CEO of Areal-Media Pedro Veloso

The Portuguese startup company AREAL-MEDIA is helping produce more than 1000 books per day with their product AdigitalBook, a digital album creation software for amateur photographers developed on Adobe's Flex.

Located in the city of Braga, Portugal, this startup differences itself by targeting amateur photographers and focusing on usability, simplicity and speed.

We wanted to ask this startup how they are doing and how using Flex affects their business. Areal-Media's CEO Pedro Veloso emphasizes several advantages of using this technology and says that Flex helps increasing both productivity and sales.

Dreaming in Flash (DIF) - Tell us a bit about AREAL-MEDIA, how did the company get started? You have been in operations for 5 years now, did you always plan to use Adobe's Flex or was that something that happened along the way?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - In fact, we have been operating in the market for 6 years now. Areal-Media was founded by two people, my partner and I. Areal-Media has held certification according to the ISO 9001:2000 standard since 2007, and changed for ISO 9001:2008 in 2010. In the beginning, the focus of the company was to develop websites. Quickly we understood that we should choose a specific market to focus on so we chose the photography market. Areal-Media has developed products for several business sectors, with the photography sector as its core focus.

We began using Adobe Flex in 2007 when we started developing the AdigitalBook software. We chose this technology because it works well on all operating systems, and with Flex it is possible to create very attractive software layouts.

DIF - How many people did AREAL-MEDIA start off with? How many of the starting founders are still with the company?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - We started with two and are now ten people (7 Flex developer's). I'm the CEO and my Partner is the CTO, which we have been since we founded Areal-Media in 2004.

DIF - How do you differentiate your product Adigitalbook from the other Flex-based digital album creation software, e.g. Blurb.com?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - Before we started developing Adigitalbook, we tested different pieces of software, and we understood what we should do to innovate and bring something new to this kind of software. At that time and even today there aren´t a lot of great applications in the marketplace, in my opinion there are three or four worldwide. AdigitalBook brings more than new features, it brings a new business model to big Labs. A very lucrative business model for those Labs, and with the big advantage to have the same software in both PC desktop and web based versions, it is something new to this type of Application. Also, AdigitalBook has some attractive features like the possibility that users have to create, store and share their own photobooks for free. Users can share their albums on facebook, by email, or with a simple URL. If other people want a printed copy of their friend’s book, they have the ability to purchase it as well.

DIF - Using this technology, it allows you to distribute the software on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Web). How do you grade the importance of using the same code base while targeting these different platforms? Is it really such a big deal?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - Definitively, this is one of the biggest advantages of FLEX. This technology brings to software development companies, like Areal-Media, the possibility to be more productive, reducing the time for bug tracking, testing, and other various time consuming procedures.

DIF - How much time was necessary before you could release the first beta version of Adigitalbook? When was it?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - The first beta version was shown last Year (March 2009) in Las Vegas at PMA2009. The Exhibition was a success and we gained customers all over the world. This year the show was in Los Angeles – Anaheim, we presented the online version (web based) and the new desktop version. As a result of AdigitalBook’s success, Areal-Media is growing up very fast.

DIF - So far, how was been the adoption of the product and the user feedback?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - The best key performance indicator is the number of Albums produced per day with our software, and at this time I can say that our systems estimate processing more than 1000 books/day. This is a very good feeling.

DIF - The user interface of Adigitalbook looks really user-friendly. One can see a lot of time went into designing the user experience. How do you approach this at AREAL-MEDIA and how important is it to assume the focus on usability?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - This software is going to be used by everybody, not only by the Experts. We think of the mother that wants to create a photobook of her son, the people without vast technology experience that want to order a photobook. The software must be easy to use, and we can only get this objective correct if our concern is the user experience. We have changed the layout many times as we tested it with regular computer users. There are many small things that in this type of software, are very important to help for a more intuitive user experience. The user’s photos and album pages must be always visible. Also, the users are able to create a book in an automatic way without any problems. The workflow of choosing, importing, creating, and purchasing is imperative.

DIF - Do you have plans to add further integration with third party services, e.g. Flickr or others? What else does the future hold for Adigitalbook?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - In fact, Adigitalbook has already integrated the API’s to import pictures from Picasa, Smugmug, Flickr, Facebook and photobucket. Also, the user can share the album on his facebook wall. These integrations are already done and working properly. In the near future we will integrate new products in AdigitalBook, like Photo Gifts in 3D. Also, we want to develop a module to synchronise the Web-based Version with the desktop Version.

DIF - How do you market Adigitalbook and how difficult is it to market Flex-based products?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - In fact, the Flex technology helps us to increase our sales of the software. We do not sell this software to small companies. Our target is big labs, and so far the labs that we have sold our software to, have already know about the Flex technology. The attractive layouts, the same software working on different Operating Systems, the same software working in desktop and web based version, are all benefits that we couldn’t do without Flex. AdigitalBook has for nine months now, been a featured offering in the Adobe AIR Marketplace under the Photo and Video Category. Some Labs found our software from the Adobe Marketplace, others found us through the exhibitions that we participate in, with the rest being from our website.

DIF - Would you like to say something to entrepreneurs that are planning to launch Flex-based products and services?

Pedro Veloso (PV) - Well what I can say, is to test AdigitalBook http://demo.adigitalbook.com and ask them if they can do the same using another technology. This technology allows my company to save time and money.

Thanks for the interview!

AREAL-MEDIA

Website: http://www.arealmedia.com

AdigitalBook demo: http://demo.adigitalbook.com

Lately I've working on three big projects that would require the usage of a framework, and not wanting to extend my own framework, that consists mostly of accumulated libraries over time, I decided to give the most prominent ones a go.

So I started by checking out what was on the market, I found as-hive, pureMVC, Cairngorm and Mate ( there are a few more but somehow I didn't feel they were mature enough to be used.

Now for a little background on this quest for the framework, and few of my personal opinions on the whole framework business.
The point of a framework is to aid you in the making of your application/website, this can be the handling of repetitive tasks for you, providing a strict way of coding and thus giving you a common ground of understanding with your peers. Also it's meant to enable you to code more efficiently, make your code more readable and produce a scalable product that you can, even at a later date, modify without breaking everything.
What they are NOT meant to do is to force a coding style that makes feel restricted, uncomfortable with and most important they shouldn't be extra work. It feels pretty pointless to have to code 3 times as more to have the same functionality, some of you might immediately argue "but what about scalability?" well sometimes that's not everything, in the real work time matters.

Ok, now that we got that out of the way let's move on to the frameworks.
The project that required me to start first was a PV3D website that heavily relies on dynamic content. So I checked out pureMVC and as-hive and quickly decided to go with pureMVC.
So then I went on to the forums and examples pages and tried to read all that mattered to me, plus I found nice diagrams that help you out alot in the beginning.
As I delved more into the project I realized that some extending and heavy integration of PV3D and pureMVC would be required in order to make things easy for me, plus the project relies on the URL to know where it is and react accordingly, this was easy enough, simple and clear.

So my opinion on pureMVC is that it's the perfect framework for AS3 projects because it's easily extensible, highly functional, doesn't force you to adopt a specific style but still requires you to have rules and standards.

The next project is an AIR Application that will mimic some of the functionality of Powerpoint so I immediately thought of Cairngorm, but then I heard about Mate (pronounced mah-tey) and it seemed like the perfect solution.

So having already started development with Cairngorm when I heard about Mate, it felt like a risk to change, but nevertheless a risk worthwhile taking should Mate be more practical and provide me with a faster environment in which to code.
Well Mate does look great on paper ( and I printed the architecture) but somehow it feels like it still hasn't achieved critical mass to be used, now don't get me wrong it's a great framework and I'm sure that with some extra work I'd be in love with it, but at the moment I just didn't have the time to try and figure out somethings on my own and the forums don't have that many topics, plus the examples are far too simple. So I'm sticking with Cairgnorm for the time being.
Cairgorm is a must know for any Flex developer, it's the official framework which means that plenty of clients will feel more comfortable with ,or even ask for it.

That said I started using Cairngorm and eventually grew to like it, I liked the ViewModelLocator and the self dispatching event model, and it did eventually make my work easier.

And to finalize I'll go into no frameworks at all because sometimes a framework is just an overkill, some might say that it's always the best solution, but not always. Sometimes we just need to develop a small application/website and using a framework is actually extra work than just making it the fastest way possible and if it needs updates after they should be easy enough, if they aren't, well you can always refactor it into a framework based app. This works well for me because of years of accumulated libraries that provide me with most of the common tasks i need, many of them published here on DIF.

So that's enough and if you read all the way here congratulations, and please leave me your thoughts.

You can access objects by name:

Or by id:

And have access to component events like:

The class with an example:

mxml-loader.zip

Example swf

you can also add Event Listener's to myClip.application , like myClip.addEventLIstener(“ON_CHANGE”,function), so by this way you can embed flex swf into an flash application and communicate with him by calling function and receiving events.

Today our good friend Gabor announced his new baby: Decorator.
Decorator is an Image Generator that exports/print postscript from it. Which means you can print your images a large as you want, without any pixel.

It generates lovely outputs and I can already see the potential to this awsome tool, my living room will love this new way of wallpaper, and the best about it's always unique due to a random seed generator.

I've had the opportunity to try the closed beta, and I must say that I was impressed with the outcome of just a little fiddling with the engine.

So be sure to drop by FlashGuy.de and check the amazing outputs of Decorator.

The details and pricing for Flex3 can be found here and I find them quite accessible for a full version going only for CHF 319.00, it's a bargain for the best Flash/Flex development IDE.

As for AIR it now has a nice little official Adobe link, and they even show an impressive list of clients for a just released product, featuring the likes of ebay and nasdaq.

So get your copy of Flex3 while it's fresh, I know I'll get mine

Ah, also for those of us who live in Europe we'll have plenty of chances to catching the on.air tour here's the link with the dates.

"MVC considered harmful" [weblogs@macromedia]

"How Flex fits the MVC models" [livedocs@adobe]

"The Flex Show - Episode 33: PureMVC Framework" [theflexshow]

Update: The follow-up by Grant Skinner is also a good read on the subject.

While I was brainstorming today with Bilou about possible things we could do, I went over to to read the FAQ again and saw this clause:

The eBay Developer Widget Build Off Contest 2008” (the “Contest”) is open to legal residents of the fifty United States, the District of Columbia, Canada (excluding the province of Quebec) or the UK;

Since we're in Portugal, I guess we won't be entering this contest anymore. That's bad, why not open the contest for other developers?

Update: Sunny Li, from eBay, was kind enough to reply to us saying that the reason only US, CA and UK are allowed into the contest is purely legal. You can check his response here.

So I set out to find and easier of doing things and found it over at Keith Peters blog bit-101, it's best two features that will save you the hassle of always having to create component, addChild, set x position, set y position, you can do it all in one line. Components that fire events such as click or change, also take a fourth parameter of defaultHandler and that also saves the addEventListener.

So be sure to check them out at: bit-101 blog or download source here.