jun :: realeyes

Adobe MAX is the yearly premiere event that encompasses all things Adobe…Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Photoshop, you name it.  This year it’s going to be November 16 - 19, 2008 in San Francisco, California.  This will be my third year at MAX, and thanks to Ted Patrick and CO, they just keep getting better and better.

That being said, I’m very excited to be speaking at MAX 2008 about the wonderful and powerful Debugging and Profiling features of Flex Builder 3!  For those of you that have seen me at past conferences such as MAX, 360Flex, Webmaniacs, RIADevShed, and FlexCamp you’ll know that I’m a sucker for good debugging tools and techniques and I love talking about this set of topics.

You can keep posted on updates to this session by using the outstanding RIA session scheduler at the MAX site and although it’s early and the time and date is subject to change, here’s the current abstract on the session:

Debugging and Profiling with Flex Builder

Learn how to use the powerful debugging and profiling tools included within Flex Builder to build high-performance, reliable applications. We’ll cover some advanced debugger features you may not know, as well as go into detail about how to get the most out of the profiler.
Speakers:    Jun Heider
Products:    Flex Builder, Flex
When:    Wednesday, November 19, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

I’m planning for it to be an informative and entertaining session, and if there’s a chance you’ll be there and have some ideas on content you’d absolutely want to see feel free to let me know.

To find out more about MAX 2008 and register, here’s a link to the very sweet-looking and feature rich RIA site that was developed for the conference:

http://max.adobe.com/

See you there!

360|Flex Send a Team or an Army - http://tinyurl.com/5vm594

360|Flex is already a great deal at the full price of $480. However, what’s even more amazing is the $375 per ticket price when you register as a 4 person team. It’s no wonder that companies are taking advantage of this deal and are sending whole teams. If you haven’t registered yet, you’d better hurry. When teams buy in bulk, the number of available tickets dwindles fast.

Grant Skinner provides the community yet another valuable resource. Check out his reference on source code licensing: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/07/source_code_lic_1.html

I’m bringin’ the paper bags, and Tom and John are supplying the contents.  Just kidding.

Although on a more serious note, if you don’t want the above happening, please hit their site and comment on your beverage preferences:

http://tinyurl.com/4k9ads

Also, if you still haven’t registered, you need to.  360 Flex is where all the cool RIA developers hang yo!

http://360flex.eventbrite.com/

Is it *dedication* or would a better word be *sick* that I wrote an InsideRIA article here in my hotel room during a family vacation in Florida?  Anyway, for those of you interested, you can read it here:

http://www.insideria.com/2008/06/flex-ria-performance-considera-2.html

Ok…off to Disney World.  I wonder how many times my son’s gonna want to ride Buzz?

A student of mine decided to use Doug McCune’s CoverFlowContainer component in his class project.  He also wanted to enable drag/drop from one CoverFlowContainer to the next so I took what he had and added some Drag/Drop to it.

There were a couple things he needed supported in the drag/drop:

• Drag image data from one coverflow component to a child array container in another coverflow component
• Show the original image as the drag image
• Only allow dragging into the proper coverflow  in other words don’t allow dragging an image into a coverflow using image data children…only one using crate data children.

So…there were a couple things that weren’t quite too fun to work with:

• The immediate child of the CoverFlowContainer was a Repeater, getting everything to play nicely without being too kludgy required a custom component and a custom event.
• When trying to create an Image clone by just setting the source attribute, it wouldn’t be rendered in the drag image.  Found a post discussing how to work around it by using the BitmapData and BitmapAsset classes. (Unfortunately, I can’t find the post in my delicious anymore…will update this if I do)
• The DragManager.doDrag() requires a MouseEvent as it’s third parameter…amazingly casting a MouseEvent subclass silently breaks it.  So I just added the source MouseEvent as a parameter to my subclass.

I know the code probably isn’t optimal, and if you know a better way to do things feel free to comment on my blog.  However, being that it was a pain I figured I’d make the sample available for anyone feeling like taking a peek.

Anyway, below is a sample of the running app…view source is enabled.  Also, if you want to download the Flex Builder 3 Project Archive file, here’s the link:

http://www.iheartair.com/samples/CodeZips/CoverFlowDragDrop.zip

Sample:

The highly popular ActionScript 3 Cookbook was released back in ‘06.

This was a really good book because it taught you the language through examples that you could use in real world situations.  A lot of the Flex and Flash developers I know really loved it.  The downside to this book was being an ActionScript book, it it didn’t cover things that were Flex-specific.

At the end of ‘07, Flex Solutions - Essential Techniques for Flex 2 and 3 Developers was released.  I just got a copy of it recently to review, and will say it’s worth checking out.

First off, this book was written by Marco Casario a very prominent and well respected member of not only the Flex community but also the Flash Lite community.  He knows his stuff, and the examples in the book prove it.

Like the AS3 Cookbook, this book expands your knowledge of the language through practical examples.  For instance:

• Solution 1-5: Understanding the Flex event model
• Solution 2-7: Building loosely coupled components
• Solution 4-9: Formatting list-based controls with the labelFunction property
• Solution 8-4: Supporting the Express Install Flash Player feature
• Solution 10-4: Mashup applications using the LocalConnection and the Yahoo! Maps API
• Solution 12-5: Debugging applications with the Logging framework

It even covers AIR topics:

• Solution 14-2: Customizing OS windows using the AIR Window API
• Solution 14-7: Keeping the application updated

The flow of the book is highly structured.  Chapters are broken down by main topic, then solution.  Then each solution has a “What’s involved” section describing the underlying concepts, a “How to build it” section giving the reader a step by step walkthrough on code implementation, and “Expert tips” which took the examples a step forward.

Although I think this book is worthwhile, I do have a negative to point out.

I’m not positive, but I think Marco is Italian, and I don’t think that English is his first language. I hope no one takes it the wrong way, but I think that some of the grammer distracted me while reading. I found myself re-reading paragraphs a couple times to understand the concepts being conveyed.   That being said, I would not even be able to imagine trying to write a book in a second language, for instance Italian.  In other words, although this was a negative for me as a reader, I give Marco props for writing the book in a non-native language. (If my initial assumption was correct)

The good thing is, MXML and AS code are universal, so the wealth of well-written code samples in the book made up for my inability to read through the textual portions efficiently.  As a matter of fact, if you download the code samples, Marco has provided 30+ MB worth!  He also mantains an external site for the book’s code, and he makes it a point to keep it up to date.

All in all, this book is worth the money: easy to find information, written by an expert in the field, and filled with plenty of good cookbook style samples.  Good work Marco!

For those of you that are interested, here’s the link:

http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590598768

I had to make some quick site updates tonight and decided to download the Dreamweaver CS4 Beta to do it.  Not only does it look extremely slick but it installed just fine and all my site config was still around, yay!  (Oh yeah, and I got to keep all my other programs running during the install…he he)

Hopefully tonight’s not just a fluke, but in general the Dreamweaver CS4 beta seems more responsive and appears to run much faster than Dreamweaver CS3.  So if I’m not imagining this speed boost, maybe in CS4 I’ll finally allow Dreamweaver to grab some default file extension handlers.

Here’s the link if you want to check it out for yourself:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/dreamweavercs4/

Good job so far Adobe!

The slides and code samples from my Flex Debugging sessions are now available. You can get them here:

• Slides: http://labs.realeyes.com/labs/downloads/webmaniacs2008/JunHeider_Flexmaniacs_2008_FlexDebuggingTechniques_1.0.pdf
• Code Samples: http://labs.realeyes.com/labs/downloads/webmaniacs2008/Webmaniacs2008_FlexDebugging_CodeSamples.zip

Also, earlier in the week, the person that was gonna present on Flash Player Memory Management cancelled out and I was asked to cover for them.  Here are the slides and code samples for that session:

• Slides: http://labs.realeyes.com/labs/downloads/webmaniacs2008/JunHeider_Flexmaniacs_2008_FlexMemoryManagement_1.0.pdf
• Code Samples: http://labs.realeyes.com/labs/downloads/webmaniacs2008/Webmaniacs2008_MemoryManagement_CodeSamples.zip

All in all, I enjoyed myself at the conference.  I got to meet and hang out with some great people in the community.  Heck, one night about 15 of us even went to China town to check out Indy and Iron Man.

As far as other people’s presentations, I have to admit I spent much of my time there working and prepping for the potential 5 presentations: 2 that were mine, 3 more I offered to cover that week.  Luckily for me I only had to present 3, but the unfortunate part is I missed out on some good sessions.

From what I did see, here’s what was good and interesting:

I got to check out Nick Matelli’s presso on CVS and ANT:

http://www.amentra.com/news_events/webmaniacs.asp

http://www.webmaniacsconference.com/Downloads/upload/cvs.zip

Thanks to Laura Arguello, I got to see a new Flex application framework called Mate (Pronounced MA-TAY Not mate):

http://mate.asfusion.com/

http://www.webmaniacsconference.com/Downloads/upload/mate.pdf

I also got to hang with David Hassoun while he gave his bad-ass presentations on Flex Skinning and AIR:Windows, Menus, System Tray:

http://labs.realeyes.com/labs/downloads/Flexmaniacs_2008_Flex3_Skinning.zip

http://labs.realeyes.com/labs/downloads/FlexManiacs2008_Windows_Menus_SystemTray.zip

I found out tonight that ObjectUtil.toString() has issues displaying the values of a Dictionary using object keys. I posted a bug with a screenshot and a Flex Project Archive to the Adobe bugbase. Go vote if you’d like:

https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-15589