Thanks to everyone that came to the Adobe Flex presentation at BYU. It turned out great. Many people learned what Flex can do and found solutions to ideas they had. Thanks to Rain Interactive for sponsoring the event with Papa Johns Pizza. Special thanks to the Web Startup Group for hosting the event. They recorded my presentation and have my slides hosted on their site.
Adobe just produced Tour De Flex an AIR app that allows you to tour all of Flex’s features. Great for those who are curious about what flex can do. For developers, this tool is great because it allows you to actually see the code to produce the feature that is shown.
Adobe states that Tour De Flex has three primary features:
In doing some research on filters in SVG I came across some new information regarding SVG. The reason that they have upgraded/changed focus for the SVG format to FXG was triggered when developing Thermo. They started using SVG and then they realized how difficult (and eventually deemed impossible) it was to easily translate SVG to Flash smoothly. So they developed FXG for Thermo & Flex 4 to replace SVG. Now we can just use FXG’s DropShadowFilter instead of copying the bitmap, offsetting it, applying a color fliter, blurring it, and then blending it.
What is FXG?
“FXG 1.0 describes an XML-based graphics interchange format for the Flash Platform. FXG contains high-level graphical and text primitives that can be used to create, group, transform and visually modify basic vector and bitmap shapes. The FXG rendering model follows very closely the Flash Player 10 rendering model and exposes all graphics capabilities of the Flash platform as well as offering expandable support to accommodate future capabilities of the Flash Player. The specification below dives into the technical details governing every element of FXG 1.0.”
FXG Specification:
FXG Specification Link
Blog Posts:
Mike Chamber Blog Post – Why Adobe Chose FXG Over SVG
Mark Ander’s Blog Post – Flash On The Beach – FXG & SVG
How to start playing with FXG:
Finally a file format that Adobe can share across its programs that can easily be written and displayed.
Update 13-Oct-2008 – I originally stated that Adobe was no longer continuing SVG support, when really they are discontinuing support for the Adobe SVG viewer. This article can be found here: Adobe Discontinues Support for SVG Viewer
Adobe Student Rep for RIA
Yesterday I was welcomed as an Adobe Student Rep for Rich Internet Applications. I am excited to get the Flex community going at BYU and educating other students about what Adobe Flex is and what an RIA is. Since I do this for work, I find it is easy to share my passion and my love for it with others.
I created a user group for BYU students. If you are a BYU student, join the group and enjoy the perks of being a member. You do not need to be an active Flex developer to join, you just need to be interested in what Flex is. I will be hosting an event this semester to get things kicked off.
Craigslist Desktop Application was released by Cobalt Fire Software. This application solves all the unusable elements about Craigslist. CLDesktop improves the design of Craigslist and utilizes its search features better. You can save your searches and refer back to them.
Download CL Desktop
(Available for both Windows and Mac OS X)
http://www.cldesktop.com/
Grant Skinner created an amazing regular expressions tester which is available as a web application or as a desktop air application.
This application allows you to create regular expressions and then test them on the fly. I highly recommend downloading this application for testing your regular expressions. I used this to successfully debug some regex parsing errors taking an SVG into flex.
Today I paid the $150 and took the Flex 2 certification test. I passed and am now an ACP – Adobe Certified Professional (add that to my Flash MX 2004 Certified Developer, MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) and MOUS (Microsoft Office User Specialist) certifications).
Overall I found the test to be challenging. I wouldn’t take it without sufficient preparation. Here are my Flex 2 study preparation tips:
Obviously use the flex documentation as a reference over concepts that you are unfamiliar with.
Topics founds on the test that I rarely used include: IViewCursor, Flex Data Services.
Good luck.
Today at work we rediscovered the Flash / Flex font size limit of 127px.
We are creating an RIA that needs the ability to scale down a large SVG to a web editor and then scale it back out for a print-ready SVG. Flex would take a 300 px font, convert it to a 127 px font, and then scale it down. This caused our textfields to be very small and inconsistent.
At work we ordered a Inspiron 530S as an upgrade to my previous machine. Dell tech support stated that the system would be able to support dual monitors with an extended desktop.
Here’s what happened:
Once the Inspiron arrived, we purchased a PCI Nvidia 5500 GeForce MX card. This NVidia card overpowered the ATI Radeon 2400 Pro due to a setting in the bios that gives preference to PCI over PCIe. So in short, I could never get both video cards to play together. Once I removed the NVidia card from my computer, the ATI Radeon 2400 started functioning properly for the first time. (Dell Tech Support took over my computer and they couldn’t figure out why).
Next, talked to Dell Tech Support on the phone. Their sales rep claimed that a DVI Splitter cable would support dual monitors with extended desktop. We ordered two of them. There is no setting on the ATI drivers to support a DVI Splitter cable with extended desktop. Don’t have faith in Dell Sales Reps. Do your homework before you purchase something from them.
After this failed, I noticed a black cap on a VGA port. I took it off and tried plugging in my second monitor into it and rebooted. At start up an warning message displayed stating that my video card configuration wasn’t supported and I had to press F1 to continue. I continued. The integraded graphics card on the motherboard took control over my PCIe ATI Radeon 2400. I couldn’t even get the PCIe card to show up in device manager.
I talked to a senior tech support over at dell, let’s call him, Rasheem, and after dissecting what he was saying, he stated that the only way to get dual monitors with extended desktop was to purchase a video card with a DMS-59 connector. This DMS-59 connector outputs two DVI outputs to a dongle which you can connect two DVI cables to, to support two monitors. Some even support up to four monitors.
Solution:
Purchased an ATI Radeon X1300 PCIe card that comes with a dongle for $125.
Shoot me an email if you come up with a better solution or if this saved you a few hours.
When attempting to load external compiled css swfs that have an embedded font into my flex application I was getting this error: Unable to load style(SWF is not a loadable module). This is reported as an official bug on adobe’s site at: Enable Local App to load RunTime CSS.swf from Server
To solve this, you require two things.
Regardless if this is a bug, the host server still needs a crossdomain policy at the root of the domain. Here’s an example crossdomain.xml policy.
The next problem is that you cannot load external compiled swfs from a
document root (c:/my documents/flex projects/myProject/myProject.html) until the bug is fixed.
PC Users:
What I did is installed easyphp. Next, I set up an alias in easyphp. Right click on the ‘easyphp’ icon in the taskbar -> administration. I set the alias to my bin folder of my project so that when I access the url http://127.0.0.1/myProject/myProject.html it loads up my bin directory. Also in my debug settings in flex I set the default debug and run path to launch as http://127.0.0.1/myProject/myProject.html.
Now my css/style swfs are loading great remotely. The only downside is having to run easyphp on top of everything just to load in my external compiled font swfs.
Mac Users:
Thanks to Bryce Barrand
Alias /nameOfAlias /pathToYourFlexBinFolder
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
should be good to go after this. you can see the results by going to http://localhost/nameOfAlias in your browser