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…)
The first MAX Europe has come and gone, and I’m super-thrilled to have been a part of it. I had a number of hands-on presentations, all around developing and deploying AIR applications. I also had two speaking sessions, one on using Aptana for AIR development, and one on script-bridging with AIR. Following is a recap of the session contents for each, and any assets that were created. (more…)
I was very happy this year to be so heavily involved in MAX sessions. The attendance at the conference and those sessions was amazing. With a few exceptions, I heard a lot of positive remarks about presenters and their content. I’m already looking forward to next year in San Francisco, CA. In the meantime, here’s a recap of the sessions, and their related content. (more…)
If you’ve ever built a dynamic web site before, you know that there’s almost always some degree of administration UI that needs to be created. Sometimes this UI might be as full-featured as the web site itself, and in other cases it may be more limited, but it almost always means some fashion of user management. Rather than build the administration entirely online, what would happen if you leveraged Apollo for offline access too? (more…)
Flex has had effects since its initial release. The limitation of these effects is largely that they are all fundamentally linear in nature. You can move something in a straight line from Point A to Point B for example. You can fade a display object in and out, but again only as one continuously incremented/decremented animation. What if you wanted to move something along a curved path? What if you wanted to fade in and out at various levels along the path of that curve? Until Flash CS3, this is something that would have been particularly challenging, but we now have “Export Motion XML”. (more…)
Everybody seems to be blogging about their presentations and/or presence at 360Flex, so I thought I’d join the mix. I’m actually in San Jose right now, but headed home for the weekend in an hour or so. I’ll be returning on Sunday night ready to network, present and otherwise have fun with fellow Flex developers. My topics are “5 Minute CRUD with FDS” and “Flex with Java”. (more…)
Let me preface this post by saying that perception is reality. That is to say that sometimes all you really need to do is instill the vision of what’s possible, and the rest will take care of itself. In the software world we call this a “demo”. Setting vision and demonstrating the possibilities of Adobe software is something I do on a daily basis. With that in mind, I was recently tasked to come up with a Flex version of the IRS Form 1040 (annual taxes for those outside the United States). (more…)
Among the many valuable features of Adobe Flex Data Services is the ability to keep client-side applications in sync with their appropriate data-structures on the server. While this generally means relational databases and lists or tables of data on the client, it doesn’t always have to be that way. I recently came across an interesting scenario, which afforded me the luxury of building an application that represented client-side data outside of a list. (more…)
It’s no big secret that I’m not a particularly big fan of the accordion control. In almost every case I encounter, the use for the accordion is to provide an alternative view to stepping through complex forms. While it can certainly be made to accommodate this use-case, it has to be one of the most abused applications of the container. What’s worse is that I fear we’ll see a lot more of it in the not too distant future. (more…)