Flex Feeds Most Recent Stories

Interview w/ Kevin Suttle – Episode #7 JXLTV

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:04:34 +0000

What I Learned From Microsoft MIX 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:33:48 +0000

*** I apologize for the “…”; this is a stream of conscious post about my experiences. Some of it is cohesive, some not. *** I attended Microsoft’s MIX 2010 conference in Las Vegas the week after 360Flex. I had previously attended I think the 2007 or 2008 one. I had actually recorded a lot of video [...] [via http://jessewarden.com/ @ March 18, 2010 @ 12:33am]

What I Learned From 360Flex 2010

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:43:06 +0000

Preface I attended and spoke at the 360 Flex conference in San Jose this year. Before the high fades away, I wanted to post what I learned last week for a few reasons. First, to share with others. Second, to share for those who didn’t attend, but might if they feel they’d gain [...] [via http://jessewarden.com/ @ March 17, 2010 @ 11:43pm]

InsideRIA FITC Conference Pass Giveaway

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:23:23 +0000

InsideRIA has two passes to give away to the upcoming FITC conference in Toronto, Canada, April 25-27, 2010! We'll be selecting two of our community members who will each win one free pass. Increase your chance of winning! If you... [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 17, 2010 @ 7:23pm]

The Flex Show Episode 104: Flex, Flash, and HTML5 with Greg Demichillie

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Given the hullabaloo surrounding Adobe, Apple, the Flash platform, and iDevices, we decided to sit down with Greg Demichillie from Adobe to talk about the platform and Adobe's thoughts on the matter (Hint: they aren't anti HTML5)

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[via http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/ @ March 17, 2010 @ 3:00pm]

Demo: SAP PLM/EAM on the desktop with Adobe Flex (Rich Internet ...

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:34:54 +0000

Author: wekemani
Keywords:
Added: March 16, 2010

[via http://youtube.com/results?search_query=adobe+flex&search_sort=video_date_uploaded @ March 16, 2010 @ 5:34pm]

Where the Wild Things Are: an Adventure in Silverlight (Act II)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:10:47 +0000

Late last year, I took it upon myself to learn Silverlight. You see, I’m both a Flex and a .NET developer, so it makes a certain sense. I’ve also spent plenty of time criticising fanboys of both genres, so here I am putting my money where my mouth is. This is part two of a four part series. We cover graphic primitives, effects, animations and events. [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 16, 2010 @ 4:10pm]

6 Lessons I Learned About Customer Service from T Mobile

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:17:41 +0000

I'd like to introduce you to Allison. Allison is an example of the things that are right about T Mobile's customer service. It's not that Allison is the only example of great customer service at T Mobile, but I... [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 14, 2010 @ 8:17pm]

Desktop iPhone Review - iPhone emulator

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:51:26 +0000

Author: techsansar
Keywords:
Added: March 14, 2010

[via http://youtube.com/results?search_query=adobe+flex&search_sort=video_date_uploaded @ March 14, 2010 @ 11:51am]

Flex and Embedded Fonts

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:06:25 +0000

Flex tries to provide you with the most flexible way of using embedded fonts in your applications. If your application consists of just one SWF and you embed fonts in that SWF, everything should just work, but once there are multiple SWFs involved, while it should work most of the time, if it doesn't, you may need the following information to figure out why. With Flex 4 defaulting to using RSLs, your default configuration now involves multiple SWFs and many more of you are suddenly using multiple-SWF applications because each RSL counts as a SWF.

The principle rule is that there are two places that the Flash Player will look to find an embedded font to use to display text in a TextField or TextLine. It will look in the global table where fonts are registered via Font.registerFont, and it will look in the SWF whose code instantiated the TextField or TextLine.

Font.registerFont has a couple of limitations. One is that, if two SWFs try to register the same font, the last one in wins. That is normally ok until you start embedding font subsets (only certain characters in the font) which you might want to do when optimizing for SWF size, especially with large Asian fonts. If SWF A has only upper case characters and SWF B has only lower case characters, for example, then SWF A won't be able to display its characters if SWF B loads later and registers its font of lower case characters.

The second limitation is that there is no Font.unregisterFont call so registering a Font pins the SWF with the font in memory.

For those reasons, Flex never tries to call Font.registerFont. Instead it has an infrastructure that tries to make sure that all TextFields and TextLines are created by code in the SWF that contains the embedded font. We use the term "SWF context" to mean the SWF whose code created the TextField or TextLine. And because a TextField or TextLine can have only one SWF context, it means that all fonts displayed in a TextField or TextLine must be embedded in the same SWF. If you must mix, you will have to register the font and deal with the fact that the SWFs containing the fonts may never unload.

Making sure the right code instantiates TextField is a bit trickier than it first seems. You can't just put calls to "new TextField" or "TextBlock.createTextLine()" in a single factory class and link that class into every SWF. The ApplicationDomain rules may cause the class in a SWF to be ignored (see the modules presentation on the blog for details).

For example, suppose I create a TextLineFactory class and link it into SWF A and SWF B. If SWF A loads SWF B, when B calls TextLineFactory, it will be calling the one in SWF A and thus the TextLine will be created in a different SWF context than B expected and the embedded fonts won't show up. Or suppose the TextLineFactory class is in an RSL. Then it is not in SWF A or SWF B so those SWFs won't be able to display text using fonts embedded in those SWFs.

In order to solve this, Flex adds code to a uniquely named class in every SWF it generates for RSLs and Applications and Modules. That way there are no ApplicationDomain class collisions. Flex does that by adding that code to the main class of every SWF and names it after the SWF. For example, if you have A.SWF with mx:Application, Flex wraps the mx:Application with a SystemManager subclass called something like A_SystemManager and adds factory APIs to that subclass.

For TextField, Flex uses the ISystemManager.create() method. For TextLine, Flex uses the ISWFContext.callInContext API. If you are writing your own text-based components, it would be a good idea to subclass the Flex components so you can inherit the embedded font infrastructure that makes those calls and also figures out the next hard part: given an embedded font, which SWF do you reference to call these APIs? Again, because of ApplicationDomain rules, any class you write may be running in a different SWF context from the caller.

Flex tracks all fonts it embeds in SWFs and each SWF registers its embedded fonts in the EmbeddedFontRegistry on load. (Yes, we do it in a way that allows the SWF to unload). When a Flex text component is about to display text, it looks up the fontFamily, fontStyle and fontWeight and sees if there is an embedded font in the registry that matches, biasing the search to the current SWF so that colliding subsets will work. The EmbeddedFontRegistry returns the best SWF context for that font and the component uses that SWF context to create the TextField or TextLines. That means that even simple components like Label will destroy and create a new children if the font styles change since the style change could require the use of a different SWF context.

How can Flex always know which SWF is the current SWF given the ApplicationDomain rules? This is done in Flex by conditionally propagating the moduleFactory property to child components. All top-level components in a SWF have their moduleFactory set to the SWF's IModuleFactory and propagate it to children unless the child already has a moduleFactory set.

Note that even though SystemManager is an IModuleFactory, not all ISystemManagers are IModuleFactory like AIR's WindowedSystemManager so code should not assume that you can determine your SWF context from the systemManager property.

There are lots of implications from having this infrastructure. If you can't control the code that creates the TextLine or TextField because the instances are created via mx.core.IFactory (itemRenderers and Chart visuals), you may need to use ContextualClassFactory or code up something similar. It also means you can't cache a single TextField for measuring text; you may have to cache a TextField in each SWF context. It means that SystemManager.isFontEmbedded and Font.enumerateFonts may not know about every font that has been loaded and return inaccurate results.

And, it turns out that other font-related APIs must also be called in the correct SWF context. If you call ElementFormat.getFontMetrics(), you must also call that via ISWFContext if you are using embedded fonts in a multi-SWF configuration. Getting this wrong an result in really subtle bugs like having the position of strikethrough and underline being off by a pixel or two, or having baselinePosition be off by a pixel or two.

The Flex team has put a lot of work into making all of this transparent to developers, so hopefully you won't ever need to know all of this, but folks definitely get tripped up by this now and then. And now, if you do, I hope you can use the information in this post to solve your problem.

[via http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/ @ March 13, 2010 @ 12:06am]

Flex advanced data visualization components now part of the FREE open source Flex SDK!

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:23:11 +0000

I just wanted to blog about an announcement I made at the 360Flex San Jose keynote on Monday morning. I announced that currently, the advanced data visualization components (Advanced DataGrid, OLAP DataGrid and all the charting components and libraries) are now part of the free open source Flex SDK offering! No longer do you need [...] [via http://iamdeepa.com/blog/ @ March 12, 2010 @ 4:23pm]

Example of Flex 3 and ColdFusion 9 ORM (2)

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:06:00 +0000

The second part of my series demonstrating how easy, and powerful, Flex and ColdFusion ORM can be. [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 12, 2010 @ 6:06am]

Comparing Apples To Oranges with Flex

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:06:05 +0000

Occasionally you might find the need to compare completely unrelated data in your applications. This may sound a bit odd, but it does happen, especially in cases where you may want to observe and compare trends within your data sets. This could include completely different data sets, using different value ranges on both axes, with variable numbers of data points. Hence: comparing apples to oranges. At first thought, you might think that you have to compare data in separate charts placed side-by-side for visual comparison. However, with Flex it is actually not difficult to to create multi-scale visualizations on the same component. In this post, we will examine the application of Flex charting components to view multiple data sets with multiple scales, and multiple collection sizes. [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 12, 2010 @ 4:06am]

Hacking Ribbit

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:06:16 +0000

Ribbit has been around for a while and beside Lee Brimelow's great introduction tutorial on gotoandlearn.com, I did some experimenting in order to achieve results needed for my application. Because I live in Bosnia and Herzegowina, it was a bit... [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 11, 2010 @ 11:06pm]

xna gunfight at mix and sxsw

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:31:02 +0000

Were getting ready to head out to sxsw and mix. We will have a booth at mix, and will be at the Microsoft booth and party at SXSW, if your in town come…. by and say Hi. One thing we will have at both is a quick fun game some of us came up with for Cynergy.Labs were calling "Gunfight in Redmond". Its an XNA game running on the zune hd, using the accelerometer. The idea came about while discussing the Mix 2010 zune shuffle app I made. We were talking about other gestures you could achieve with just the accelerometer. Shake is the most prominent of these types of gestures, but we wanted to find another that emulated a real life interaction. After some discussions of using the zune for a baseball game, and the concern of people slipping and throwing the zunes, we looked down at our nerf guns. In the DC office we have a fine assortment of nerf guns, and a single nerf missile, which are always a great release. This became the inspiration for the game.

thanks to Ryan Lee (by the way check out his new mobile gesturecons ) and Javieer Villarel for all the great work. [via http://cynergysystems.com/blogs/ @ March 11, 2010 @ 8:31pm]

xna gunfight at mix and sxsw

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:31:02 +0000

The Flex Show Episode 103: 360|Flex Day 3

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

The final batch of 360|Flex interviews, taken from Day 3 of the 360|Flex conference in San Jose .

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[via http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/ @ March 11, 2010 @ 4:00pm]

360|Flex Day 3 Recap

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:08:09 +0000

With the final day of of 360|Flex behind us, I give some short synopsis of the presentations I attended and some thoughts on the general trends in 360|Flex as a whole. [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 11, 2010 @ 9:08am]

The Flex Show Episode 101: 360|Flex Day 2

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

A batch of interviews from Day 2 of the 360|Flex conference in San Jose .

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[via http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/ @ March 10, 2010 @ 4:00pm]

360|Flex Day 2 Recap

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:12:25 +0000

Day 2 is here and gone. In this entry I'll talk about some of the highlights of the talks I attended and good things I've learned during the presentations. [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 10, 2010 @ 10:12am]

The Flex Boogie Bot

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:03:54 +0000

Author: lizign
Keywords:
Added: March 9, 2010

[via http://youtube.com/results?search_query=adobe+flex&search_sort=video_date_uploaded @ March 10, 2010 @ 12:03am]

Flex - Image Rollover and Rollout effect using states

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:43:00 +0000

Author: GrfxG
Keywords:
Added: March 9, 2010

[via http://youtube.com/results?search_query=adobe+flex&search_sort=video_date_uploaded @ March 9, 2010 @ 6:43pm]

rodeo.mov

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:31:18 +0000

Author: tqbrady
Keywords:
Added: March 9, 2010

[via http://youtube.com/results?search_query=adobe+flex&search_sort=video_date_uploaded @ March 9, 2010 @ 6:31pm]

IntelliJ Idea9 ActionScript 3/Flex Workflow Part 2

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:11:51 +0000

Welcome to part 2 of my IntelliJ Idea 9 ActionScript 3/Flex workflow series. If you followed part 1 you should have a HelloWorldProject setup along with a HelloWorld module. Now it is time to learn how to compile our SWF and go over the other core features IntelliJ Idea 9 has to offer. Lets not waste any more time, here we go! [via http://www.insideria.com/ @ March 9, 2010 @ 4:11pm]

The Flex Show Episode 101: 360|Flex Day 1

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Another batch of interviews from the 360|Flex conference in San Jose .

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[via http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/ @ March 9, 2010 @ 4:00pm]