« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »
June 27, 2007
Slides and Samples from Flex Maniacs
Here are the slides and sample code from my various talks at Flex Maniacs. Enjoy!
Keynote: Slides
ActionScript 3 Performance: Slides Code
Posted by mchotin at 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 26, 2007
Info on Flex/.NET interoperability
Mark Piller has written an article explaining how Flex and .NET classes map to each other. Good info to know if you develop for both!
Posted by mchotin at 11:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 25, 2007
Flex Code Hinting Component
Andrew Brindamour is an intern on our team and has written a new component for doing simple hinting (similar to Auto Complete, but different). He has a thorough explanation of what he's done as well. Check it out!
Posted by mchotin at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 18, 2007
Adobe Digital Editions now available
Check out our latest release of Adobe Digital Editions. It was built using Flex 2! Right now it isn't an Adobe AIR application, but we imagine once AIR hits 1.0 Digital Editions might move to be that. For now it uses custom build of the Flash Player, but the install experience is easy-peasy.
Posted by mchotin at 09:55 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 14, 2007
Registration for MAX 2007 Now Open
We've finally got the registration open for MAX 2007 in Chicago this year. You can go learn more and sign up here. Also check out Ted's post on his new role as MAX evangelist and how he's working with the rest of the team to make MAX even better.
Posted by mchotin at 08:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 12, 2007
Chat me up on The Flex Show
In case you hadn't heard I'll be doing a live interview with The Flex Show on Wednesday June 13 at 4pm PDT, 7pm EDT. Please join us on the Skypecast and we'll talk about the recent Flex 3 launch, open source, and whatever else comes up!
Posted by mchotin at 09:44 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Flex Developers needed for user research
Adobe User Research would like to talk to Flex developers next week in our historic San Francisco office. We know your time is valuable, so in exchange for your coming to our office on Townsend Street (at 7th Street) for about an hour, we would be happy to give you $100.
To see if you qualify for this research, please take a minute to answer the short survey we have posted here.
And remember, we hate spam as much as you do, so we never share your information outside of Adobe User Research.
If you are not a Flex user but would like to participate in other paid user research conducted by Adobe, please register at http://www.adobe.com/survey.
And thanks! We couldn't do it without our fantastic and opinionated customers!
Posted by mchotin at 09:38 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 11, 2007
New Adobe AIR App: MediaWiki Uploader
As part of the Flex 3 launch I needed to upload about 70 images for the feature introductions. Those of you who use MediaWiki (the wiki system on Labs) may know that it doesn't support uploading multiple files at once. Each upload to the Labs wiki requires choosing the image via the file chooser and checking a box saying that you own copyright. Rather than do this work myself I decided to see if I still remembered how to code and wrote up a quick app using Adobe AIR so that I could upload lots of images at once. I'm making the app available to you all under the MIT license to do with what you please.
Download the AIR (requires Adobe AIR Beta 1)
Download the source (in theory you should be able to import this as a project into Flex Builder)
This app was interesting to build as it had a few interesting challenges.
1. Don't you need to be logged in to upload?
Yes! And since this is an AIR application it wasn't sharing my session with Firefox. So I wrote a login service (HTTPService) to execute the login for me (against my staging server). Easy enough except that it was difficult to tell when things were going wrong due to not wanting to add lots of debugging code to the app. So I used my trusty network sniffer (I used the one that comes with JRun but lots of folks use Wireshark or Charles) to figure out where I was going wrong and got the login working. One thing I noticed was that the response on a successful login (and also upload) to my testing wiki was a 302 redirection which the Player did not follow. However it treated the call as a success, and since I wasn't going for solid code I let it be.
2. How do you go about uploading the image?
I went to the upload page and looked at the source to figure out the parameters that were needed. Believe it or not, this is my first Flex app where I've done file uploading. Fortunately the docs for FileReference.upload were pretty easy to understand. I was able to see most of the variables that I needed to set by looking at the form items and filled in the URLVariables to be sent along with the upload request. I created a DataGrid where you can edit the display name, but I didn't actually want to change the names so I didn't even test to see if my changes would have worked.
So now I could upload multiple images to my staging server (I actually did two different staging servers because I didn't want to corrupt the real staging server). This allowed me to shake out a minor difference between the two so now my system could upload to both. But then I faced my final challenge...
3. The Labs wiki doesn't use MediaWiki's account management, it uses adobe.com's!
Oops! I thought I might have just wasted a few hours of coding since I wouldn't be able to do my real uploads with my fancy new tool. Then I had a thought...the http session information and cookies are shared between HTML and Flash in AIR. All I need to do is use an HTML control, navigate to the wiki and sign in there, then I don't need to use my custom login stuff for this particular wiki. So I created a new Window, put an HTML control in there (nice job Gordon!), threw in a TextInput so I could quickly change the location, and away we went. Final complication though is that login on adobe.com is through https but all of the other urls were http. The HTML control didn't seem to like moving back and forth. So I simply used the TextInput to change to some urls that I knew would work, and despite the fact that sometimes the redirections didn't work, when I then went to the Labs page I could see I was logged in. Tried to upload a file, and voila!
My new HTML window gave me an extra bonus, I could now check the wiki's recently added images special page to ensure that everything was getting up there OK.
Note that this was really written as a utility for me, so I made no usability fixes. The wiki url must basically be the root of the wiki with no trailing slash: e.g., http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php. I don't do any corrections if the url is invalid. And there is no error handling whatsoever. If someone was interested in making it more robust I'd be happy to link to your verision (or repost it).
Posted by mchotin at 09:00 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 01, 2007
Flex Early Evaluation Guide Now Available
Have you ever been told to take a day and learn about a new technology and figure out if it's right for your project? Time to start surfing the web and trying to find different resources, right? Well the guys at effectiveUI have written a new O'Reilly Shortcut: Flex Early Evaluation: Assessing Flex and Your Project Needs. It includes a breakdown of what Flex is all about including a high-level summary of its features and a brief example to demonstrate its capabilities.
I assume that most of my readers already have and love Flex :-) But if you need a single document which provides a lot of information to give to colleagues or managers or friends, this shortcut might be perfect!
Posted by mchotin at 09:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Flex 3 Details Coming Soon
Ted's announced that he's going to be sharing details of what's in Flex 3 starting next week. Ted's sneaky. He's going to blog all this cool stuff and everyone's going to love him for it. Then someone's going to ask for a feature that Flex 3 isn't supporting. What's Ted going to do? I bet he'll tell them to complain to me. I hate being the bad guy! Why can't I reveal all the cool stuff and get the Flex love?
Posted by mchotin at 08:51 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack