Vote For My Adobe Flex Builder Feature Request!

We should be able to browse a .SWF file in Adobe Flex Builder allowing us to see the internal assets and classes just as if it where a folder/ tree like Flash Develop does. Also the ability to drag these elements or assets into a code document it would add it as an embed tag specific to the type of file you are in. MXML, CSS - BAM it knows how to embed it after dragging it over. Check Flash Develop for yourself to see how this works. I just think we need it in Flex Builder and would to see it added as a feature. If it's all about integration and enhancing workflow, well then let's keep doing that.

If you think my Adobe Flex Builder feature request is indeed something you'd like to see as a feature then please go vote for it by clicking the link below:

VOTE FOR THIS FEATURE HERE --- https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-12166

Note: voting is on the left panel of the page and you'll need to login :)

Thanks!

ActionScript 4.0 - A Distant Glimpse

From Colin Moock's Blog

http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000268.html:

"Last fall, the working group responsible for designing the next version of ECMAScript released an overview of proposed features for ECMAScript 4. ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, so the hypothetical ActionScript 4.0 will undoubtedly support some, if not all, of the proposed features.

In February and April (in Amsterdam and Toronto, respectively), I'll be doing a lecture at FITC covering the ECMAScript 4 features that will theoretically be added to ActionScript 4.0.

Read my FITC lecture notes here:
>> http://moock.org/lectures/newInECMAScript4/

Get information about FITC here:
>> http://www.fitc.ca/"

Upcoming Lecture: ActionScript 4.0? >>

 

From David Tucker's Blog

http://www.davidtucker.net/2008/02/16/moock-on-actionscript-4/

"Colin Moock is presenting details of ECMAScript 4 at FITC. He has posted some of his lecture notes regarding changes (that will probably be present in ActionScript 4 as well). These changes include:

• Generic Functions: This functionality will add Java-style method overloading to ActionScript. A function must be defined with the keyword generic, but then mutliple methods (with different method signatures) can be used.
• Iterators and Generators: Increased support for iterating over a series of values using a class defined iterator. Both of these items are very Python-like.
• Proper Tail Calls: A function can properly call another function as its last operation - this adds increased support for recursion patterns.
• New Number Types: byte, double, decimal (and the current generic ‘Number’ type would be removed)
• Numeric Suffixes: As in Java, numeric literals will have suffixes to denote their specific numeric type.
• Vector Type: As in Java, there will be a mono-typed array called Vector. Length can optionally be pre-defined at creation.
• Record Type: Describes the details of an object - easier to create than a class. I believe it is dynamic - in that it has required values, but additional properties can be defined per instance.
• Array Type: A type that describes what will be contained within an array. For example - you could say that you will have a 7-element array made up of Strings.
• Union Types: A property (or argument) could be one of a list of types (as opposed to now where a property has to be of one type - or no type). This would give you the ability to have an argument that could be a String or XML - but nothing else.

In addition there appears to be changed to the primitive types and the addition of wrapper classes for some of the types (again, like Java). I believe these changes indicate also that the next AVM (ActionScript Virtual Machine) will be even faster - thus increasing the capability of applications that can be delivered through Flash, Flex, and AIR. This is certainly needed as some developers are already pushing the current AVM to the max (mostly with the 3D rendering engines).

UPDATE: - Francis Cheng (on the ECMAScript Committee) is now blogging about some of the details regarding ECMAScript 4."

Moock on ActionScript 4 >>

The Last Lecture of Randy Pausch - People vs. Things

Anyone who knows me well and works with me on daily basis knows that I think a good attitude, a positive vibe, willingness to always learn while being humble are traits that are imperative to making teams work well together internally and externally between other teams. I have worked in places where it absolutely sucked and people loved to talk shit and didn't accept positivity (SP) I say F@k that! It has been my experience that being energetic and helping your teammates succeed, and grow and learn in a team environment is something that can really be gratifying in so many ways. Set the example and don't let anyone bring you down (SP). See by doing this, it helps you in those areas mentioned as well. Personally, over the last 5 years I have really found that being a happy and helpful person really yields much more satisfaction in life and can really come back in many more ways than I can describe in this little blog post. So the real thing of importance I wanted to mention here is that my Mother-In-Law sent me this video yesterday about a man who is dying, knows he is dying and yet chooses to live in such a way that is happy and filled with so much meaning even though he is fully aware that he is not going to be around much longer. See I am blogging about this because I strongly believe that watching or even being like this man (Randy Pausch) can really send a powerful message here. Be Happy and live life and help others do the same. Follow your dreams and inspirations no matter what any Luddite or curmudgeon will say or do. I think this applies to being a good husband, father, super creative individual, working in our field of computers and programming as well as anything in life for that matter.

"Never underestimate the importance of having fun" - Randy Pausch

Anyway's, just watch this for yourself and you'll see this amazing lecture.

 

Randy Pausch reprising his inspirational and moving "Last Lecture" (Oct 22, 2007). See the full-length CMU version at www.cs.virginia.edu/robins/Randy_Last_Lecture.html and the full-length version of this reprise at www.cs.virginia.edu/robins/Randy_Oprah.html Randy Pausch (www.randypausch.com) is a virtual reality pioneer, human-computer interaction researcher, co-founder of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (www.etc.cmu.edu), and creator of the Alice (www.alice.org) software project. High-resolution downloadable versions of Randy's videos, including a longer version of this TV appearance, can be found at www.cs.virginia.edu/robins/Randy

 

Video of Randy Pausch reprising his Last Lecture>>

Randy Pausch's Web Site >>

Accessibility Best Practices for Flex

Our team at work recently has been looking into accessibility with Flex and addressing it as important. I personally feel accessibility is something that gets overlooked or becomes some distant after thought - ALMOST EVERY F@K!&G TIME! Well, this time we are preparing in advance for accessibility and I am very happy about this. I found this really good article today about Flex Accessibility and how to make your Flex app more accessible to people who need to use screen readers. The one thing about this article I found interesting was that Adobe tested their components with the JAWS 9 Screen Reader from Freedom Scientific. Read more about JAWS here: Using Adobe Flex applications with JAWS. Anyway's, I'll keep posting more about my findings with Flex accessibility and 508 Standards and Compliancy. So I'll definitely keep posting about this important topic in the near future.

P.S. Somehow, I get the feeling that there must be more to test on than just the Jaws screen reader but we'll see.

I did notice that Flex is not accessible by default and requires the following:

To enable accessibility, you can use one of the following methods:

• Enable accessibility by default for all Flex applications so that all requests return accessible content.

  To enable accessibility for all Flex applications, edit the flex-config.xml file to set the <accessible> property to true, as the following example shows:

  <compiler>
    ...
    <accessible>true</accessible>
    ...
  <compiler>
  

  
  
• Enable accessibility when you are using the mxmlc command-line compiler.
  
  

  When you compile a file by using the mxmlc command-line compiler, you can use the -accessible option to enable accessibility, as the following example shows:

  mxmlc -accessible c:/dev/myapps/mywar.war/app1.mxml
  

"Macromedia Flex includes 22 components with built-in accessibility support. These components automate many of the most common accessibility practices and radically simplify and accelerate the process of creating accessible Rich Internet Applications. Designed and tested by Macromedia, these components automatically inherit accessibility features and help the developer apply accessibility standards to their application development with significantly less work.

This article is designed to establish a basic framework that you can use to develop accessible applications with Macromedia Flex. The central tenet of accessible design is to test, test, and test again. This also presents the greatest challenge of accessible design. To build accessible applications with Flex, developers must cultivate a limited understanding of a screen reader and other assistive technologies.

This article will cover the following topics:

• Defining User Requirements
  
  
• Flex Accessibility Best Practices
  
  
• Accessible Components Information"

Frustration with accessibility in Flash and Flex >>

Accessibility Best Practices for Flex >>

Flex Accessibility Overview >>

Accessibility overview -- Flex 2.01 >>

Using Adobe Flex applications with JAWS >>

508 Tools & Resources >>

Free! - Using the Web Accessibility Toolbar >>

Flex 360 Atlanta - Coming Soon!

Nearly two thirds of the presentations from the recent Interaction 08 Conference are now online - FREE

Bryan Wills let me know yesterday that a lot of the presentation videos from the Interaction 08 Conference are online and available for free. I watch some of these already and they are very good and very informative videos. If you are into interaction design then you will want to peep these for sure.

http://www.experientia.com/blog/videos-of-interaction-08-presentations-now-online/

Frankie's First Flex Sprout Test Application

 

This morning I used the Sprout Beta today and was able to put together a pretty basic little custom widget in about 1 minute. So far from what I have seen and used it's pretty fresh because it saved my configuration and published straight to this blog. I had to make one small change and it made it automatically and let me publish it right back to this post. I think this is going to be a really popular RIA that gets used for almost everything since it will be so easy to use for most people and it's entirely web based.

http://sproutbuilder.com/

http://greenhouse.sproutbuilder.com/

Exploring a unified component workflow between Flex and Flash - by: R Blank

I was reading this Flash article this weekend and found it to be very informative regarding a unified Flash and Flex workflow. I suggest you read it if you want to learn the nuances of the Flex Component Kit and it's quirks and the one topic I especially found interesting was how to get a Fla-Editable Flash Component using the "ComponentShim" object. This article provides great insight into the things you might run into in your work and helps you understand some of the solutions to these issues.

From Flash Article - "Building applications in Adobe Flash that can also be used as Adobe Flex components can be a challenge, as I learned with a project involving an embeddable video player. Learn from this example how to create a project enabling you to share code across three versions of this player published as a stand-alone Flash application, a Flash-generated Flex component, and an editable Flash CS3 Professional component."

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flex_component_workflow.html

 

 

 

See Also:  Creating FLA-Based Components in Flash CS3 -  http://www.flashbrighton.org/wordpress/?p=31

Flex 3.0 - Full CSS Properties List - Simple View

Ever wanted to just see every single CSS class or property that was available in Flex 3 easily without having to use Design View or Code Hinting? Yeah me too! I couldn't find a real good assimilation of css in one simple like Adobe has for their Class View or Package View so I made a quick one by doing a Grep Search in the entire Flex framework directory and pulled out each [Style] tag for each respective class. Keep in mind that some of these objects or components use and inherit other styles and that is not yet reflected in my list. But it will soon! Anyway's, I really got tired of not having this super basic list for Flex CSS for each class, and since Adobe didn't make this CSS List and just thought code hinting in the IDE was enough, I just made one real quick. it's not the most detailed, but it's a list. Again, I am aware you can view these things in the Design View, but does that make it right that there isn't a list of things like this for Flex CSS? I don't think so.

View Entire Flex 3.0 CSS Class List at one time >>

Doug McCune - Full video of his 360|Flex Seattle session on Custom Flex Component Development

Doug McCune is a great person to learn from. I don't know him personally, but we read and keep up with his work and posts here. So I thought since he was so kind to share this with us, I'd just keep sharing it with you. Doug's work is amazing and his advice on Flex Custom Component work is great. You can definitely learn a ton from Doug!

Doug McCune @ 360Flex Seattle - Custom Component Development from Doug McCune on Vimeo.

 

Thanks for the Video Doug!

Indentured Code Servitude?

Ok, this is ridiculous. Just read this and then tell me what the F@&! is wrong with this.

From rentacoder.com site -  "We are looking for 2 senior level coders to come to the United States to work with us. We will pay for roundtrip airfare, hotel stays, and monthly salaries. We will give an invitation for Visa to the coder after one year of working with us through RAC... if it works out during our RAC experience we will send the invitation. All expenses paid!
Must have excellent ratings on RAC!
You will be our employees. We are willing to pay $750 per month for each coder. Each coder will do 4 projects (social networking sites or same in complexity type projects) The coder will have his own modules and we can also provide modules too. Projects are to be between 1-2 months time. We will pay extra $50 bonus if the project is done within 5 weeks time.
Only high level senior coders with at least 3-4 years experience should apply. Thank you."

http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/BidRequests/ShowBidRequest.asp?lngBidRequestId=852831

 

ARE YOU KIDDING ME! WOW, an extra 50 Bucks if I do it early! Then maybe, just maybe they can get their passport back too when they are done.  I'm sorry but this kind of stuff really makes me upset. I mean it's an insult to any senior level coder that takes the position. Maybe the person will find an better life by taking this job, but I bet they are surprised when they find out how cheap and arrogant the employer really is and they end up wishing they never came here because they where expecting more i.e. "All expenses paid!". I mean wow. Max Bid is $750 + an EXTRA 50 Bucks. Any "senior level coder" should be appalled by that offer.

There's my 10 cents, 2 cents is free!

Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 - Erroneous and Buggy? So far it seems so.

Every time I use the Flex Component Kit in any way with my Flash CS3 animations I get errors all over the place. Not sure why. I followed the instructions for install and performed the tasks needed to make this work. I appreciate the work that has gone into these tools but for some reason I can break this shit easily every time and really it just makes me want to forget about the fact that they where ever made for us Flex / Flash designers in the first place. I have some ideas for design / integration with Flash and Flex that I will probably blog about in a few days hopefully. I'm sure it won't do any good but I don't really care. That's the beauty of the blog. I can just say it anyway.

 

 

So far I haven't been able to get any of my Flash animations to work right from this tool so I can then inegrate them with Flex. Maybe in future iterations this will get better but for now I just had to share my frustrations. I am grateful for the integration tools Adobe Engineers build us, but I am just extra grateful for the ones that actually work for me!

User Interface Design Patterns

Bryan Wills just sent this link to me to UI Patterns. It's pretty slick and really makes the terminology and practice something that can be discussed and displayed commonly. It's nice to see some commonality for design and application related techniques like this site offers. I have a feeling that this will become more prevalent as we continue to develop rich and dynamic web applications and we continue to put the concepts and implementations into words. So designers, not just developers can talk the talk and have common ground about what works and what doesn't for certain UI's or "recurring solutions to solve common problems".

From their Site:

"It has long been common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are also called design patterns. Collections of software design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him.

UI-Patterns.com are not the first to create a UI design library. While other pattern collections are useful, they are far from coherent and complete. The purpose of this site is over time to fill some of the gaps - especially by providing code examples as to how how the different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice."

http://ui-patterns.com/

Also check out Yahoo's Design Pattern Library: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/

Passion, Skill and 'Having A Blast' - Interview with Dave Thomas

I watched this video the other day and really thought it was really powerful. Dave Thomas ( No Not From Wendy's! ) spoke about some very great topics and I really recommend that anyone with a passion for computers in general watch this interview. The one thing I found very intriguing was how he finds that people who come from non-programming backgrounds tend to be very good developers and problem solvers. I found this very inspiring as I have a very strong Art and Design background and am really getting into the development side now as well. Anyway's you should watch it, it's a great inspiring and very informative video.

 

Summary
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!

Bio
Dave Thomas is recognized internationally as an expert who develops high-quality software - accurate and highly flexible systems. He helped write the now-famous Agile Manifesto, and regularly speak on new ways of producing software. He is the author of six books, including the best selling The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.

 

Watch Interview with Dave Thomas:

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/dave-thomas-agile-passion

FlexSpy - A Handy Runtime Tool for Flex Designing

I was reading some feeds today and came across this super handle tool called FlexSpy. I remember working with friend Guy Wyatt a while back to do a very crude thing like this for our AS2 casino games. Only we didn't have [Bindable] available to us so it would have made something like this way harder. This tool has been developed very nicely and works well. One thing that is really nice is having the ability to edit and change elements and value at runtime, browse and modify .CSS, and the really nice ability to pick an object target and inspect it's properties. But be warned if you are using the new Flex 3 stuff it might break and crash in some places. I happened to test it in an app that heavily used modules and ItemRenderers etc... and the tool crashed my app. So it works well when it works, but it crashes bad when it doesn't. Perhaps it needs some Flex 3 tweaking or something, But it is most definitely worth looking at.

Description from website: "Flex-Spy allow you to inspect and dynamically change most properties and styles of the visual components in your Flex application. You can - for example - try out a specific width or a background color for your component before changing it in your code."

Check out and download the FlexSpy code here >>

 

 

 

http://code.google.com/p/fxspy/