Flex Monkey Patches

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

I would really like to highlight the AIR 2 content above. There are some really cool and innovative ideas coming out of the new (actually upcoming since all of this has be done with beta software) version of AIR 2.0. I would also like to point out that I think this is the first time that I am seeing very useful Flex/Flash Builder related plugins being released and to top it off, 2 in 1 week. All of this in the last gasp of 2009. I am sure there are many more great things to come for the next year!

Here are some tips on troubleshooting from the client side, data request issues via network calls that may be failing for you:

In main the flex application add the TraceTarget component which will log client side networking calls (in and out) to the flashlog.txt

Basically just add this to your flex app anywhere in the main mxml page:

Then when you run the flex app, if you are running in the debug Flash Player (which you can check here: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507), you will generate info in the flashlog.txt (which on windows should be located here: C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\)

If you don’t have the debug Flash Player you can get it from here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

(Note you can upgrade to a higher version# of the flash player, but if you are trying to install debug player with the same version number over top of the release player, that won’t work. You’ll have to uninstall the Flash Player first. The uninstaller can be found here:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html)

More info on flashlog.txt:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/logging_04.html
(including where to find the flashlog.txt on other platforms.)
More info on TraceTarget:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/logging_09.html

Well….after the fiasco of my last Rubbernecker’s review post where I messed up the html links, this one should be better.

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

I’d like to highlight the multitouch demos and information from Andrew Trice at Cynergy and Christian Cantrell at Adobe. These 2 seem like the best resources in the early stages of this technology. With their demos and samples I have been making headway in understanding how this all works. If anyone has any other good resources or knows of any other good samples/demos, please comment. I should have a demo of my own that encorporates multitouch in a little while…so keep checking back.

I know. I know. Quite a gap between the past and current Rubbernecker’s review. What can I say? It has been a busy year so far. With this new “Chapter”, I hope to get back into the swing of things and resume weekly (or even twice weekly) reviews (and this time with some commentary).

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

By far my favorite news of the week is the release of the pre-release versions of AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 as I mentioned here:
http://blog.flexmonkeypatches.com/2009/11/17/cant-touch-thisor-maybe-you-canpre-releases-for-adobe-air-20-and-flash-player-101-on-adobe-labs/

However, don’t let this completely overshadow some of the new things in the new release of LCDS 3.0 that is just out.
Specifically you should check out a presentation from one of the LCDS engineers from MAX that was noted by the LCDS Engineering Manager on his blog.
http://www.dcooper.org/blog/client/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=03587B4A-4E22-1671-55CD873C8F6F5FC1

This presentation is done by Mete Atamel, who I have had the opportunity to work with on a few occasions when troubleshooting customer issues and he really knows his stuff. To keep up with what he is doing, check out his blog at: http://meteatamel.wordpress.com/

Pre-release versions of Adobe AIR 2.0 (runtime and SDK) and Flash Player 10.1 were released on Adobe Labs.

Complete information available here:

http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2009/11/adobe_air_2_beta_now_available.html

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/

And to skip right to the interesting bits:

Get the Flash Player 10.1 here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
Get AIR 2.0 here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air2.html

By far the most exciting functionality for me is the multitouch functionality. In fact, I pretty much coincided my purchase of an HP Touchsmart tx2 laptop with the release of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1, just so I could dive into this new and exciting feature! (By the way, good prices on Amazon for these devices!)

To be sure, you’ll see some future blog posts on this blog regarding this new functionality after I have digested these cool looking sample apps on Adobe Labs

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/samples/#flash

that demo this functionality.

Flash Camp St. Louis is a full-day event featuring some top industry experts on the Adobe Flash Platform from both inside and outside Adobe. Come advance your Flash, Actionscript and Flex skills, meet members of the Adobe team and network with local companies and fellow developers. Sessions are geared towards designers and developers with beginning to intermediate level of experience with ActionScript 3, Flash, and/or Flex and AIR. There will be plenty of giveaways, swag, lunch.. and a free ticket to the City Museum!

Who: Designers and Developers for websites and Rich Internet Applications

When: Friday, September 11th 2009 – Registration begins at 9:00am with sessions going until 4pm.

Where: The Vault Room, The City Museum, downtown St. Louis

More info here: http://www.flashcampstlouis.com/

Register here: http://flashcampstlouis.eventbrite.com

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

new LocalConnection API rocks – and its OS
(from RockOnFlash \m/ :: John Grden)

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

I am not sure if this is common knowledge. I googled and didn’t find any other reference to it. (At least not in 10 minutes of googling.)

I wasn’t sure this was possible, but then I decided to look in the Flex bugbase. This is what I found:

https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-5308

Whaddaya know? An enhancement request that I logged that had actually addressed this issue back in the Flex 2.x days.

Basically if you change the extension of a swc to .zip, you can open the archive with winzip (or similar) and look at the top of the catalog.xml file. You should see something like this:

Hopefully this will help some folks out.

Incidentally such a thing does not exist for compiled swfs. There is an enhancement request:
https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-14042

If you think such a thing would be valuable, please vote for the bug.

And one more thing…I actually had an AIR app back in the pre-release of AIR 1.0 days:
http://blog.flexmonkeypatches.com/2007/11/12/flex-sdk-fds-lcds-version-detection-adobe-air-application/

You could point it at a fds/lcds war or sdk directory and it would tell you the version (of LCDS and the SDK).
Maybe this should be resurrected and updated to AIR 1.5.1 and to use this new version info (at least new since I built the original AIR app). It could also be enhanced to read version info from individual swcs as well. Oh and maybe allow users to drag and drop directories, or wars or swcs onto the app to read the info. Hmmm….if only I had the time.