1. Learn Flex in a Week video series on the Developer Connection site is being updated. These were an immense help for catching up with the latest incarnation of Flex.
2. Tour de Flex has tons of new and updated samples. Any source code you could imagine is in Tour de Flex, it’s like your personal Flex library you carry with you. You might even run across one particular sample to wow you created by yours truly. Many thanks to my colleague Holly Schinsky, who works tirelessly on Tour de Flex and a zillion other things all at once, and to Adobe Evangelist Greg Wilson for the opportunity to help out with the project!
3. Flex Test Drive on the Adobe Developer Connection is a great way to get into Flex if you’re brand new. This series walks you through the process of building a Flex 4 application in one hour, and is accompanied by video and written tutorials.
4. I built the Spark Intranet Sample app and tutorial on the Developer Connection site and just updated it for the Flex 4 release. This is another good one to learn to connect Flex 4 to data, explore the Spark framework and new MXML specification, and see more about the new Flash Builder features. I can neither confirm nor deny that there are more Flex 4 sample apps to come very soon, and they may or may not be fairly intense so as to satisfy your inner geek

If you’re a Flex 3 developer just getting into Flex 4, you’ll see there’s a slight learning curve to the new Spark architecture. A good place to start is Deepa Subramaniam’s article on the Developer Connection. That’ll give you the background you need to understand Spark versus MX components and how/when/where to use them.

With all this new material at hand, the learning curve is tiny compared to the benefits you’ll get by updating to Flex 4. With the Spark framework, you’re able to take things to a whole new level.

Technorati Tags: adobe flex 4, developer connection, flash builder, learn flex in a week, tour de flex

This is SO cool because it gives you truly granular control over every aspect of a component you want to animate. In the sample I’m upgrading, there is an extended TileGroup component that has three columns and two rows of charts for an enterprise dashboard application. When a user clicks a button to zoom in on any given chart, I wanted to make use of some of the new Spark effects to really create a 3D look and feel quickly (without delving too much into custom layouts). Actually, the layout I made is a custom TileGroup, but I wanted to point out some ways you can use the Animate class to make sweet transitions on any property of a component in your own apps for simple animation, without having to create custom layouts.

This super simple test was to find out if I could use the Animate class to move the entire TileGroup to a new X,Y and increase its horizontalGap and verticalGap at the same time. In other words, could I use the Animate class to create my whole animation in one shot, truly custom? I watched Chet Haase on Adobe TV’s Codedependent on animating properties, and it worked great, but I needed it running in ActionScript.

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<fx:Declarations>
		<s:Parallel id="par" duration="1000" target="{t}">
			<s:Animate >
				<s:SimpleMotionPath property="horizontalGap" 
									valueFrom="15" valueTo="200" />
				<s:SimpleMotionPath property="verticalGap" 
									valueFrom="15" valueTo="200" />
			</s:Animate>
			<s:Move xTo="{t.width/2}" yTo="{t.height/2}" />
		</s:Parallel>
	</fx:Declarations>
 
	<s:TileGroup id="t" horizontalGap="15" verticalGap="15" direction="ltr" 
				 width="100%" height="100%">
		<s:Button click="par.play()" label="Button One" />
		<s:Button click="handleClick(event)" label="Button Two" />
	</s:TileGroup>

The above code is the MXML that worked great for my test, and here’s the AS3 equivalent:

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<fx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
 
			import spark.effects.Scale;
			import spark.effects.Move;
			import mx.effects.Parallel;
			import spark.effects.Animate;
			import spark.effects.animation.MotionPath;
			import spark.effects.animation.SimpleMotionPath;
			import flash.events.MouseEvent;
 
			public function handleClick(event:MouseEvent):void
			{
 
				var p:Parallel = new Parallel(t);
				p.duration = 1000; 
 
				var s:SimpleMotionPath = new SimpleMotionPath();
				s.valueFrom = t.horizontalGap;
				s.valueTo = 200;
				s.property = "horizontalGap";
 
				var s2:SimpleMotionPath = new SimpleMotionPath();
				s2.valueFrom = t.verticalGap;
				s2.valueTo = 200;
				s2.property = "verticalGap"; 
 
				var v:Vector.<MotionPath> = new Vector.<MotionPath>();
				v.push( s );
				v.push( s2 );
 
				var a:Animate = new Animate();
				a.motionPaths = v;
 
				var m:Move = new Move();
				m.xTo = t.width/2;
				m.yTo = t.height/2;
 
				p.addChild( a );
				p.addChild( m );
				p.play();
 
			}
 
		]]>
	</fx:Script>

Thanks to Chet too for spotting what my tired eyes didn’t see sheesh, it’s been one of those days.

This sample is not very exciting, except for the fact that it gives you the idea how you can animate any property over time. If I wanted to (and I have for my project) animate the x, y, z, width, and height at the same time using the Animate class, you could easily create a very specific animation this way.

For my purposes, I used the SimpleMotionPath to specify certain properties to change, and since the Animate class’s Interpolator is set to NumberInterpolator by default, it worked out great to fill in the steps for the “tween” automatically for me. I’d like to get to the point where I come up with my own Flat-terpolator for some other project one day just to see what I can create, but for now, this worked out fine.

You can download the FXP for this sample and try it out yourself here. Once you see how this works, you can imagine the possibilities afforded to Flex 4 that will allow you to make some truly amazing animations. Mine’s turning out to be pretty cool, but you’ll have to wait until the ADC releases it In the meantime, you can get started on this one to catch up on Flex 4 and Flash Builder.

Technorati Tags: adobe flex 4, animate class, animate properties, gumbo

My colleague Holly Schinsky and I were invited to be part of the super early beta program before MAX, which was extremely cool. This is huge for AIR developers because we now have a fully supported means of monetizing our applications. In the early days of Apollo (AIR’s beta name) I had come up with the idea for Attest (mock exam software for Adobe’s Flex certification) while studying myself. There was nothing on the market and I had compiled heaps of data while studying, so I thought it would make for a nice side project.

Attest was originally built in Apollo, but at the time it was beta and not ready to use as a release version of a commercial app. So I ended up going with C# to build a desktop app. Of course, there were one or two voices of dissent who asked why I didn’t use AIR at the time, I would have thought it was pretty apparent. Enough rambling, the point is that now, years later Attest PRO utilizes the Shibuya licensing, and makes life a lot easier for us at PXL Designs. Holly and I are still going to support the free version of Attest going forward, but for the upgraded, beefier version you now have Attest PRO available.

For the AIR developers out there, it couldn’t be any simpler to incorporate the Shibuya framework. It is still in beta, so there’s things to tweak and work out, but overall you have creative license to build any trial version of your application that you want.

• Time-based: If you want a 10 min or 10 day trial for example
• Feature-based: Turn off any features you want during the trial period

To get the license up and running is cake, there’s really nothing to it. You’ll know from the server whether an app is licensed or trial, and be able to turn on/off features wherever you like. For example, check the license, if it’s trial, set a boolean on your model and enable/disable certain buttons, or views, etc.

Keep in mind, the number of developers for the beta program is restricted for the time being. I’m not sure how many developers they’ll take right now, but it’s definitely something to read up on. Once Shibuya is a full-fledged product, there’s going to be tons of AIR apps for sale out there. For now, you can dream about writing AIR applications that make fart noises and becoming a millionaire (ok maybe not, hopefully you’ll want to actually build something with real purpose).

Technorati Tags: adobe air, flex, licensing, shibuya, try/buy service

Besides that, I’ve just been insanely busy (what’s new) pitching gigs, winning some, losing some, running away fast from others, and working secretly on Attest in the wee hours on top of everything else. Check out the PXL Blog for more (much much more soon), even if you’re not looking to get Flex certified or not interested in Attest, you’ll be very interested in some of the Adobe MAX goodness next week – mwahahha! Shhh, say no more…say no more, wink wink, nudge nudge, does she go aye?

On top of that, I’ve been updating MezzyShredder.com with new content, many a late night. He joined a new band, formerly called LOCKJAW, currently called War Horse. I defy even Yngwie Malmsteen to play faster or better than this man

Besides his band’s demo and performances, he’s teamed up with artist Scythen Hade and released their first album on iTunes called Elements of Time.

Check out the NEW Mezzy Shredder and Scythen Hade album entitled ‘Elements of Time’ on iTunes! I know of a few people who will be happy to finally get their hands on a real album instead of eating up my bandwidth listening to songs.

War Horse is actually highly likely to go tour next year in Europe, which would be insanely cool! I’ve posted new pics, songs, videos, and there’s a ton more coming soon. They’re currently recording their demo album and Mezzy is going to send much more material, so keep an eye out (or ear open) for updates.

Technorati Tags: Attest, cf united, lockjaw, Mezzy Shredder, war horse

My thorough lack of writing on my FUN blog parallels my thorough lack of sleep. It’s tough running a company on your own, especially when it’s a teeny tiny RIA firm and you’re completely lost when keeping records in QuickBooks. So what have I been up to? For starters, I updated a bunch of stuff on MezzyShredder.com. Added tons of videos of him playing with his band Wicked Society ( signed on a B & G Music label ) and YouTube. So if you’re into Black Label Society-style music, go check out Mezzy shredding like none other!

So far this year, I’ve reconnected with some very cool clients from the past, lost some projects, won others, wrote articles on the Adobe Dev center about Flex and Ant, part II is in review right now, coming soon.

I had the chance to team up with Tour de Flex developer Holly Schinsky to get Attest 1.5 out the door. Holly’s completely awesome to work with, and we plan on teaming up on some more killer projects in the near future. There’s also a ton of things planned for new versions of Attest, and some of it will be a lot of fun. You’ll see…

Just like 2008, not one of the projects I’ve worked on so far this year were ones that I pitched for, but rather, they just keep finding me. Who needs a sales department when you’re a Flex developer? I’ve actually passed a bunch of projects off to others in the community when I can, and was thinking about creating another job site type deal purely for Flex. Everyday my inbox is filled with projects I won’t be working on, and it would be great to find a way to post them for the community, for those who are located closer, or a better match for the position in general. It seems to me that the Washington, DC – Richmond, VA area is loaded with projects for Flexers, but there are definitely larger communities out there in other states. So if you’re a Flexer around there, give me a yell. I’d like to hear from others in the area.

I often have to turn down projects and on top of that there were others I lost, like a Microsoft Silverlight project where the MS guys came inches away from going with Flex rather than Silverlight. When the big guys made the decision it had to be Silverlight, there went that project. By the way, call me when your RIA falls apart Other projects were shipped overseas, but still the fact remains that there’s always work for Flex developers – knock on wood.

Now for some reason, a Google search for the name “flatley” puts me on page two. Considering the competition with Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance, that’s not too shabby. So it doesn’t hurt to get your name out there. I’m coming after your title Mr. Lord of the Dance, and I’m River dancing all the way to the first results page! The point is, I’ve watched the Flex community grow from the beginning, and it’s growing fast, which is awesome! If you’re in the DC – Richmond area, I think we can eventually make this another hot spot for crazy RIA projects with a large community of developers to match. Especially the ones that pay you in government cheese, like Mr. Jones says, but Flexers will never have to worry about their kids eating all the food in the fridge

Many other awesome projects are in the works currently at PXL Designs, some I’ll keep on the down low because they’re top secret for the time being. Others are supposed to debut soon. Whenever you see the Capital One Card Lab commercials on TV, think of all the late nights and countless ramblings I had to pull to get that one out the door. I was the architect on this project, consulting through an agency, and worked with a great team, pulled countless weekends and late nights to get it finished.

I found time to add a mini shopping cart to Peekaboopaperie.com for quick orders where a customer may not want to customize their own baby announcement.

This year, I think I’m even going to have time to venture out to CF United in Leesburg, VA, so I might see you there. If you’re from the area, give me a holler if you’re going and make sure to download the Bump app for the iPhone, this is extra cool and lazy

These are a handful of the reasons I’ve been missing my blog duties, but I’m going to make a concerted effort to get back into it…even if it has to be late night ramblings

Technorati Tags: adobe, enonomy, flex, Mezzy Shredder, ria, wicked society

Sorry, I had to share my euphoria though. With this thing in the office, I’ll have a hard time getting any work done. Anyway, I’ve been working my rump off on a bunch of different things but mostly I’ve been cranking on Attest 1.5.  It’s built in Adobe AIR (see PXL blog for the full scoop). This is current being tweaked and tested, and will be available shortly. The coolest news is that it’s free for non-commerical use. If you want to get certified in Flex 3/AIR, you’ll want to download this AIR app when it’s finally released.  I’ve taken a way longer time getting it out than I had originally planned on, but with my work load, and being a one man show so far, it’s been tough.

I’ve also been working on my first Ruby on Rails app for a client, amongst heaps of other things, and I have to say I really dig RoR.  Ruby’s syntax takes some getting used to for me because I’ve always worked with C-based languages. It reminds me more of Basic, but I like the whole set up and how easy it is to get a database connected site up and running fast. There will definitely be more Rails apps created at PXL in the future. For this release of Attest 1.5 (not calling it 2.0 yet) I wanted to set up the questions and answers with a RESTful webservice built with RoR. But that’ll probably come in the future (not that it makes a difference for end users) but I’d like to create it For now though, Attest is done differently than version 1.0.

When I had originally built it, it was done in Adobe Apollo but I couldn’t monetize the app. Many things happened since the first release, and with the economy sucking turd I don’t want to charge for regular devs like myself going forward.  So I’m going to give the full version for nada, unless you happen to be a large telecom who’s spying on my transmissions as I write this blog post (I’m looking at you Comcast, and I’m not laughing) then you’re going to pay for it! I’m all for Buy American, and that’s what ocurred to me after I got the Fender…it’s a small thing but I did technically help out the economy and my greedy guitar lust by buying this fine mama jamma! Attest, however, is made in the USA and you, the every day shmoe like myself  will no longer pay for it.

Onward and upwards, if you’re a developer like me, and you want to add yet another credential to your resume, study with Attest 1.5, take the exam for $150 bucks, and get it behind you. There was a discussion on the Adobe Flex Developers group on LinkedIn yesterday about just that…should I bother to get certified in Flex 3 or not?  I’m pretty biased obviously but I added my two cents regardless.  If you’re interested in taking the cert exam, if you’re looking for study material to gauge your readiness, enjoy Attest 1.5.  It’s another contribution to the community at large and will be available before the end of March. My apologies for being so late on this release.

The plan is to finish up what I have first, then I have some great Flex/AIR developers who have enlisted to help out on some  pre-release testing, and it’s on track to be released before the end of March.  Until then, relax your mind a bit…maybe buy yourself the Fender you always wanted, or read the news

and wonder if the folks at MXC (Most Extreme Elimination Challenge)

had advance knowledge of angry pink dolphins.  And look for Attest 1.5 on the PXL blog in a few short weeks.

Technorati Tags: adobe air, attest 1.5, flex 3/air cert, flex certification, study material

I’ll have to look into this more as time permits. Is this a technology/API that we as developers work into our apps? Or, it seems from the article that it’s going to be part of the Flash Player itself in conjunction with Yahoo/Google’s technology so there may be no new steps needed to get your Flash/Flex app or website indexed on the biggies.

I’ve been horrendously busy lately so I haven’t kept up-to-date on my blog-sponsibility…my humble apologies. I’ve promised the late night code-high induced ramblings will not cease, in fact, in the very near future they may become more intense. In the meantime, this was a very cool read and one I’ll have to keep up on to see where it goes.

Technorati Tags: adobe, google, indexing, search engines, swfs, yahoo!

Going forward, I know which api I’ll be using for online image sharing I know some other AS developers, like Quentin, who commented on the last post were searching too and we didn’t see anything up on Google code yet, so we planned on maybe starting up a project. The guys at Photobucket beat us to it. So that was an easy job for us, can’t beat that!

Updating MyStylez with the Photobucket api for drag and drop went well easier than I had planned, that’s because I thought I’d be creating a brand new library to work with the api. Ahh a pleasant surprise! Nice work again!

So I guess you can call MyStylez a true mashup now that it uses Photobucket and Flickr. It has nothing to do with the MySpace api because there’s no fun to be had there. I think the MySpace api is just for apps that run purely on MySpace. Exciting…ehem.

If you were looking, like Quentin and myself, to mash up AIR with Photobucket, now you have something to do. You’ll enjoy working with the library. I’d like to try out a bunch of other methods on the api but that would entail having a creative brain wave on some new AIR app. I’ll keep you posted

Technorati Tags: actionscript, adobe air, flex, google code, library, photobucket api

I haven’t seen any ActionScript library projects yet, but then again I’ve been sitting in the dark for two weeks writing code and staying away from the sun…very healthy indeed. You may have noticed I didn’t exactly go to town on the blogging either, pardon my absense as I’ve been wholly absorbed with so much code flying through my neurons I feel like my head could split.

Does anyone know of any plans to crank out an AS3 lib for the Photobucket API? If so, I might want to jump on that one.

Technorati Tags: actionscript, adobe air, flex 3, flickr api, open source, photobucket

performs too slow to be useful on the iPhone

and that the mobile version of Flash

is not capable of being used with the Web

Steve Steve Steve. This from the same company that makes mice with one button. Now before we start a flame war where I’m accused of hating Macs, let me first say that I was a Macintosh user way before I ever used Windows. I currently use both. In fact, I was just looking to upgrade my G4 since it’s an old paper weight now. So rather than sort through the silly prices, I figured a new Mac Mini would suit my purposes just fine. While searching for one, I found heaps of them that were preloaded with…..oh man, Windows OS?! Ah yes, the old legacy of the Apple logo.

Buy an Apple machine, with the Mac OS ::cough cough UNIX cough cough:: with a nice new Intel chip, and wait……now you can get them with Windows installed? So what exactly warrants the insane prices? I’m getting a Mini because I refuse to pay a hoard of money for an Intel based, Windows OS dual boot with Unix. I can build my own box for far less

What’s wrong with you Steve? Now you’re giving Adobe some crapple because you say the iPhone, over priced ,AT&T one-widget-wonder of a miracle though it may be, won’t run the Flash Player (installed on over 98% of the world’s computers) fast enough? Why not just hand over it’s inards George Hotz, I’m sure he’ll get it up and running for you.

iPods and iTunes that you need a credit background check (practically) to play your freakin’ MP3s on? I have to say, I’m honestly not digging the whole Apple thing over the past few years. I can’t say that I’m sad I (a Flash and Flex developer) won’t be developing for the iPhone – oh crapple, NO! Won’t Bill Gates just hurry up and buy Jobs out already, don’t you owe him that much Bill?

Unless he’s got awesome evidence to prove it, and I’m leaning towards iPhone being a slow, over priced pile of crapple, than Jobs’ comments seem right up there with the folks who leave messages all over forums about how Flash is good only for annoying ads. Can you say, out of touch? I know, some of you will say ya but the iPhone allows this and that now, but to that I answer ” iPhone, iAmAnOverPricedPileOfCrapple” it’s the same crap. Sorry, but that’s about where I’m at now. I’ll still get my Mini because I MUST offer Mac support for my applications, but other than that, I think I’ll nail it to the wall pretty much just to show off the little Apple logo. I was thinking of just buying a cheap Dell Linux box, ripping out the guts and stuffing them in a shoe box with the Apple sticker on it and telling my clients that it’s a genuine “iAmNotFastEnough”.

Steve, I’m sure George would be willing to spend a weekend away from World of WarCraft and have a look at getting the Flash Player to work fast enough on your iPhone if you’d just ask him. Either that or take a look at the few 450 million Flash enabled devices that Ryan Stewart mentions, and maybe ask one of the companies who created them where they bought their hardware from.

I believe in you Steve!
P.S. Please send me an iPhone but not until you get the Flash Player working on it, otherwise just send me a Mini instead.

Technorati Tags: adobe, Apple, flash player, iphone, ipod, mac, steve jobs, Windows