Tour de Flex..

Josh Buhler has posted this very useful AIR app, tour de Flex. I love this application, it's like Flex help on steroids.

The application has a ton of code examples from the basic Flex APIs to third party examples like Doug McCune's Coverflow. Each section offers references to the specific component or API you selected and some even offer downloads of the source code right from the app.

By far the most comprehensive look into flex I have ever seen. I must for flex devs.

Check it!

Romke and Nate AIR Classes @ UWM

So Nate Frank and I are teaching a one day session on AIR (using Flex) at UWM's Center for Technology Innovation. Want to learn more about AIR? This one day session will dive into the AIR api and also get into micro architectures in flex that can help you organize you AIR app!

Check it out.

Zend and Flex Free eSeminar from Adobe.

Looking to get a bit more out of your Flex experience? Check out this free eSeminar from Adobe to learn about the collaboration that will bring together the flexibility, productivity and enterprise reliability of PHP and Zend Platform with the user experience benefits of Flex.

Register here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

Discover why Adobe Flex 3 is a complete application development solution for creating and delivering cross-platform RIAs within the enterprise, across the web, and on the desktop.

I have been getting more into integrating Flex with other back-ed technologies. I am sure this will be a good one.

Wanna Learn Flex?

Having a little trouble getting all the intricacies behind Flex? No problem. Adobe is creating a series of videos and tutorials, hosted on the Adobe Developer Center, that will help you get all the basic knowledge you'll need to work in Flex in a week. The first 3 days have been completed, with days 4 and 5 following shortly. Head on over there and pave your way to becoming a Flex star!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

I love flex and I think if you learned it too you would love it.

Caravella Limoncello Drink Recipes

We just launched a Flex and Papervision mini-site for Caravella Limoncello. I am really excited to have launched this project and think it came out great. It was also the first time we got our designers involved with the whole Flex process and they seemed to have loved it.

Check out the site and let me know what you think!

Cairngorm Creator

I found this ill Cairngorm generator called Cairngorm Creator. I thought I would try it out for a project I am working on. I didn't go into detail writing out my methods and variables but it was super dope to have the app generate the stubbed out classes with all the proper imports for my project.

check it!

FlexMVCS

So one big debate I have with other developers is what framework or architecture we agree on using. When it comes to AS3, people seem to be leaning more towards PureMVC for Flash Based projects just because Cairngorm is more and more a Flex based architecture.

Today I found FlexMVCS. Some folks who worked over at BunchBall created a flex friendlier version of PureMVC that addresses some of the issues of using PureMVC in flex.

You can snatch up the SVN repository info at their google code site

What do you think?

Reading .wav files to AIR.

So while working on FlossyFX I was trying to see if there was a way to import .wav or .aiff files into AIR to play in Flossy. Since those file types aren't native I was trying to look for alternate ways to get this going.

At first I thought I could write a hook to lame to convert the file into an MP3 then import into AIR. But from what I read security is tight, so that was a no go. Boo!

Then I saw Merapi, a project that allows a bridge between Java and AIR. So I signed up for the beta. I am still waiting for the beta email, but while waiting I found Benjamin Dobler's Rich Apps blog. Benjamin broke down how to take the byte array information from a wav file and stuff it down to a swf for the sound to play. This totally answered my issue of getting wav files working.

Now I am in the process of taking the wav conversion code and converting the idea over to aif files as well. The binary structure of an aif file is way more organized then wav is it seemed fairly easy to get to the byte data. I just have to make sure it's saving the data in all the right places. If I get the code done I will post the solution.

Here is the post on the wav conversion. I did have to change the code a bit in Benjamin's WavSWF Class and add the LoaderContentInfo to the Loader because of the new security settings in AIR.

FYI, if you are looking for more information on ByteArrays check out http://bytearray.org/

Facebook AS3 api.

Jason Crist has got a Facebook AS3 API that I thought I would try to use. It uses Facebook's Javascript engine then creates a bridge between the two to talk to facebook. You can't do things like upload photos yet, but it's nice to have a framework to integrate with Facebook in AS3.

Setting up the app wasn't hard but it does take a while to get a key from Facebook, then making that key secure isn't to easy in Flash.

None the less I am working on my first Facebook app, I will post later about my findings.

Check it!

Yahoo! Flash Developer Center

I saw a post on Zues Labs about Astra in Yahoo!'s dev center, so I thought I would check it out. There are a ton of Flex and Flash Components in the site that you can use under the BSD license. I must say Yahoo! has got some mad love for us Flash Devs!

Check it!

They also developed some AS3 APIs for their current products. I used the Map API in AS2 before and it was super handy. The AS3 version looks dope! Adobe has got a post about the new Map API and Blaze DS.

Flex and Flash workflow...

Samuel Rivello has got a eSeminar at Adobe.com for using Flex and Flash together during development. I really like the concept of using Flash for creating assets and layouts, then taking into Flex for coding. There seems to be a lot of benefit in being able to use this workflow, keeping a stronger separation between code and visuals assets.

check it