adobe for the 1.0 version effort, so I’m not exactly “impartial”.

A good top level overview of the app can be found in Adobe’s press release, so I won’t regurgitate that in detail, rather I’ll give you a couple excerpted highlights of it, and then dive into my own personal (slightly more geeky) perspective.

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