For more than a year Interactive Pioneers is developing the user interface of a self-driving car with the help of Adobe AIR technologies in context of an innovation project.

The first milestone was recently reached and an autonomous car was successfully tested in road traffic.

Our agency’s task is the ‚Human Machine Interface‘ development and connected light, audio and input control. Our mission is to provide information about the sensors as efficiently as possible. Operation should be as easy and intuitive as possible.

“The car is already able to drive autonomous quite good, but if the driver is not informed well enough, he won’t trust the car and might not be able to give control away, this can lead to dangerous intervention by the driver” Carlo Matic, CEO of Interactive Pioneers.

Different applications, like navigation, cameras for detection of environmental data as well as sensors exchange their data via the car’s standard CAN-Bus and will be processed in real time by the HMI. Elaborately designed 3D-views, which can be freely chosen by the driver, can be used to display close-by cars, read out navigation data and automatically show areas which can be driven automatically.

Various meta-information, like the driver‘s perspective for example, will be processed as well and visualised via LED-installments.

Chief developer at Interactive Pioneers for this project, Marvin Blase: “Adobe AIR works excellent for developing a HMI, since a seamless development can be realized, starting from graphic ideas to a final working application.”

Thanks to Actionscript 3 the application architecture can be developed in clean object-oriented sourcecode with professional developer tools like Powerflasher FDT, making use of continuous integration and Unittests.

For performance oriented processes Native Extensions were developed, unless there were native Adobe AIR components available.

Interaction between the driver and HMI is achieved with the help of a ‘SpaceMouse’, an input device that moves in three axes, which is implemented and processed via a native Adobe AIR component. Communication between the components within the system itself takes place over TCP/UDP and specifically developed Middlewares, for example to read out the steering angle and forward it to the HMI.

This advanced project uses the strength of Adobe AIR and will do so in the future.

Interactive Pioneers is looking for enthusiastic Actionscript 3 developers for ongoing development.

Applications should be sent by e-mail to jobs@interactive-pioneers.de

With this release FDT can easily switched to dark theme:Simply select the Dark theme and apply. The Dark theme is available since Eclipse 4.4 (Luna). Older versions of Eclipse (and FDT) does not support color themes of this form.

The FDT views and editors will switch to their default dark color set:

In case you use a different third party color theme (plugin) you can manually set the default dark color for the editor here:

To switch the semantic highlighting to dark mode use this preferences:

The last part is the AsDoc:Then the AsDoc view will present its contents using the dark theme defaults.

Our latest version of FDT comes with basic Mylyn support.
You can find more details about Mylyn here.

The Mylyn task context of the active task influences how the FDT Explorer and Outline show their content. Some elements inside the FDT Explorer are grayed since they are not part of the current task context as you can see here:The same is true for the Outline. Inside the task context the touched (edited or visited) elements are listed. For Flash projects these elements can be projects, folders, files, functions, classes, interfaces, and libraries.

By focusing on the active task most grayed elements would be filtered:

All parents of unfiltered elements are also presented but grayed depending on the current task context.

This FDT version offers new Quick Fixes for some project/classpath problems inside the Problems view.

These new Quick Fixes are available via right click or Ctrl-1 (Cmd-1):

This Quick Fix will remove classpath entries referring to missing SDK SWCs:

For the other Air Project problem Project Air SDK Version 22.0 does not match descriptor Air SDK Namespace 21.0 this Quick Fix is available:

This Quick Fix sets the descriptor namespace to the Air SDK version for each selected problem of an Air Properties profile.

In this version of FDT the FDT SWF Application launcher can handle CSS files:

The launcher starts the compilation of a CSS file into a SWF.

To create a launcher for a CSS file just right click the file in the FDT Explorer and choose Debug As/FDT SWF Application. By default the new created launcher does only invoke the compilation of the CSS into the SWF but it does not launch the final SWF, nor it starts the debugger.

For convenience the launcher WebApp-Dark.css can be added to the Launcher Chain of the web application launcher WebApp-WebApp:

The position in the Launcher Chain guarantees that the CSS file is compiled before the web application SWF is created and launched.

Bracket/Source Hover

In some situations it is hard to guess which blocks are closed by curly braces:By hovering over the curly brace in line 26 the full block is shown in a popup:

Some lines of large blocks are skipped but the head is always visible:The popup shows the class block on hovering over curly brace in line 44.

The source hover is shown on hovering over a reference with pressed shift key:Here the definition of class Term is shown in the popup on hovering over the superclass reference Term of class Application.

 

AsDoc view shows (inherited) interfaces

Inside the AsDoc view all interfaces are listed now:The interface list contains direct interfaces and their ancestors. The interface IBitmapDrawable is the ancestor of interface IDeferredContentOwner so it is listed, too. The inherited interfaces are all interface of the superclass with their ancestors.

With this new FDT version we focused on convenience for AsDoc.

Now FDT considers AsDoc XML comments for MXML components and also Deprecated metadata tags are interpreted and taken into account. Additionally all refactorings have been extended to update AsDoc references like @see,@throws,.. accordingly.

This new FDT version recognizes AsDoc comments inside MXML:

Now Deprecated metadata is interpreted, too:

The AsDoc view shows the deprecation information below the title row:

Each deprecated element reference is highlighted with strike-through:Additionally a warning is generated for each reference to a deprecated element.

With this release the FDT Explorer can present projects in groups:
Each Project Group is a set of workspace projects (i.e.: Working Set). Each project can be a member of one group and can not be shared among groups. Project Groups are logical structures shown inside FDT Explorer. Neither they represent nor they change the folder structure of the workspace.

A new wizard is available to create a new Project Group:
Sometimes after update the new Project Wizard is not directly visible in this menu. In this case please reset the FDT perspective at Windows/Perspective/Reset Perspective.

The Project Group wizard asks for a name and the member projects:

With the Project Group properties Dialog (available via right click menu)
the user could change the name and the contained member projects of a Project Group.

Often project packages are named after company web addresses or company department structures so that package names usually contains a standard prefix:
In further developed projects package names are even longer and only the last parts carries information. Lots of space in FDT Explorer is used up in flat package layout to present these long names and also horizontal scrolling can become necessary.

In these situations the preference setting for package name abbreviation can be very handy:
Here the package com.powerflasher.SampleApp will be represented by c.p.s.

Now the FDT Explorer shows only the abbreviations instead of full package names:
All package names with matching prefixes are reduced by the rule given in the preferences.

The hierarchical package layout is not change by abbreviations.