June 17, 2008
AIR Cookbook now in beta
The Flex Cookbook is a great way to learn how to do specific tasks in Flex and is growing every day. Now we have the AIR Cookbook to go along with it. Learn how to accomplish things using both Flex and HTML to best leverage AIR. And once again, contributions to the online cookbook will be considered for inclusion in the upcoming O'Reilly printed edition as well!
Posted by mchotin at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2008
Flex 3 Cookbook Cookoff
The Flex Cookbook is a great resource for those who need to learn how to accomplish specific tasks. In fact, it's such a great resource that some of its recipes were contributed into the official O'Reilly Flex 3 Cookbook!
Now O'Reilly is hosting a contest for the best newly submitted recipes. Check out the details over on InsideRIA!
Posted by mchotin at 05:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2008
Flex and AIR books abound!
One of the benefits of being a public-facing Flex team member is that publishers and authors send me copies of their books. It's pretty cool how many Flex and AIR related books have been coming out recently. To name a few delivered to me recently:
Beginning AIR by Rich Tretola
Flex 3 Training from the Source by Jeff Tapper, Michael Labriola, Matt Boles, and James Talbot
Flex Solutions by Marco Casario
Publishers like O'Reilly, Friends of Ed, and WROX are really stepping up and it's great to see. You can see a comprehensive list of Flex books over at flex.org. But make sure to check out your favorite bookseller directly since there are a ton on AIR coming out as well!
Posted by mchotin at 04:14 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
February 27, 2008
Learn more about BlazeDS on Thursday
Edited on 2/28 because I was already thinking about the ship party and got my days screwed up
Tom Jordahl, an engineer on the BlazeDS/LiveCycle DS team is giving a talk on BlazeDS that will be available over Acrobat Connect. Definitely worth checking out! More info on Tom's blog.
Posted by mchotin at 05:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 21, 2008
InsideRIA now live
Looks like the world already knows but a great new site, InsideRIA is now up and running. Owned by O'Reilly, sponsored by Adobe, two great companies build one awesome site. You'll find all sorts of information there about building RIAs: from the tools and technologies, to best practices and standards, to discussions on design. Just looking at the initial line up of contributors makes it pretty clear you're going to be getting first-class information.
Congratulations to all the folks making this possible, especially Rich and Andre.
Posted by mchotin at 05:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 19, 2007
Get yourself published in the Flex Cookbook
More info on the Flex team blog.
Posted by mchotin at 09:23 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 28, 2007
Check out our new Adobe Developer Connection
I'm very excited that our new Adobe Developer Connection has launched, a complete revamp of the Adobe Developer Center. A great new UI and some good content as well, including our new Flex Interface Guide. A lot of great new content right as we head into MAX!
Posted by mchotin at 07:52 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 18, 2007
30 Days of Free Flex Training
Have you wanted to take advantage of some of the comprehensive training that has been designed by Adobe and given by some fantastic presenters? Now you can experience 30 days of training for free, offered by our friends at Total Training. Learn more about the offer here!
Posted by mchotin at 06:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 30, 2007
New Flex Cookbook Eclipse Plugin
Want an easy way to check the cookbook? Use the new Flex Cookbook RSS Plugin for Eclipse! An easy way to see what's going on in the world of the cookbook.
Posted by mchotin at 08:04 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
April 30, 2007
Cookbook Questions in Need of Answers
The Flex Cookbook is a great resource but there are plenty of questions looking for answers. If you'd be interested in writing up an entry but were looking for topics, check out the open questions cookbook entry, pick a topic, and write away!
Posted by mchotin at 10:46 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 05, 2007
Flex course you should check out: Programming the Visual Experience
I've seen people asking for learning materials to make a Flex app not look like a Flex app. I think if you look at some of the apps that are coming out like Picnik and Flip's Flipbooks you can see some pretty neat design elements going in, not the standard Flex skins. If you want to learn more about how to create these kinds of apps, check out the Adobe Training course: Programming the Visual Experience. Total Training has released a DVD version of this course as well.
I think people have generally been very happy with these courses, so if you've got the interest I'd highly recommend them.
Posted by mchotin at 09:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 18, 2006
Flex Cookbook Beta now Live!
I'm very excited that the Flex Cookbook is now live in beta form. A common request that I see is the need for more samples. The cookbook provides a great mechanism, a simple Problem/Solution/Explanation format that gets you code and answers in a taggable and searchable format.
Flexcoders has so much traffic these days and many questions are ones we've seen before. The Flex cookbook is going to help us out by providing a central repository for commonly needed code and solutions.
So start posting your own tips and make sure to add the cookbook as a valuable resource for your Flex coding needs!
Posted by mchotin at 06:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 10, 2006
Please take the Flex Learning Resources survey!
We're always looking to improve our documentation and samples, etc. Please take a few minutes to fill out our survey and give us your feedback!
Posted by mchotin at 02:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 07, 2006
Quickstarts Complete!
The last 3 quickstarts have been posted on the Developer Center:
Loading external data with HTTPService
Thanks especially to Aral for helping us out with these!
Posted by mchotin at 05:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 29, 2006
Flex 2 Learning Materials
One of the things that I focused on for the last 5 months of the Flex 2 release was the different learning materials that we wanted to get out. We decided to operate under the "more is better" principle, so I'd like to mention a few of the things that we did.
1) Introduced the Quick Starts: The Quick Starts are a series of short articles that serve as introductions to basic features and tasks that you will want to accomplish as you get going with Flex. Aral Balkan has done most of the writing. Each article points into the standard docs for more information.
2) Added to the ASDoc examples and made them consistent with the Component Explorer. There is no difference in the examples between these two resources, the explorer is now essentially a different way of indexing into them. All those other examples that used to be in the explorer? Well I'm expecting them to go into number 3...
3) Introduced the cookbook. We're still working out the final name and don't have a good codename, but that shouldn't stop you from being excited about this great resource we're building. You can read all about it in Craig's article, and make sure to let us know if you're interested in joining the seed program to help contribute initial content, provide feedback on the UI, etc. We're going to try to keep releasing more information on this project so that everyone knows what's coming, but it is unfortunately still a little ways off from being ready. Frankly this is the one that most excites me. But I'm still pretty happy with number 4...
4) New samples! You can see the current SDK samples here but it will be another week or two before I have the FDS samples hosted publicly (hardware took longer to arrive than expected). Each sample is trying to highlight different things in the framework and describes what it's doing in the associated README. Please take a look and give us feedback as to what other samples you might wish to see. I often hear "more samples with source" but if there's techniques you feel we should be demonstrating, please let us know.
Of course on top of this the Flex IMD team has done a tremendous job working on the documentation, we've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it but can always use more (good and bad). And I'm pretty excited to see the number of Flex books planned, I will happily plug your book if you send me a copy :-)
The Flex team will continue to provide samples and other learning materials, but what excites me most is the level of enthusiasm I see in the community towards helping each other. It's great to have this spirit and I really look forward to seeing what everyone will be coming up with.
Make sure to let us know the things we could improve to make your learning experiences even better!
Posted by mchotin at 10:33 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack
May 31, 2006
Learn from the Kiwi Team
Check out the Kiwi Team Blog where all sorts of good information is being posted. Brian Riggs has just added a great introduction to the architecture involved in a large Flex app. Definitely worth a read.
Posted by mchotin at 09:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 15, 2006
Samples on the Adobe Developer Center
I wanted to point out a preview of what's to come for Flex 2 samples on the Developer Center. We've just posted a description of the SDK Dashboard sample and provided a link to the running version.
When Flex 2 launches we're hoping to get every sample that ships with the product (both SDK and FDS) its own description on the Developer Center along with links to a running version of the app (where you can view source). We're hoping that this exposure to the sample code along with more detailed descriptions about what the sample shows and why it's important will be one of many steps in improving our resources for the developer community.
Every description that's posted (and every README shipped with the samples) will have a description of the app, features highlighted from the framework and FDS (if appropriate), and any additional implementation notes that might be important.
The dashboard example is short, but if you've downloaded Flex 2 Beta 3 check out the restaurant sample README.html and you'll see more.
Feel free to post comments on the README format and contents here.
Posted by mchotin at 09:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 25, 2005
Macromedia Training Is Great!
Check out this post by Steven Erat on the Flex for ColdFusion Developers course he took recently. These kinds of courses are offered all the time and all over; very worthwhile to rapidly increase your skills or if you're trying to find out if Flex can really suit your needs .
Posted by mchotin at 10:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 21, 2004
What Are Your Favorite Learning Materials?
One of the things we're constantly doing with Flex is adding to and improving the learning materials provided with the product and on the web site. This includes prose documentation, the ASDoc API descriptions, sample applications, and tutorials. I'm probably going to be spending a good deal of time on these over the next few months, and will be looking to the community for feedback and suggestions. So let's get started with some not-so-simple questions...
What learning materials would you hold up as an example of how to do things correctly? What specifically did you like about them? For example, I've heard that ASP.NET gets high marks for its documentation. Have you used any of it? Anything to share?
Any particular Macromedia documentation that stands out for us to emulate? Suppose hypothetically that Macromedia had to focus on just one kind of learning material; where would you want that focus? Samples? Tutorials? Some new kind of material?
All feedback appreciated for now; this is the warmup. More detailed questions to follow as we pick up steam on this effort.
Posted by mchotin at 05:25 PM | Comments (18)