Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 8/19/2011
Posted on Aug 19, 2011
This week was a very busy one. In particular it featured a number of tutorials from within Adobe and the evangelism team covering new features in AIR 3 beta that was recently released on Labs. However, there were a ton of other tutorials, code samples and open source projects covering a wider than normal variety of topic areas.
One of the things that is great about the Flash and Flex community is the diversity not only in personality and background but in professional experience and training. This is made all the more clear by Sean Moore's recent series of interviews with Flash/Flex community members including Jonathan Campos, Joseph Labrecque, Doug Winnie and many more.
Cool Mobile & Devices Stuff (AIR for Android, AIR on TV, Flash on Android, iPhone etc)
With the beta of AIR 3 now available on Adobe Labs, Adobe's Christian Cantrell shows how to use new front-facing camera support in AIR 3. Christian also shows how to tell which Flex components are mobile optimized by checking for a mobile skin. However, as noted in the comments by Fabien Nicollet there are some exceptions to this rule.
Adobe evangelist Mihai Corlan shows you how to improve the performance of your Flex mobile application by caching images using ContentCache which is a class built into the Flex framework. Mihai also discusses a variety of methods to store data locally in Flex mobile including some discussion of utilizing the built-in persistence mechanism and registering classes to be persisted.
Adobe evangelist Immanuel Noel posts the slides and code from his Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2011 presentation on P2P applications for mobile devices with Flex including a sample application called RealTime Locator that shares users location with peers.
Daniel Freeman has created Flex wrappers for his MadComponents library which features a number of mobile optimized components for AIR applications. While MadComponents was initially designed to be used without Flex, you can now use them within your Flex projects as well.
Android
The ability to embed the AIR runtime within your application, as is done for iOS, is one of the most requested features for AIR. This ability, dubbed "captive runtime" is available in AIR 3 and Adobe evangelist Andrew Trice shows how to use Captive Runtime in AIR 3 for Android applications.
Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart discusses how to dismiss a Flex Mobile PopUp when the back button is pressed. Interestingly, as often happens in blogging, a reader, Jonathan Kaye, suggests perhaps an even easier solution in the comments.
Antonio Holguin has created a new Android application in the Android Market called AppIR that is a showcase for other Adobe AIR applications in the marketplace. This could be very useful for consultants looking to demonstrate the possibilities to potential clients. Another AIR application called GeoSocials recently launched on Android and was previously available on iOS. It is described as a location based social game.
Dan Florio walks you through the process of submitting your Adobe AIR mobile application to the NOOK marketplace which he says was very easy to do.
iOS
Bill Sanders details step-by-step the process for publishing your AIR application on your iOS device including setting up the provisioning file and deploying to your device for testing.
Rich Tretola features a couple of excerpts from his new book on Flex development for iOS covering styling AIR applications for iOS. Part 1 focuses on handling the various DPI's of iOS devices using MultiDPIBitmap. While part 2 deals with setting styles for your Flex mobile application for iOS using CSS.
Cool Flex, Flash Builder & Catalyst Stuff
Mark Lapasa posts about a new open source (LGPL) library of Flex components called Klovis that features a number of new components such as AdvancedTextInput, Autocomplete and LoginBox to name a few.
Douglas Reynolds shows you how you can modify the Flash Builder 4.5.ini jvm settings to potentially improve Flash Builder performance.
Jeff Ardilio shows how he modified the ProxyFactory in the open source AS3Commons library to handle aspect oriented programming in Flex.
Evtim shows how to take advantage of code templates in Flash Builder 4.5 to save you time with typing repetitive properties in your MXML code.
Krasimir Tsonev demonstrates how to create a DataGrid with custom ItemRenderers using Flex components within pure ActionScript code. Krasimir also shares his wrapper class for handling tracing in Flex/Flash that allows him to enable/disable logging from within his application whenever he likes.
Cool ActionScript/Flash Stuff
I love seeing sites that don't usually cover Flash Platform stuff get drawn in by the quality of what Flash developers can create. Joystiq typically covers console and PC games however this week they became addicted to Symphonic Tower Defense a Flash game by Matt Ackerman and Jon Sandness.
Adobe's Jay Armstrong offers some of his favorite resources for learning how to get started with ActionScript 3.0 in Flash Pro.
Barbara Kaskosz and Dan Gries of Flash and Math create a sample application that teaches how to preserve transparency while using graphics.drawPath versus moveTo, lineTo methods.
Simon Bailey posted a sample application on Github to serve as an example of modular development using Robotlegs and Signals. Simon also created an example of how to use a project by Dominic Graefen called Gator for generating Flex/ActionScript 3 applications which he has ported some of his generators for Robotlegs into a project he calls Gator-as3-robotlegs/.
Sean Voisen created a new project on Github called AS3 Free Association which provides an ActionScript API for accessing free association data found in the University of South Florida Free Association Norms database.
Nick Schneble shows a method for creating deep copies of objects and arrays. Note that the comments offer some alternative methods and caveats that you should consider when determining how you wish to handle this.
Adobe's Doug Winnie shows how to use the Vector class rather than simply an Array where it best suits your requirements.
Roland Zwaga shares a Spring Actionscript v2.0 progress report showing some of the things being worked on and sharing a way to pull the current code if you would like to test the new features.
Cool AIR for Desktop Stuff
An earlier tutorial showed how to do this for Android, but Adobe evangelist Piotr Walczyszyn shows how to use the new captive runtimes feature in the AIR 3 beta to bundle the AIR runtime in AIR desktop applications for both Mac and Windows.
Another new feature in the AIR 3 beta is native JSON Support as detailed by Adobe's Christian Cantrell.
Arcadio Carballares Martin released a new AIR application called CopyAIRdb that can be used to copy data from one SQLite database to another.
Cool ColdFusion Stuff
Sean Corfield, author of the popular FW/1 MVC framework, has released an early beta of DI/1 which is his new dependency injection framework for ColdFusion.
Adobe evangelist Raymond Camden posts some open source components for adding support for Collection, Index, and Search operations in script-based CFCs.
Comments
Posted By Mark Lapasa / Posted on 08/25/2011 at 7:33 PM