The Official Flex Team Blog

Join the Adobe Acrobat User Community on Wed. November 18, 2009 for a free eSeminar on how to create highly branded, custom PDF Portfolio layouts using Acrobat 9's ActionScript API and Flex. PDF Portfolios let you combine Flex/ActionScript with PDF to redefine what a document can be. If you are a Flex developer and are interested in leveraging your skills in a new and exciting way, this eSeminar is for you.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
10-11am US Pacific (1-2pm US Eastern)

Free Registration: http://www.acrobatusers.com/events/1475/pdf-portfolios-developers

What you will learn:

What you need to get started with the Acrobat ActionScript API
How to bootstrap a basic Navigator in Flex Builder 3
How to bundle your Navigator's SWF file into a .NAV file for use in Acrobat using ANT
How to avoid the most common trouble spots
How to turn on the debugging options in Acrobat

Who should attend?

Flex developers interested in expanding their skills and market reach.
If you are an Acrobat developer or power user and have never worked with ActionScript or Flex, you might want to skip this one.

Skills required:

ActionScript 3
Flex Builder 3
ANT (recommended)

Glenn has posted his slides and source code on Acrobat.com. This talk was fantastic so I encourage everyone to check them out.

Slides
Source

We're excited to announce that the second Flex 4 SDK beta 2 is now available for download! Check out the Labs page and the Flex 4 Open Source page for more details. Also, be sure to check out Matt Chotin's updated What's new in the Flex 4 Beta and Joan Lafferty's Differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4 articles. This beta release also coincides with the beta 2 releases of both Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst.
We received great feedback on beta 1, which we incorporated into beta 2. We hope you'll keep the discussion going on the Labs forums.
Enjoy!

As we do every year at MAX there will be a Meet the Team session on Monday night. This year we're actually doing 2 sessions back-to-back so that you have the opportunity to go see multiple teams without losing out. We'll be doing our session as a panel this year, but it's always good to get a sense of what questions you guys are looking to have answered. Feel free to post comments here or Tweet with #flexmtt if you want us to have an answer prepared for you.

Please note: for some reason our MoveableType config keeps sending a lot of comments to the spam folder and not mailing us. So it may take a day or two for us to get your comment to appear.

Due to significant recent performance and reliability issues with our JIRA bug database, we will be making a series of changes over the next several weeks. So far, the changes we've made include disabling the following functionality:

• RSS
• Remote API calls
• XML search requests
• Anonymous browsing

Note: This is a mirror of Adobe Evangelist Anirudh Sasikumar's post http://anirudhs.chaosnet.org/blog/2009.09.01.html which has been down due to too much traffic.

September 1, 2009 10:36 PM
I spend a lot of time reading articles on the web. Somehow, I miss the lack of typesetting and pagination especially when the article is captivating as well as long. This is my attempt at making reading content on the web (and the computer to a certain extent) more beautiful. With a lot of help from Flex 4, Readefine beautifies text, RSS and HTML content for easier reading. Text is laid out in multiple columns, sanitized of stray newlines and paragraphs and a nice font is applied.
What is it?

Readefine is a Flex 4 web application (a desktop one is coming soon) that beautifies RSS, text and HTML content by laying text in multiple columns for easier reading. Take a look at the screenshots below:

It can load content from the web, a file on your computer or via copy-and-paste. Readefine supports content in RSS, HTML or plain text format.

Text settings like justification, ligatures, column width / count, etc. can be fully customized and saved.

Some nice things about it:

• Removes stray newlines, empty p, br tags.


• Newspaper like layout for RSS - my aim was for RSS files to look like a newspaper1.


• Paginates rather than supporting scrolling. I hate scrolling while reading a lot of text.


• Makes long plain text files beautiful and also sections them for performance.


• Copy paste or load a file from your computer (load, not upload)


• Gives a new look to those valuable Gutenberg text files


• Remembers the last 30 URLs you have visited.


• Re-flows text according to the available size.


• Resizes images to fit within the columns.


• Tries to compute the absolute URL from a relative link.

Some not so nice things:

• HTML support is experimental. Certain HTML (even from popular sites like the Wall Street Journal) will make it go crazy. Plain text and RSS work best.

For the Flex Community

This is my first full-fledged Flex 4 application. Flex 4 rocks!

The components used in this extend the existing Flex 4 and Text Layout Framework classes to add pagination, HTML cleanup and tolerant HTML import. I've also built a Scroller like component for the overflow of articles from top DataGroup to the one on the left side. I will be open sourcing these components shortly for the benefit of the developers out there.

Try it out and let me know. Any feedback is welcome.

There have been some questions over the last few days on the status of the Flex data visualization components and I wanted to make sure everyone knows our intentions.

First of all, you may notice that the 3.4 downloads page has an updated copy of the data visualization components (charts and the Advanced DataGrid and OLAPDataGrid). While we have made it easier to view the source (you don't have to run the DMV-source.jar anymore), we still consider these components to be under the Flex Builder license, and the source to be considered "Professional Component Source Files" as described in the Flex 3 SDK EULA. So I hope that clears up the licensing question.

The other concern I've heard raised is that Flex 4 is not seeing many changes to the data visualization components, and therefore folks are worried that Adobe is not investing in them. Data visualization remains a "core competency" of Flex, and we absolutely plan on further development of these components along with supporting partners who have expanded upon them like the ILOG team at IBM. In the Flex 4 time frame we plan on making some improvements to the GroupingCollection, a fundamental piece of the ADG in the hopes of addressing one of the larger performance bottlenecks. However, we chose to take on 2 significant agendas that preempted doing significant work in the data visualization components.

The first is the data connectivity features in Flash Builder; the way we're making it even easier to connect your data from the back end into the data visualization components in the front. We hope that this will make the data visualization components even more accessible for developers, making it simple to get up and running and build powerful data-driven applications.

The other agenda is the introduction of the Spark architecture. As everyone knows, this is a significant improvement to the fundamental component architecture in Flex, but it is too much to bring every component forward into the new model in a single release. While the charting components do not need to be modified significantly to fit well with Spark, the DataGrid (and therefore the AdvancedDataGrid) will take significant effort, and that is work we intend to do in the following release. Knowing that a fundamental re-architecture of the DataGrid is coming, we decided not to make significant investment in the current one for this release other than addressing the most important bugs.

So that's the status and we hope you'll understand and agree with our prioritization. If you've got any questions, feel free to comment here or post to the forums!

We'd like to gauge community interest in contributing to the Flex open source project. Please take this 15 minute survey and be thorough in describing what your particular interests are. Please provide your contact information so that in the future we can reach out to you and keep you informed about our open source developments. We look forward to hearing from you!

Flex SDK version 3.4, the latest production quality release, has been released. You can download it from the Flex Open Source page. We are not releasing a new version of Flex Builder. However, the SDK 3.4 version will work in Flex Builder using the multi-sdk feature. You may want to postpone updating if you're using the Data Visualization components, they will be available in about a week when SDK 3.4 is posted on the Adobe.com site.

This release supports the security updated runtimes for Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. Additionally, it includes key bug fixes in the SDK, one of which addresses a critical security bug (more below), and bug fixes provided by the community.

An important vulnerability has been identified in Flex SDK 3.3 and earlier versions. This vulnerability could result in cross-site scripting. We recommend all users of Flex SDK 3.3 and earlier versions update to the newest version, Flex SDK 3.4. Please refer to this security bulletin for further information.

You can find the SDK bugs that were fixed in Flex SDK 3.4 here.

Adobe is conducting a User Research study to learn more about the work flows of Flex Developers. If you are currently working with Flex in a professional capacity we would really like to hear from you.

If you are interested in providing Adobe with feedback about your use of Flex and other Adobe products, please click on the link below and complete our survey. Adobe will be in contact with you if you align with our target characteristics.

Survey