Viewing by month: February 2011
Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 2/25/11
Posted on Feb 25, 2011
The biggest Flash Platform news this week was probably the release of AIR 2.6 on Android which now supports Honeycomb devices like the Motorola Xoom. However, the community also created a ton of great tutorials this week. The ones that really caught my personal attention were the new persistence framework for Flex from Dan Schultz called Mesh, the demo of Molehill with Flare3D shared by Serge Jespers and the new ColdFusion open source project by Bob Silverberg called CFSelenium.
Continue Reading →Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 2/18/11
Posted on Feb 18, 2011
This week's news was often dominated by announcements from the Mobile World Congress, so I added a special section below dedicated to Adobe-related news that came out of Barcelona. Some other highlights from this week (for me) include the announcement of the new product managers for Flash Builder and Catalyst, the former being my friend and former ColdFusion Product Manager Adam Lehman (congrats Adam!). Also, there were detailed instructions on getting as3Kinect installed and an Ogg Vorbis encoder for Flash.
Continue Reading →AIR for Android and Flex Mobile Resources
Posted on Feb 17, 2011
I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to present on mobile development using Flex "Hero" and Flash Builder "Burrito" to both an internal audience here at Adobe and to the Boston Flash Platform User Group. There's a lot of ground to cover and in both cases I had to breeze through sections due to a lack of time. Perhaps in the future I will split his session up or offer it as an extended workshop. Anyway, I can't share the slides at this time but I wanted to share the links and resources that I used to help me put the slides together, organized by topic. I think many of you might find these useful. It's important to note that while the presentation focused on Flex, many of the topics were ActionScript based so not specific to Flex developers.
Please forgive that a number of the resources are my own work - it's not ego, it's just that I compiled my prior samples and work to build this presentation. I would, however, welcome you to share your favorite links on any of these topics and I will try to update this list periodically with them.
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Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 2/10/11
Posted on Feb 10, 2011
Another really busy week in the Flash Platform community. Beyond the announcement of Flash Player 10.2 being released, this week seemed to bring a plethora of expansive tutorials and new open source projects and sample code from the Flash, Flex and ColdFusion communities.
Of course, the Adobe evangelism team (currently enjoying a lovely Boston February for their offsite) often makes up a good percentage of the posts covered here. If you want to keep up with the entire evangelism team, the Adobe Evangelists site has the latest blog posts and tweets as well as profiles of everyone on Adobe's evangelism team.
Continue Reading →Sending Text Messages with Body Text using AIR for Android - Hackish Workaround
Posted on Feb 09, 2011
It's been a while since I posted actual code samples here, in part because I have been working with prerelease versions of the software and SDK that are still technically NDA (on that note, if you'd like to get into the Flash Builder "Burrito" and Flex "Hero" SDK prerelease program, you can find out how to apply here). I promise I will try to have more code in upcoming posts.
In today's post I want to cover sending text messages within your AIR for Android application. As others have pointed out, the basics are very simple. You simply use navigateToURL(new URLRequest("sms:6175551212")) and the text messaging application will open with the number you have specified already pre-entered. However, in most cases, this just simply isn't very useful for two reasons. Reason one is that there is no integration with the address book, so in many use cases, having the user actually type the number within your application isn't very helpful (as a side note, you can actually do something like navigateToURL(new URLRequest("sms:Brian Rinaldi")) but it's not much of an improvement in my opinion). The second reason is that, unlike the email integration, you cannot specify a body for the message. After doing a bit of research, it appears that is a limitation within Android at the moment and not within AIR. So, while it's far from ideal, here's how I am working around this limitation - and I encourage you to offer better solutions in the comments section if you have ideas.
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