agitcraft

I was recently trying to familiarize myself with the mx.charts package in Flex and accidentally produced this while trying to learn how to use Pie Charts.

If I didn’t have an eventual goal for all the data I’m trying to display, I would probably be content to just settle with this. It doesn’t effectively say anything right now, but it’s still an aesthetically pleasant object. Wouldn’t it be nice if all data come out this way?

I was reading somebody’s Flex blog the other day and noticed they had a Share Widget at the bottom of the post.

I’ve seen this widget around town. It’s a fairly popular way to share content with other networks.

When you roll over the widget, it animates, with a slide reveal effect, to this state:

When you roll over individual icons, they pop out almost all the way.

It’s a neat widget, but I have a few criticisms that seem obvious to me:

1. Sharing is not sexy, even if we’re just trying to be playful and clever. I challenge you to find me even one person who finds sharing obscure posts about Flex to be sexy. I challenge you.
2. The interface is slow. I don’t mean the transitional reveal is slow, but rather my experience with it is slow.

What do I mean by slow? Let’s play a game: Pick a sharing service off the top of your head, and see how long it takes you to find the correct button for it in this widget. Need I say more?

As I probably promised before in the post announcing my itinerary for Adobe MAX 2010, I now have video for all of the sessions I attended.

Deep Dive into Mobile Development with the Flex SDK

Deep Dive into Flash Player Rendering

Creating Testable Flex Applications

Performance Tips and Tricks for Flex  and Flash Development

Having Fun with Layouts in Flex 4

FutuRIA: The Convergence of Rich Internet and Enterprise Applications

I’m now back from Adobe Max 2010 (it was great), and the first thing I want to do is talk about the free shit I got. That’s right: Conference Schwag!

Group shot! Here’s the rundown:

1. An Adobe Max water bottle. In addition to the bottle itself, Adobe put water coolers all over the convention center that you could fill them from. This beats the hell out of buying bottled water from vendors, and it was really nice to have something to drink during the hour long sessions.
2. My badge! Of course I had to wear this all day, so it doesn’t exactly count as schwag, but I do like holding on to it as a memento.
3. An Adobe Clock: Guaranteed to sit in the corner of my desk, ticking away unobserved, until I eventually decide to throw it away. At least the battery was included.
4. Motorola Droid 2: This is of course what everybody was raving about the other day when I signed up. It seems like the cool thing to do now is to give away high end cellphones for attending conferences. Unfortunately, I’m not a Verizon customer and I still have perhaps a year left on my T-Mobile contract, so it’s unlikely that I’m going to be able to make any use of this. I’m looking to sell or trade it right now, so if you know anybody on Verizon who wants an awesome new cellphone, let me know. If not I may actually go through all the trouble of switching carriers.
5. Digital Primates Playing Cards: I don’t even care to play cards, but I can’t resist a freebie. Maybe these will come in handy at the office some lazy friday.
6. Mimobot USB Drive: I definitely don’t need more USB drives, but this one has officially stolen my heart. I love the design!
7. A Ninja!: This was also given out by Digital Primates, during their session on FlexUnit (now packaged with the new release of FlashBuilder).

In addition to these great items, I also received a couple of books.

Getting Started With Flex 4

It’s an O’Reilly pocket guide! Cool. Everybody who attended Max received one of these.

Flex 4 Fun

Flex 4 Fun! I received this during the “Having Fun with Layouts in Flex 4″ session I attended. Fun was indeed had. At the end of the session when they announced they had books to give out, everyone rushed the stage. One guy was ready to push me over to get by me, and I had to literally drag my book out of another guy’s hand after he tried to swipe it from me. Insanity all around. I’m looking forward to digging into the book.

I’ll be posting more about Max in the near future, hopefully discussing individual sessions. Stay tuned.

I managed to complete my last minute registration for AdobeMAX yesterday and even managed to sign up for some sessions. Here is my tentative schedule for tomorrow morning:

• 8:00 am – 9:00 am: Deep Dive into Mobile Development with the Flex SDK
  • Learn how the next version of the Flex SDK will enable developers to easily create applications for the desktop and mobile devices. This session will show you how you can use the new mobile features in the SDK together with familiar Flex concepts to build mobile applications. You will learn about the new mobile-specific components and capabilities being added to the Flex SDK, as well as learn tips for optimizing both the design and performance of your application as it works across different devices.
  • Speakers: Glenn Ruehle, Chiedo Acholonu

• 9:30 am – 10:30 am: Deep Dive into Flash Player Rendering
  • Dive deep into the Adobe Flash Player renderer with Lee Thomason, Flash Player architect, and see how to optimize the rendering performance of your applications. Thomason will cover mechanisms like the display list, text rendering, shaders, GPU hardware acceleration, and exclusive features coming in a future version of Flash Player. After this session, Flash Player rendering will no longer be a mystery.
  • Speakers: Lee Thomason

• 11:00 am – 12:00 pm: Creating Testable Flex Applications
  • Join the expert team responsible for the FlexUnit 4 framework as we look beyond writing unit tests toward the real issue: writing testable Flex code. We’ll examine the techniques needed to change functional but untestable code into cohesive classes whose functionality can be assured continually through automated unit testing. If you ever needed to know how to architect testable Flex applications, this session will prove invaluable.
  • Speakers: Michael Labriola, Jeff Tapper

• 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: Performance Tips and Tricks for Flex and Flash Development
  • Investigate Flex application development from a performance perspective and learn techniques to improve and optimize your Flex and ActionScript code. Join members of the Flex engineering team as they identify common performance pitfalls that new — and even advanced — developers run into, and share best practices for creating the most optimal Flex and ActionScript applications. We’ll share tips and tricks for desktop and mobile development, as well as methodologies to identify and fix problems areas during development.
  • Speakers: Ryan Frishberg

• 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm: Having Fun with Layouts in Flex 4
  • Join Enrique Duvos, Adobe Flash Platform evangelist, as he introduces you to creative layout techniques leveraging the new Flex 4 SDK component model and layout architecture. You’ll learn how to develop sophisticated layouts from both a technical and user experience point of view. Topics will include assignable layouts, transformations, 3D, visual orchestration, and more.
  • Speakers: Xavi Beumala, Enrique Duvos

• 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm: FutuRIA: The Convergence of Rich Internet and Enterprise Applications
  • Hear top design professionals explain how to unlock new value hidden in complex enterprise systems through the expression of user-centric goals in design patterns. You’ll learn how Adobe is converging solutions, platforms, and tools to help you better serve your customers or constituents by delivering great experiences. This session equips you with business cases as examples of current cultural shifts, as we share our user experience vision, some technology sneak peeks, and a vision for the future of enterprise applications.
  • Speakers: Ben Watson, Andy Mulholland, Matt Butler, George Neill, Tadeusz Chelkowski

As you can see, I have a full day lined up for me despite being quite late to register and prepare. I’ll try and blog and tweet about each of these events as the day goes by.

Perhaps you, like me, have had a need, at some point or another, to parse RSS feeds in Actionscript. If so, then perhaps you’ve also stumbled across the generally wonderful as3syndicationlib developed by Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell. For those of you who aren’t in the know, allow me to provide the following excerpt from the project’s google code page:

Use the syndication library to parse Atom and all versions of RSS easily. This library hides the differences between the formats so you can parse any type of feed without having to know what kind of feed it is.

These claims actually hold up pretty well…once you get the code running.

The problem is that the codebase was written specifically for development in Flex. While Flex is a great platform for certain projects, many of us still use Flash for a lot of the work we do, so a toolkit that relies on packages that are only available to Flex just doesn’t do it.

This problem is also no secret. It’s listed as an accepted issue on its project page. The problem is that the codebase apparently hasn’t been updated since December of 2006.  That’s no joke kids.

Fortunately, a solution was pushed forth from outside the project by a Mr. Martin Legris in the form of a bare implementation of the missing “DateBase” class that the syndication library looks for, as well as an edit to an import statement buried down in ParsingTools.as.

So if you, like me, have a need to consume RSS/Atom Feeds in Flash and need a solution that works, look no further. I present, to you, an updated version of the as3 syndication library with the necessary changes in place to begin using it out of the box in your flash projects.

The files are all available here.

For those of you carrying Android phones that spend far too much time thinking about flash/flex development, I’ve found a very handy little app.

From the publisher’s website:

After seeing that someone wrote an ActionScript reference application for the iPhone called ActionScript 3 API Reference for iPhone, I decided to take matters into my own hands and make the same application for the Android platform which the t-mobile G1 works on.

Yesterday TechCrunch published an article noting that an “unofficial” google text-to-speech API had been exposed. Naturally, I jumped right on top of playing around with it. Here’s a simple little Flex application that will plug you directly into the text-to-speech API.

Update #1: Apparently translate.google.com doesn’t have a valid cross-domain policy file, so unfortunately this app won’t work through my blog. I have, however, made the source available for download so all of you crafty devs can play with it anyway.

Update #2: Apparently a policy file has been created! Now the application works! The source is still available for download.