Kevin Hoyt

The Flex framework is amazingly capable. Between renderers, editors, skins, styles and containers, you can produce amazing applications. Sometimes however developers get stuck in the framework; they think they need to use the framework for everything. I used to see this a lot with list-based controls, but of late the target for getting stuck seems to be the DateChooser. Guess what though, the results are in, and you don’t have to use the DateChooser to produce a calendar.
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Two very quiet, yet very important announcements came last week for developers using Adobe AIR. The first is a new “Introspector” for AIR developers using Ajax - think Firebug, but for AIR. The second is an update to Aptana Studio (1.1 required) which provides support for AIR Beta 3. Here’s a quick look at both these updates which should prove very beneficial to those with an HTML workflow.
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There’s no mistaking that Flex 2 has been a historic release in the evolution of the framework. With Flex 3 closing in fast, there’s even more great features we can now use in our applications. Sometimes however, it is important to go back a remember some of the smaller features we may be overlooking. On a recent project I was reminded of the beauty of MXML itself, and the simple elegance that is markup.
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HTML 5 introduces a new canvas element which comes along with a graphics context based on Quartz 2D. This means that JavaScript developers can draw paths, fill and clip (mask) shapes, transform bitmaps, and even provide basic animation in addition to other operations. The similarities to the ActionScript Drawing API (especially in ActionScript 3) are striking, so I couldn’t resist playing around.
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