Adobe Apollo AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) Beta and Flex 3 Beta have hit the labs homepage. In addition there’s a Flash Player 9 update beta. Oh it’s going to be a late night, better put on a pot of coffee.
Via the Virtual Ubiquity Blog, Dan Bricklin has created a short screencast of Buzzword. Dan gives a high level overview of Buzzword.
I’m very impressed with what little i’ve seen of Buzzword. The user interface is beautiful and it’s obvious that great thought was given usability. I’ll be very excited to get my hands (keyboard?) on a demo. I’m really curious about it’s compatibility with MS Word formatting.
I’m more than impressed with the Apollo Camp schwag bag. First of all I wasn’t expecting anything other then Apollo Alpha 1. Here’s what we received:
On the way into the Adobe offices they asked us Windows or Mac and handed us our copy of FB. The guy in front of me said “This is a demo right”. When the gal said no, I was blown away. Thanks Adobe! I’m deeply impressed. Gotta go the keynote is about to start. More later.
I just got out of the 360 Flex day 3 keynote, lots of great information (more on that later). At the end of the keynote Ebay announced the immediate availability of an AS3 library for its services.
“The eBay ActionScript 3.0 library provides an interface between the eBay XML API and ActionScript 3.0. This open-source library will allow developers to create novel and innovative applications leveraging both eBay’s marketplace services and Adobe’s Flash Player 9 runtime! It is written in ActionScript 3.0, so any environment using ActionScript 3.0 can use this library, including Adobe Flex 2 and Adobe Flash Pro 9.”
You can download beta 1 from http://adobe.com/go/ebaylibrary/
The 360 Flex conference has been terrific, I’ve been learning a ton and meeting some really nice people. I really wanted to blog more during the conference but the wireless at Ebay Town Hall has been hammered with use (go figure!) and evenings have been full to say the least. I’ll try and get some posts done while sitting in the airports this evening. Anyways, on to the tip.
Yesterday I sat in on a session by Ted Patrick, he covered MXML vs. AS3. It was a very informative session and I learned a lot about MXML under the covers. Ted showed a compiler argument that directs Flex Builder to save the generated AS3 code to a folder in your project root.
Try this; Open your project properties, select Flex Compiler, then in the Additional Compiler Arguments add “-keep” (no quotes). When you recompile your project you’ll see a new “generated” folder in the project root, all of the generated AS3 code for the project is in there. So if you have a main.mxml file in your project the generated code would be in main-generated.as.
I wanted to share just in case I’m not the last one to learn about this 
You can learn a lot by looking at the generated code.
Enjoy!
P.S. My favorite session so far has been Flex Builder Secrets, I pulled numerous productivity tips out of that one. More on that later.
I’m at 360 Flex this week so I’ll be blogging as much as I can about the conference. It hasn’t officially started yet and already it’s been really fun. Yesterday, after the pre-reg everyone meet at the Holiday Inn house restaurant for drinks and conversation (Thanks for buying Ted!!). I had some great conversations ranging from application development to XBox to Sci-Fi TV (Firefly, Battlestar Galactica). If you want to follow the conference, in addition to the usual blogging there’s a Twitter back channel and a Flickr account. I forgot my camera so any pictures will be from my Macbook Pro (that should be a fun experiment)
In this post I’ll explain how to assign an Eclipse editor to a specific file by name.
Why is this necessary? This blog is running on Machblog Beta 2. Machblog obfuscates the the MachII configuration file by adding a .cfm extension to the file, so it ends-up being mach-ii.xml.cfm. This technique is highly effective, simple and widely accepted. Perfect right? Almost, there’s a fly in the ointment and you’ll see it when you attempt to edit the file in Eclipse.
Until today editing an XML file disguised as a CFM file in Eclipse was a little tricky because Eclipse (like most IDE’s) maps the file extension to the editor, so in this case Eclipse tries to use CFEclipse to edit an XML file. The result (since CFEclipse doesn’t do XML) is a plain old editor with no syntax highlighting and no code insight etc. etc.
Now admittedly this is not a huge problem, more of an annoyance really. Enough of one that today I got to thinking there must be a way, and there is.
In the Eclipse file association editor you can map an entire file name to an editor. So in my case I mapped mach-ii.xml.cfm to the Aptana XML Editor. Re-opened the file and whalla it worked! I tried mapping *.xml.cfm but that didn’t work for some reason. Click on the pic above and you’ll get the gist of what I did.
Enjoy!
[Update]
Brian Kotek Posted the following comment on 3/1/07
“You should also just be able to add another editor to the associated editors list for .cfm files, and then when you open the file instead of double clicking it, right click, choose open with, and choose the XML editor.”
In preparation for an upcoming project I have been spending a fair amount of time with Flex Data Services (FDS). So far I have been really impressed with FDS and it’s out of the box services and adapters. What’s not very impressive is the organization of the documentation. I looked on my install CD and no doco, I looked on the FDS site and no doco, where’s the doco?
It took a fair bit of Googling but I finally found it (I think?). Contrary to my preconceived idea that FDS has it’s own documentation set, it appears the FDS documentation (what little there is) is mixed-in with the Flex Developers Guide. To me this seems a little awkward, since FDS is it’s own product I would logically expect an independent documentation set. At any rate here’s a link to what I’ve found to date:
Livedocs
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/201/html/Part6_data_access_095_1.html
Flex Data Services Developer Center
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/data_services.html
If you know of any good FDS resources please leave a comment and I’ll update this post.
This is a bit off-topic but exciting non-the-less if you’re a Parallels junkie like me. The fine folks at Parallels have posted a new release candidate (RC2, Build 3150) of their Desktop for Mac product.
There was quite a span between release candidates this time around and after installing RC2 I can see the time was well spent. Performance is better overall, especially in coherence. Speaking of coherence, RC2 added a new feature (I thought release candidates were supposed to be feature complete) to coherence mode. You now have the option to remove the Windows taskbar all together in coherence mode. It’s a fairly simple addition, while the taskbar is gone the Windows hot key still works for launching apps. Minimized apps hang-out in your dock as before.
You can download RC2 from the Parallels beta site and as usual the support forums are already buzzing with RC2 posts.
Lately I have been spending a lot of time considering Flex application design. I work in a really small shop (two of us) and we don’t have the luxury of a Designer on staff. As a result when it comes time to make our Flex applications look muy bonito it’s yours truly who has to put on the designer hat. Since I’m “design challenged” my options to date have been limited to CSS. Skinning is beyond my abilities as I don’t get Flash (timeline….huh?). So the Flex Style Explorer has been my designer buddy for awhile.
Yesterday while researching the depths of Flex CSS I discovered you can apply Flash Filters to Flex Components. That’s what I want to explore in this post. Flash filters can not only make your application look better but they can also improve the user experience. You could us the Glow filter to provide user feedback based on mouse movements or you might use Blur filter to direct the user’s attention to an object on screen (similar to a modal Title Window but with more options). The flash.filters package contains 13 filters you can use and combine to create some amazing styles without having to resort to skinning.
There are two methods for implementing Flash Filters in your Flex application.
Both of these approaches have their own benefits and it’s really up to the developer/designer as to which method to use. Let’s look at the basic syntax of each method.
<mx:Application>
xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
xmlns="*"
xmlns:flashFilter="flash.filters.*">
<mx:TextArea>
width="150" height="100"
cornerRadius="6" text="Some text">
<mx:filters>
<flashFilter:DropShadowFilter>
inner="true" distance="3"
angle="120" color="0x000000"
alpha="0.4" />
</flashFilter:DropShadowFilter>
</mx:filters>
</mx:TextArea>
</mx:Application> import flash.filters.*;
private function addGlow(event:MouseEvent):void
{
var g:GlowFilter = new GlowFilter(0x006666, 0.65, 15, 15);
var newFilters:Array = new Array();
newFilters.push(g);
event.currentTarget.filters = newFilters;
} As you can see Flash Filters are easy to implement and you don’t need any other software.
Flash Filters Demonstrated
I’ve created a very small Flex app to demonstrate both of these techniques as well as give you something to look at. View Source is enabled so right + click and select view source to download the app and view the full source.
Other Resources
