Topic Archive: Flex

Flash Player on iPhone gossip

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, October 3, 2008 @ 7:59 am

First thing that came to my mind when I initially heard about the iPhone was the multi-touch possibilities that would start changing the way we create Flash/Flex interfaces (hopefully through SDK extension supporting multi-touch on Adobe's side triggered by iPhone release).

It looked very promising and natural to me in the beginning that this will be the route. Flash is a great part of the Internet experience and iPhone is a great mobile device for, among other things, Internet access.

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Symphony of Ruby on Rails and Flex through RubyAMF

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 25, 2008 @ 12:27 pm

In a project that I am currently a part of, we inherited Ruby on Rails from our client's system and project front-end was designated to be developed in Flex. RubyAMF came naturally.

I have been working with two other AMF frameworks prior to this: AMFPHP and WebOrb. My experience with both was that they are fairly hard to set up and once you go through that minefield, everything works excellent. No need to say that I am a great advocate of AMF in general. RubyAMF brings the same good old AMF but with a stunning ease and speed of development!

My colleague working on the Ruby side, Justin Ficke, introduced me to code and architecture of Ruby on Rails and I was impressed to see with what ease, precision and speed can one develop it.

Justin and I put a little test together of this architecture and here is a screen cast of it.

All the lovely custom typed objects and speed of data transfer are there. Beauty of it, appart from obvious benefits from AMF, is that the development process couldn't have been better and faster.

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Mouse wheel (scroll) Event in Flash Player running on a Mac

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 1:04 pm

One of the great advantages of Flash technology is cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. That is almost entirely true but a few things did slip Adobe.

A big issue that was overlooked is support for mouse wheel event on Mac OSX. A pretty basic functionality you would think. If your interface is heavily relying on mouse scrolling, your audience on Mac's will probably have a "so how does this work" blank stare.

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Flash/Flex physics engines and examples

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 10:25 am

Flash technology has gone a long way from simple vector animations. Today it has support for video and audio, 3d rendering and interaction, all kinds of advanced data visualization libraries, great components of all shapes, sizes and purposes.

What caught my eye lately is that there is a lot of 2D and 3D Physics engines being added to the list.
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Data visualization and the art of conveying information

Sasha Dzeletovic, Tuesday, September 2, 2008 @ 1:42 am

As a coder, I go over tremendous amount of information on daily basis. My case is no different than anybody's else living in the world today. Regardless of where we live and how we spend our time we are saturated with all kinds of information, a lot of it that we don't care about and a lot of it that we wish we had fast access to, if at all.

Ironically, computer technology adds to the problem more often than not. All that computational power is often just creating more data that we will never experience because there's just too much of it everywhere and all the time. Traditional techniques of consuming information are becoming too slow and narrow to handle this kind of pace.

We have all heard that a "picture speaks a thousand words". Doesn't that sound like an efficient way to consume information? Now, there are pictures and there are pictures.

There are pictures that strike a cord with you and there are pictures that leave you bland. Which one are you more likely to remember and allot the time of your mind?

Here are some libraries for data visualization in Flex/Flash as well as some artful experiments that I found to be good tools/examples of data visualization.
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Flex Gauge Component Example with source

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, August 21, 2008 @ 6:41 pm

This example covers how to build a simple 360 degrees gauge Flex component. It has public properties that allow you to easily adjust the appearance of the component for colors, size, font size, guideline thickness and such. It also fires a custom "angleChanged" event that helps you integrate it with the rest of your app.

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Custom Flex 3 Lightweight Preloader with source code

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, August 14, 2008 @ 2:25 pm

Here we have a demonstration to an age old problem in Flash (inherited in Flex) - the Preloader. I think that the Flex community has long ago grown bored with the default preloader, which I am very thankful to Adobe engineers for providing us in the first place. It's just that we keep seeing it over and over and over...

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Papervision3D 2.0 (Great White) in Flex 3 (Part II & III combined) with source code

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, August 7, 2008 @ 5:47 pm

The purpose of this demonstration is to use Yahoo Map and Papervision3D as a base for creating/importing 3D Objects with reference to actual locations on planet Earth using the Adobe Flex framework.

In this post I will be covering how to integrate Yahoo Maps AS3 API as an Interactive Material in PV3D 2.0 and solutions to the following problems:

- Security sandbox violation when using Yahoo Map as MovieMaterial (i.e. BitmapData.draw problem)
- Mapping Longitude and Latitude values to X and Y coordinates of a PV3D material
- Dragging Yahoo Map in PV3D (avoiding the map panning collision with PV3D)
- Simple gauge component from the ground up using basic trigonometry
- Simple tilt component again using basic trigonometry
- Making a visual component using Degrafa

Demonstrations of these solutions are packed in this air application for which you can also see and download fully functioning source code.

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Papervision3d 2.0 (Great White) in Flex 3 (Part I)

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, July 17, 2008 @ 7:22 pm

I'm developing a prototype that loads GPS coordinates/time of flights from an external file into Flash player in a browser and renders them at runtime using PV3D over an interactive Yahoo Maps API.

This prototype is in part being used to test performance of Flash Player running the excellent PV3D. So far it holds pretty good.

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Using Adobe Flex Builder 3 on a Mac

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, July 11, 2008 @ 4:44 pm

I've made a recent switch from Windows (Vista) to Mac (OS X 10.5.4). In these two months I had enough time to evaluate all biases that I was carrying with me for the past decade, including the one about coding on a Mac.

+ =
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Google learns to crawl Flash

Sasha Dzeletovic, Sunday, July 6, 2008 @ 4:49 pm

For a technology used to publish content on the internet, not being able to be properly indexed by search engines is a big snag. That is one of the first questions that is raised about Flash in any IT environment. The second one is how do you get around it. That might be about to change... Continue reading »

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Can’t we all just get along?

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, June 5, 2008 @ 5:22 pm

I've came across an interesting article titled The Next-Gen Web: HTML5 - Will We Ever See A Real Standard? by Nik Cubrilovic that gives a nice overview of the history of web standards while focusing on the current HTML5 draft specification and its potential.

Web standards are not something particularly interesting to me as an Adobe Flex developer. After all, one of the reasons I've chosen this technology is that I can develop web applications without those standards limiting my imagination.

Adobe Flash technology is in part setting the standards of what Web 2.0 (and Web 3.0) really mean. Web experiences made using it are on the high end of what's available today and that's where I want to be.

One major lacking of this technology is that it is not utilizing web standards which makes some tasks harder, like making sites and apps search engine friendly, for example. I personally decided that its benefits significantly outweigh the problems.

Whatever one's perspective, I think that lack of full implementation of web standards causes a huge waste of time for people developing content for the web. Until that happens, I choose to ignore them altogether and use a medium that gives the same results on all platforms. To the best of my knowledge, content developed in Flash years ago still looks and acts the same in all browsers and operation systems.

You can find some great insight on what might be the future of web standards in Nik's article. In the meantime, my money stays with Flex.

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Upcoming Conference: FITC Chicago 2008, June 22-23

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, May 30, 2008 @ 7:27 pm

Another Chicago area conference coming up: FITC Chicago 2008, from June 22-23 at the Chicago City Centre Hotel & Sports Club, 300 E. Ohio. We're even supporters. So what is it beyond the platitudinous "design and technology" event?

Obviously there's going to be lots of talk about how to develop Flex and Flash applications. Also how to develop online/offline apps with Adobe Air. Heck you'd think Adobe was a sponsor.

If designing RIA's with Flash/Flex/Air is your thing, you want to be here. It's not free, but based on last year's event, well worth the $125-$250 (depending on which sessions you go to).

Update: If you sign up here with our special ninja supporter code of PATH15, you get 15% off.

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Separating Source and Test Code With FlexUnit and Antennae

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, May 28, 2008 @ 4:29 pm

In most projects, people tend to separate source and test code into separate directories. However, out of the box, FlexUnit with Antennae is geared toward a single directory which contains all source and test code. I didn't really want to mix everything together like this, so I modified Antennae to work with a separated structure. Here is the quick and dirty on getting it to work (assuming you're using FlexUnit .85 and Antennae 1.2.0)

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Making a good choice when using Flex components

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, May 22, 2008 @ 11:39 am

Good people of Adobe were so kind to pack a lot of useful components
with Flex Builder. Story goes, they are there to speed up the
development process and in doing so cut production cost while retaining
excellent user experience. There is also a lot of other kind people of
the Flex developer community that made wonderful components for all
kinds of applications and made them freely available.

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