Archive for the ‘Flex’ Category

The new flash player 10.1 on Windows and Mac breaks embedded font rendering. See image below.

This is very disappointing. This is going to affect my customers badly, and there is nothing I can tell them. Just another reason to be very nervous about the future of Flash.

Before 10.1 on the Left, After 10.1 on the right.
Hopefully there will be a fix for this soon.

The announcement of the iPad has set off a huge Flash v. Apple the rest of the world debate.

I happen to think reasoned thought should take effect, hence I agree with the John Nack.

Flash is the closest thing we have to a consistent rich browser frame work. That is why I wrote Lifetick in Flex. I have thought about moving it to HTML only, but I don’t want to do it just yet.

Well, not until we have a richer html/javascript/css world – with a broad range of native gui controls (and which 99% of the world’s internet users have a compatible browser – no IE6, 7 or 8). Standards take time to create, to be agreed on and adopted by the masses.

However, my support of Flash has been tested, I have dropped my Flash blog, and you are now reading this in HTML. In my mind, Mac performance has never been more critical to the future of the Flash player.

btw, I find it laughable all those people who criticise Flash web ads… what do you think advertises will do if people all have flash blockers?They will make the exact same ads work in javascsript, which if written just as poorly as their flash versions, will screw up your browser just as bad, and you can’t separate that cpu thread out, or block an individual execution of javascript if it all goes bad or you want to block it. Think about it, those ads will not go away, even if Flash did.

My personal take on Flash on the iPad… Yes I would like to see it. Flash on the iPhone – I doubt it would work performance wise.

Here is some interesting performance observations I have mad since installing Snow Leopard.

Flash 10 in Safari appears slower.

However, if you are using Camino, Flash performance is significantly better. (maybe better than Leopard – just a feeling)

Firefox, seems about the same as before, although I don’t really like using it. Chrome is the same as Safari.

If you work with a lot of Flash apps and need the best performance, switch to Camino

I have installed Snow Leopard… and now the Flex compatibility results.

Flex Builder 2 – FAIL.
Changing some configuration files did allow me to open Flex Builder, and I was able to compile some apps, but my large app with embedded images failed to compile.

Flex Builder 3 – SUCCESS
Unfortunately I had to buy Flex Builder 3… anyway… it appears to be fine.
On a separate note, when I tried to compile an app using the version 2 SDK, it put a Charting watermark on my app. Not happy considering I have the full version.

Flex Builder 4 Beta (latest) – SUCCESS
I didn’t try for long, but all appeared successful.

I just found out that you can’t run Flex builder on OSX Snow Leopard. That SUCKS!

Adobe please fix asap!

mmm. this sort of thing makes me nervous about a proprietary platform (flex sort of is, especially if you want an IDE). Maybe I should look closer at using the SDK on its own.

I am currently running Flex Builder 2, but am keen to hear from any who has been able to get any version of Flex builder running on Snow Leopard, and how good the performance is.

UPDATE: Well, there have been a couple of encouraging comments from people who have got it running. Thanks guys!

Perhaps Adobe should come out and clarify their position.

UPDATE 2: See the results: here

Hi all,

After several months of working in my spare time, I have finally launched a new version of my website, this time based on Actionscript 3.

I still have more work I want to do on the site before I am happy with it. Both visually, and behind the scenes.

Converting my website to AS3 was more difficult than I ever imagined. I have written a lot of stuff using Adobe Flex (see Lifetick’s app) and am very familiar with AS3 but in the Flash IDE it was very tough.

Flex builder is based on Eclipse and it is a very strong coding environment. For a start, all classes are automatically imported, there is great code completion (including completing your own classes, variables, function etc…) The debugging is excellent, including debugging from the browser, and it will not even compile if you have a problem in your code (flash sort of did this, but too many mistakes went through with out identification)

The problems with Flash CS4 are too numerous to mention. Aside from Performance, the workspace layout feels too complicated and cluttered. The new motion editor for tweens seems great, but just makes it harder to do simple tweens (maybe I need more time with it) The debugging was very difficult. As I said before, you could not debug from the browser only from a stand alone swf (if I am wrong about that, please correct me in the comments with instructions), The connection between classes and movie clips feels disjointed, movie clips are not as strict as classes but it feels weird to code, plus I didn’t seem to be able to override a function of the class my movie clip is based on.

At the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy making this new version of my site, I felt I battled with Flash the whole time, everything was a struggle, and it left me wanting to return to Flex as fast as possible. If you do any application building, you must try Flex, and leave flash behind, you will not believe the difference.

ps: I have removed the AS2 version of my template from sale, I hope to make the AS3 version available for sale at a later date.

I recently had trouble using the Flex Email validator in Actionscript.

Therefore, I thought I would post the function I used to get it to work so it can save some of you the time and effort. When you look at it it is rather simple, but the documentation didn’t seem as straight forward when explaining how to do it in actionscript.

public static function validateEmailFormat(string:String):Boolean
{
var validator:EmailValidator = new EmailValidator();
var result:ValidationResultEvent = validator.validate(string);

if(result.type == ‘invalid’)
{
Alert.show(result.message);
return false;
}

return true;
}

I am happy to announce that after 8 months of hard work, I (along with a friend) have launched a new Flex based Web application. It is called Lifetick and it allows you to set goals online.

From a technical perspective, I consider it a great example of what flex can achieve. It features a clean design with frequent use of Charting for Visualisation, along with bright widgets, deep linking and an emphasis on usability.

Check it out, spread the word and find out what flex can really achieve when its done right

About a year ago I looked at the Scheduling Framework code on Adobe Labs. At the time I couldn’t work out how to get it all to work. However yesterday I sat down with the intention of getting it to work… and I did!

Click Here to have a look.

I had several goals; 1. Workout how to create events, 2. restyle it, 3. Make something I can use in a real world project.

This is without Changing any of the core code. I did create a couple of Item Renderers and changed some settings.

and don’t worry, I plan to post my own code soon on my Lab website.

The next big thing I want to look at is to see if I can drag and drop events to re-schedule them. Does any one know if there has been any work on this?

A few weeks ago Fabio Terracini posted a document on his blog which dealt with Coding standards in Flex.

It deals with all sorts of stuff, and I found it useful, however I was wondering if anyone has come up with Standards for naming components and containers.

For TextFields and Buttons I always use something like someText_txt or someButton_btn. But what all the new components and containers that are in Flex. Does someContainer_box sound right?, I know there is no wrong or right answer as such, but I am a bit inconsistent when it comes to naming the new things in Flex.

If you know of or have written documentation of some sort for naming conventions, please leave a comment.