Ryan Stewart and I are crazy about GPS and geospatial information. We both actually carry a Trackstick device wherever we travel which records our adventures. The data file can be accessed via USB as any number of formats, but it is usually XML-oriented. Of course we’re both building applications that use this data, which is when I ran into the problem of waiting for a server to process several megabytes of XML data. Using Flex I was able to monitor the long-running transaction without unnecessarily delaying the responsiveness of the user interface. (more…)
It is pretty common these days that Flex developers come from traditional programming backgrounds. This means that more and more, many developers leveraging the Flash Player, have never worked with Flash CS3. It also then means that many Flex developers aren’t always familiar with common Flash authoring techniques. Here’s a quick introduction on masking for Flex developers, with some collaboration thrown in for good measure. (more…)
There’s an old demonstration we used to show for Flex Data Services, now LiveCycle DS, that pushed data from the server to the client to be charted. More modern incarnations of this can still be found as samples included with LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS (Trader Desktop). The original incarnation was great fun to show, but I never really liked the workflow of getting the data feed started and stopped. Old habits die hard, and I used that dislike as an excuse to explore the new CFTHREAD feature of ColdFusion 8 in conjunction with the included LiveCycle DS instance for data push. (more…)
As I was hanging out in Madrid, getting acclimated for the AIR Europe Tour, I started thinking about what I was going to present - specifically around script bridging. In the United States, I just talked about how Flash and HTML are separate, but can be integrated. I though it would be good to actually show how separate they are in the browser, and contrast that with how integrated they are in Adobe AIR. Several hours spent exploring ideas, and a new demonstration was born. (more…)
As I was preparing for the pre-release user group tour, I was surprised at just how much content around the new Flex 3 features was already available. The Flex engineering teams have been working diligently to be more transparent for the benefit of our customers - and it shows. The main problem I encountered while browsing all these samples, was that they seemed to be put together by different engineers, which meant that each had it’s own style and formatting. I’ve pulled many of these samples together as it relates the AdvancedDataGrid and new charting features, and made them available for viewing and download. (more…)
We put the wraps on the Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 pre-release user group tour last week. I had the privilege of visiting eight different user groups over two weeks. There’s a lot of new stories to tell, not the least of which is the snow storm that slammed into Milwaukee, WI and Lansing, MI. The real story to developers however is the code, so here’s a walkthrough of the presentation to include a few snippets. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
The web’s insatiable appetite for upload functionality never ceases to amaze me. What do I mean? My little blog has around 100 posts of technology goodness. In the top five most trafficked posts are twoarticles I’ve done on uploading files. The more popular of the two goes all the way back to the days of Macromedia Central, and I still get random emails about it on a weekly basis. With that in mind, I decided it was time to revisit some of that old code with the latest tools and libraries. (more…)
I often find myself inspired by the questions that I encounter on the public AIR forums. Today I saw a question about using AIR to select a random image file from a user-selected location on disk. What piqued my interest was that the selected directory was to be populated by capturing images from a web camera. (more…)