Recently in General Category

A pretty fascinating analysis of how i've interacted with Flexcoders over the years. Doug of course has focused on the data, but I still love how a great analysis tool like SpatialKey can be built with Flex. What other interesting visualizations can people do with all that data? Anyone want to dig into figuring out what subjects generate good responses?

I am not a designer. But using some sample code that one of our engineers (Glenn) provided I have a created two simple themes that can be used with the Spark skins for changing the colors of your application. One of the cool new features in Flash Builder 4 is our Theme Chooser, so these are designed to work with that. Simply download this zip and expand it. Make sure you keep the subfolders for now, then in Flash Builder you can import the SWCs either from the project properties or in the Appearance panel when you choose the theme. Right now FB will say that it's copying the whole folder, we're going to look to change that after Beta 2. Also you'll need to remove the hyphen from the name to make it legal (I chose those names for the SWC to enable some style features, but those won't be necessary after Beta 2 either).

The source is included in the form of fxpl projects. You can import those into Flash Builder and edit away. Make sure that if you add new files you go into your project settings and re-select all the files to be included. We have a bug currently where if you just do the checkbox that includes everything the skins likely won't work.

The goal here is to show how easily you can change just a few style properties and have a very different color theme running in your app. By the time we ship the custom skins that I included shouldn't be necessary and we'll hopefully need even fewer entries.

I hadn't realized, but Rani Kumar who has been doing a lot of the engineering on our automation features now has a blog. This is a great resource for hearing about potential issues and learning how things are actually working under the covers, as well as what might be coming in the future.

Jeff has posted the podcast that we recorded a few weeks ago. You can hear a lot of my own opinions on where things stand, what's cool about Flex 4, and more!

At some point in the interview I embarrass myself in not really knowing what's coming in CF9 that's going to benefit Flex developers, but since that time I have played with it a little in building an app I hope my team can use. There really are some great things with CF that make it very fast to build the back end to a Flex app (if you want to think of it as front-end first and back-end second). For example, I played with the upload utility which helps quickly get files up to the server for temporary storage. I've also been taking advantage of the ORM features so that you can really just write your value objects and not write any database code whatsoever. It makes writing your services for data storage and retrieval really easy! And then of course you've got CF Builder, an IDE that can really assist morons like me who don't actually know what they're doing in getting up to speed and being more productive once we do have a clue. Make sure to check out the CF9 betas on Labs!

Jeff has posted the podcast that we recorded a few weeks ago. You can hear a lot of my own opinions on where things stand, what's cool about Flex 4, and more!

At some point in the interview I embarrass myself in not really knowing what's coming in CF9 that's going to benefit Flex developers, but since that time I have played with it a little in building an app I hope my team can use. There really are some great things with CF that make it very fast to build the back end to a Flex app (if you want to think of it as front-end first and back-end second). For example, I played with the upload utility which helps quickly get files up to the server for temporary storage. I've also been taking advantage of the ORM features so that you can really just write your value objects and not write any database code whatsoever. It makes writing your services for data storage and retrieval really easy! And then of course you've got CF Builder, an IDE that can really assist morons like me who don't actually know what they're doing in getting up to speed and being more productive once we do have a clue. Make sure to check out the CF9 betas on Labs!

Our engineering team is looking to host a session explaining the changes coming in the automation APIs for Flex 4. This session will only be useful to those who have created an agent in the past and are looking to maintain it into the future (I expect this number to be small). If you qualify, please contact me at mchotin AT adobe DOT com.

Want to learn more about the next generation of Flex, including the updated framework, tools, and new tool Flash Catalyst? Register for the free FlashCamp held at Adobe's San Francisco office on May 29. Lots of engineers, lots of beer, and lots of information!

Join us!

More info on Mike Chambers's blog and on the registration site.

I participated in the judging of the entries for the Ribbit Killer App Challenge over the last few months, and it was really great to see so many folks building cool applications. I think the contest also brought a number of people to Flex for the first time, which of course was especially gratifying :-)

The winners have now been announced! Congrats to everyone!

Our QA manager recently added a Nabaztag to her cube at work, which means all of us are sending it nasty sound files and messages to keep us entertained. We know that there are ActionScript APIs already available for the Nabaztag API and even some apps already built. But if someone were to build a super-cool Flex example that leveraged the Nabaztag (that we can then use in-house), I'm sure we could come up with some worthy gift for you :-)

To help out, we asked the guys at Violet to add a crossdomain.xml file to the api domain, and last night they did. So no more proxies needed!

Have fun!

Back in December Chet Haase, James Ward and I spoke at Devoxx, a Java community conference (one of the biggest worldwide) in Antwerp, Belgium. We gave a number of sessions, but one was the Future of RIAs, according to Adobe :-). It's available via Parleys, one of the coolest Flex (and AIR if you want it) apps available today. And I've embedded it below for your convenience.