Tour de Flex..

Josh Buhler has posted this very useful AIR app, tour de Flex. I love this application, it's like Flex help on steroids.

The application has a ton of code examples from the basic Flex APIs to third party examples like Doug McCune's Coverflow. Each section offers references to the specific component or API you selected and some even offer downloads of the source code right from the app.

By far the most comprehensive look into flex I have ever seen. I must for flex devs.

Check it!

AT&T Sweeps: Guitar Hero

We at the fish just launched a new site for AT&T featuring guitar hero. I love the visual/sound we incorporated in the site. Let me know what you think.

Check it!

Romke and Nate AIR Classes @ UWM

So Nate Frank and I are teaching a one day session on AIR (using Flex) at UWM's Center for Technology Innovation. Want to learn more about AIR? This one day session will dive into the AIR api and also get into micro architectures in flex that can help you organize you AIR app!

Check it out.

Zend and Flex Free eSeminar from Adobe.

Looking to get a bit more out of your Flex experience? Check out this free eSeminar from Adobe to learn about the collaboration that will bring together the flexibility, productivity and enterprise reliability of PHP and Zend Platform with the user experience benefits of Flex.

Register here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

Discover why Adobe Flex 3 is a complete application development solution for creating and delivering cross-platform RIAs within the enterprise, across the web, and on the desktop.

I have been getting more into integrating Flex with other back-ed technologies. I am sure this will be a good one.

Wanna Learn Flex?

Having a little trouble getting all the intricacies behind Flex? No problem. Adobe is creating a series of videos and tutorials, hosted on the Adobe Developer Center, that will help you get all the basic knowledge you'll need to work in Flex in a week. The first 3 days have been completed, with days 4 and 5 following shortly. Head on over there and pave your way to becoming a Flex star!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

I love flex and I think if you learned it too you would love it.

ECMA Snappin'

I remember when AS3 first came out they stated that it was based off of ES4 "proposed" standards. Now I thought to myself "proposed", wow risky. If they were going to put all their eggs in one basket using a "proposed" standard would have me stressin'.

Today the Flash and ECMA communities have been a buzz because of a decision made at the latest Oslo meeting to merge the two groups to focus on ECMA 3.1 development. Creating Harmony.

So the big question running through most ActionScript developers is "Where does that leave AS3". Now, I can't possibly see namespaces and packages going away, which is something that ES 3.1 has removed. I will say that it does leave for an interesting future for Adobe. They have been great at adopting standards and opening their technologies to allow future growth. Now with such a change of events will they reformat their language to follow the new standard or keep going with it's already great leap forward.

I tried rounding up all the articles I read about this here. I am nowhere near a ECMA expert but I found it helpful to read over these sites and hear what the experts have to say. Hopefully it will help you understand it a bit more.


http://drawlogic.com/2008/08/14/es4-is-now-es31-es4-is-no-more-merges-with-es3-spec/

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/003400.html

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es3.x-discuss/2008-August/000469.html

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/javascript_stal.html

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/08/ru-roh-adobe-screwed-by-ecmascript.html

http://joshblog.net/2008/08/13/how-will-ecmascript-harmony-affect-actionscript-3/

FDT 3.1 StandAlone

So now that I am moving more to AS3/Flex development I have found myself more and more using Flex Builder to build Flash based applications. I still use FDT 1.5 for AS2 projects because of some odd bugs in FDT 3 that I have seen other developers run into.

With that said I did just get my FDT 3 license and I thought I would start it off with the FDT 3.1 stand alone version. I read that some of the bugs developers ran into are fixed in this version. There are some cool features I thought I would mention in the new FDT stand alone:

Shipped Flex SDK (3.0.477)
- FDT Intro Contribution
- FDT Cheat Sheets
- AIR Debug Launcher as SWF Viewer
- AIR Release Launcher
- SWC Outline view
- QuickTrace..

More on FDT

Caravella Limoncello Drink Recipes

We just launched a Flex and Papervision mini-site for Caravella Limoncello. I am really excited to have launched this project and think it came out great. It was also the first time we got our designers involved with the whole Flex process and they seemed to have loved it.

Check out the site and let me know what you think!

Simple AS3

Josh Tynjala took Colin Moock Charges Against AS3 and turned it into a solution called SimpleAS3. I know alot of flash designers and old school developers will love this approach because it helps them to get into AS3 without worrying to much about all the headaches of learning the new structure.

I gotta say though I am on the fence with this one. Is this framework getting developers into a bad habits? Shouldn't you just learn how to do things the right way instead of just reverting to older practices? I guess it's like the argument with CSS developers snapping that tables are not proper use of HTML for layout. Some developers still use it.

In any regard it's still an interesting solution to the problem and I am sure will get adopted by a lot of people.

Check it.