Developed by Jon
Hi All,
Just a quick post. Rob Adams has just posted up the next installment of his excellent designing for flex articles, titled Part 5: Designing Content Displays to the Adobe Flex Developer Center: Flex Interface Guide. If you have not read the other four parts, check them out first.
For More Information
Developed by Jon
Back in September, Adobe released a new section to the Flex Developer Center, called FIG or Flex Interface Guide. This is an excellent resource for anyone involved in the Interaction Design (IxD) or User Experience (Ux) of RIAs or any developers who want to make more user focussed apps. There are several articles still in draft about designing for Flex. One of the upcoming articles that will be particularly of interest and relevance to the new possibilities of designing RIAs is the use of motion, as a tool to guide users.
Developed by Jon
Adobe have today announced that they will be offering Flex builder 2 as a free download (at no cost) to education establishments and students. Not only a welcomed announcement by the community but also this shrewd move will mean more institutions teaching Rich Internet Application development, and more graduates ready to tackle the next generation of web applications and satisfy the growing demand for Flex developers. (Hopefully in time for the impending Rich Internet Application boom?)
Developed by Jon
I was pleased to hear the announcement that Doug McCune will be writing the upcoming Flex 3 for Dummies with Deepa Subramaniam. I am looking forward to seeing this early next year. What I am most excited about however, is that Doug has posted a sneak peek of his excellent TileUI Flex App to promote his announcement.
Developed by Jon
Following my previous article I discovered Chatopica an excellent chat widget, you can integrate directly into your blog. Current topics are related to programming and design but custom topics are coming soon.
Chatopica is created by Tom Bray and Robert Cadena of SearchCoders, Tom being the presenter of the excellent eSeminar on an Easy MVC approach to developing flex apps, I blogged about.
Developed by Jon
Like many others, I have been struggling to fully get my head fully around the Cairngorm Micro Architecture, and even with the excellent Cairngorm Creator, I find it a little overkill for many Adobe Flex projects I am involved with, in fact, so does Steven Webster (one of the creators of Cairngorm).
So yesterday I sat in on an excellent Adobe eSeminar, presented by Tom Bray of SearcherCoders who presented an easy / simplified Model View Controller architecture based on Cairngorm.
To demonstrate the need for these frameworks, Tom started with an excellent example of an application based on a simple chat client. Inspired by his excellent Chatopica perhaps?:
Read more…
Developed by Jon
Buzzword is a revolutionary Rich Internet Application that allows anyone with a browser access to a powerful word processor that gives Microsoft Word a run for it’s money. Virtual Ubiquity the developers of Buzzword (which includes well known Flex blogger David Colletta) has recently been acquired by Adobe Systems.
Although Buzzword currently has a comparatively limited feature set, it gives you everything you need to produce professional and striking documents that can be printed directly from Buzzword or exported as Microsoft Word .doc file or Word 2003 .xml file.
Developed by Jon
Yahoo recently released a new Flash framework for use with it’s Search, Weather, Mapping, Upcoming and Answers APIs called ASTRA (ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications). As the documentation is still a little sketchy in places I thought I would write a quick getting started tutorial on using the ASTRA framework with Flex 2 and Flex Builder.
Developed by Jon
I thought I would share a quick overview of using Subclipse on Windows and one particular step that took a lot of digging around to find that lets you install it. On Windows Flex Builder 2 uses the Eclipse 3.2.x platform which is not compatible with the latests release of Subversion. To install subversion, you need to install from the 1.x branch using the following url:
http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.0.x
In Flex Builder, select Software Updates -> Find and Install from the Help Menu. You will need to add a new remote update site to install Subeclipse from, by clicking New Remote Site, giving it the name Subeclipse and entering the update URL above.
Click Finish, and after a little updating you will be asked to select what to install, on selecting Subeclipse you may get the following error:
Subclipse (1.2.0) requires plug-in org.eclipse.core.resources (3.2.0), or later version.
The key here, is to unselect: Show the latest version of a feature only. as shown below:
With this done, you can select the latest 1.x version of subeclipse and it should install fine.
If you are behind a proxy, you will need to add the following lines to your servers file, located in C:\\Document and Settings\\<username>\\Application Data\\Subversion :
You can now checkout a project by New -> Other from the FIle menu and selecting SVN -> Checkout Project from SVN