Flex and AIR Cookbook

In case you didn’t know about these two great resources, I think it is time to take a look: Flex Cookbook and AIR Cookbook. Here you can learn or share with others: solutions, tips and tricks, hacks and more. Starting today, I have two “recipes” over there!

June 26, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, Flex Builder, LCDS | 1 Comment 

MAX 2008 North America website

MAX 2008 website was launched: http://max.adobe.com/na/experience/. It is a really cool site, made entirely in Flash, you can click on the background and play around (solve puzzles, discover who built them). Or you can just browse for information and register.

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, Flex Builder, LCDS, Others | Leave a Comment 

Flex and Deep Linking

What is Deep Linking?

Deep Linking is a term that describes the support for URL based navigation in applications that are not a collection of HTML pages. In a web site, for example, if you have a menu with Home, About Us, and Contact, whenever someone chooses an item from the menu, the browser will point to a new URL, such as http://mysite/home.html or http://mysite/contact.html. This is great because you can bookmark the page that you have an interest in and you can give the link to your friend. Without this, you have to send your friend a link to http://mysite along with an explanation about how to get to the Contact page.

In Flex applications, when you don’t use Deep Linking this is also the case. You are not able to bookmark a particular state of the application or to send someone just a link to get him to the Contact form page. Deep Linking fixes this and also enables the browser back button.

How does it work in Flex?

In Flex 3, Deep Linking is implemented using fragments, the portions of URLs after the “#”. For example, in this link http://mysite/page.html#view=1 the fragment is view=1. Whenever you add to URL fragments (and you can write basically anything you want) the browser does not reload the page. This is exactly what you need in a Flex application. In a Flex app you have all the states inside of a SWF file, and thus you don’t change the content by reloading another page.

Flex uses these fragments to “store” the state and when an URL is loaded, the Flex application can analyze the URL fragments to recreate the state corresponding to that URL. Let’s see how a programmer can write and read URL fragments from within a Flex app.

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June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Flex | 2 Comments 

tostring.org : AIR / RIA books online

Mike Chambers launched an interesting site: http://www.tostring.org/ Mike explains what is this site:

“Well, I am happy to announce a new site that I have been working on called tostring.org, which in addition to containing the entire Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide online, also provides an infrastructure for the community to contribute to the books, both through hosting translated versions of the books, as well as allowing comments on individual chapters.”

Here you can find more about this project in his own words.

June 24, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Books | 2 Comments 

Flex / AIR projects and source control

Sooner or later every Flex developer will have to either work on the same project with others or send their project to someone (for example as an email attachment or via an FTP server). This task can look deceptively simple, but in fact there are some challenges. For example, let’s say we have a Flex PHP project and when we created the project we entered this information:

New Flex Project - PHP type - Page 2 of the wizard

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June 23, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, Flex Builder, PHP | 6 Comments 

JibJab.com

Yesterday I saw a cool site made entirely in Flex: http://beta.jibjab.com and by the way they are hiring a Flex programmer.

June 23, 2008 | Filed Under Flex | Leave a Comment 

How to easily and seamlessly update an AIR application

 

Introduction

Last year I built an internal application for our local office that manages employee’s days off. I chose to use AIR/Flex for the client and PHP/MySQL on the server. Soon after the first release I ran into a big problem: as bugs were fixed and new features were implemented I would send email notifications to all users to update the application (many of these changes broke compatibility and thus without the update the user wasn’t able to use the application anymore). So you can imagine that after several notifications both my client (the HR manager) and some of the users were quite loud in their complaints. The client even suggested that it might be a better idea to redeploy the application as a web-based one.

This was indeed a problem. How can you push your updates for an AIR application as simply and non intrusively as you do with web-based applications?

Solution

Fortunately, at the same time the local AIR team had a project that addressed exactly this problem. Raul Hudea (the lead engineer of this project) had been working for some time on a Flex library that lets you update any AIR application (Flex or HTML/JavaScript) very easily. I became his first client and in no time we were able to roll out updates without any email notifications.

Yesterday, as part of the Adobe AIR 1.1 release, the Update Framework was launched. It is still in beta but I think it is OK to use it in production (I have been using it for some time and I didn’t have problems).

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June 19, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Tutorials | 42 Comments 

Adobe AIR 1.1 is out

AIR 1.1 was released yesterday. Although it is “only” a dot release it brings a lot of cool things: improved support for localized and internationalized applications (AIR runtime supports Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish) and an update framework that lets you easily update installed AIR applications. You can get the runtime installer from here: http://get.adobe.com/air/ and more about the update framework here.

June 17, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Others | Leave a Comment 

Follow up – Holland Flex User Group Meeting

As I expected, it was an adventure to get to the location of this meeting. It wasn’t so hard to get to Apeldoorn (funny thing the customs officer from Schiphol asked where I was going and when I said Loenen he looked at me amazed and he said it is pretty far :D ). Once I arrived in Apeldoorn it started to rain (of course no umbrella) and I walked to the bus station. After waiting and waiting and no bus in sight, I went back to the train station to ask for directions. And I found out that the bus drivers are on strike: “don’t worry they will come to an agreement today”, he said to me :D . So back on the road to find a taxi. Found it, showed him the address and with the help of GPS we found the location (I was lucky to have enough cash because I couldn’t pay the taxi with a credit card).

But I immediately forgot all these challenges when I saw this:

Kasteel ter Horst Kasteel ter Horst

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June 16, 2008 | Filed Under Others | 7 Comments 

First Thermo screenshots

Ted Patrick published today the first screenshots of this new product Thermo. Thermo will help designers to create the UI for Flex/AIR applications. Developers will continue to use Flex Builder. I can’t wait for Adobe MAX 2008 to see the demos and maybe a beta.

June 11, 2008 | Filed Under Flex, Flex Builder | Leave a Comment 

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