Archive for February, 2007
I usually have fun with Flex and Flash codenames and their meanings. So when I saw that “Moxie” as the Flex 3 codename. (Enagage reports, ref1, ref2) I thought I would look up the word.
The word is slang for a couple meanings, the one I like is “skill; know-how“. But to get the point about “Moxie” you need to read through the history as it is a trademarked soft drink created in 1876.
Can’t wait for Flex 3 or my shot of Moxie….as I have already consumed way to much Flex 2 juice a little more Moxie won’t hurt!!!!
February 27th, 2007
I have placed a Jaxtr button on the side of my blog. I like the idea of having a way for people to contact me with out giving out my phone and worrying about it being spammed (yes spam phone calls are on the rise).
If anybody else has a Jaxtr account and wants to try it out please let me know, or better yet give it a try and call me. As I understand a worst I’ll be able to go hear the voice mail, and if you are on my friends list it will connect directly to my phone. Even international calls work. Its a bit like paying for Skype In minutes, but I haven’t used that much either can be for sure.
You can read more about Jaxtr at http://jaxtr.com.
Well, now any one off the web can give it a try and give me a call. We’ll see how this Jaxtr stuff works out.
February 22nd, 2007
The flexcoders.net site was created as a place to house the “International Registry of FlexCoders”. It has been more than 6 months since the release of Flex 2. We have a long way to that 1 million developer mark as the current count is 695 (at least registered Flex coders).
I am bringing the registry of FlexCoders up again to get people to register. Hopefully we can bring the current of 695 up over 1000 this month. Go show your Flex pride and sign the registry…..
February 21st, 2007
Flex 2 Essential Training (CD-ROM)
by David Gassner (Author)
• CD-ROM
• Publisher: lynda.com, Inc (July 19, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1596712619
• ISBN-13: 978-1596712614
ActionScript 3.0 Essential Training (CD-ROM)
by Joey Lott (Author)
• CD-ROM
• Publisher: lynda.com, Inc (July 19, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1596712627
• ISBN-13: 978-1596712621
ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)
by Joey Lott (Author), Darron Schall (Author), Keith Peters (Author)
• Paperback: 556 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596526954
• ISBN-13: 978-0596526955
Flex 2 Beyond the Basics (CD-ROM)
by David Gassner (Author)
• CD-ROM
• Publisher: lynda.com, Inc. (October 10, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1596712848
• ISBN-13: 978-1596712843
Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source (Paperback)
by Jeff Tapper (Author), Matt Boles (Author), James Talbot (Author), Ben Elmore (Author), Mike Labriola (Author)
• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press; Pap/Cdr edition (October 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 032142316X
• ISBN-13: 978-0321423160
Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns (Paperback)
by Joey Lott (Author), Danny Patterson (Author)
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press; 1st edition (November 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321426568
• ISBN-13: 978-0321426567
The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 (Paperback)
by Charles E Brown (Author)
• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: friends of ED (February 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597338
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597330
Programming Flex 2.0: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rich Media Applications with Adobe Flex (Paperback)
by Chafic Kazoun (Author), Joey Lott (Author)
• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (March 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059652689X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596526894
Free Chapters on Adobe.com
Professional Flex 2 (Paperback)
by Rich Tretola (Author), Simon Barber (Author), Renaun Erickson (Author)
• Paperback: 700 pages
• Publisher: Wrox (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470102675
• ISBN-13: 978-0470102671
Foundation Actionscript 3.0 with Flash and Flex 2 (Paperback)
by Steve Webster (Author)
• Paperback: 450 pages
• Publisher: Apress (June 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590598156
• ISBN-13: 978-1590598153
Flex 2.0 Cookbook: The Adobe Developer Library Guide for Rich Internet Application Developers (Paperback)
by Joey Lott (Author), Chafic Kazoun (Author)
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596529856
• ISBN-13: 978-0596529857
Programming Flex 2
by Chafic Kazoun (Author), Joey Lott (Author)
• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (April, 2007)
Rough Cuts Release: October 2006
Print Book Release: April 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0-596-52850-7
• ISBN-13: 9780596528508
Essential ActionScript 3.0: Rough Cuts Version
By Colin Moock
• Paperback: 760 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (June, 2007)
Rough Cuts Release: October 2006
Print Book Release: June 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0-596-52993-7
• ISBN-13: 9780596529932
Flex 2.0 User Interface Design & Development: Creating User-Friendly Rich Internet Applications (Paperback)
by Matt Voerman (Author), Simon Reid (Author)
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596528450
• ISBN-13: 978-0596528454
Total Training for Adobe® Flex 2 Rich Internet Applications
Hosted by James Talbot
Format: DVD (ROM)
Platform: Windows & MAC OS
Total Training for Adobe® Flex 2 Advanced Visual Programming
Hosted by Leo M. Schuman
Format: DVD (ROM)
Platform: Windows & MAC OS
Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java: Secrets of the Masters
Yakov Fain, Dr. Victor Rasputnis, Anatole Tartakovsky
http://www.riabook.com/
ISBN 0-9777622-2-X
Shipping Date: Fall 2006
Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide
A Developer’s Reference for Apollo’s Alpha Release
By Mike Chambers, Rob Dixon, Jeff Swartz
First Edition March 2007
Pages: 121
ActionScript 3.0 Programming: Overview, Getting Started, and Examples of New Concepts
By Bill Sanders
January 2007
Pages: 74
Flexible Rails
by Peter Armstrong
Flexible Rails is an in-progress, PDF-only book about using Ruby on Rails 1.1 or 1.2 and Flex 2 to build rich Internet applications (RIAs).
currently 399 pages
Adobe Flex 2.0 Documentation Set
Old List: http://renaun.com/blog/2006/06/27/49/
Note: Yes, I am an author of one of these books. I’ll talk more about it in the coming months.
February 17th, 2007
I went ahead and signed up for an account on the new myFeedz, from Adobe labs, a social newspaper web application. After signing up and checking out my profile I noticed an API key. So I decided to go ahead and make a quick Flex application access some of the myFeedz API. This was pretty easily done with HTTPService and JSON (from the AS 3.0 libraries).
You can return posts or tag clouds from the general myFeedz site or your own profile of feeds. It seems to have been having some lag issues but it works most of the time. I created a simple search application to search for posts by tag terms. This worked fine on my local machine where there is no security issue but when I deployed it out on my server the application throws a security error.
Looking at the crossdomain.xml for the myFeedz site takes you to the homepage. So no Flex API love.
I’ll post the code any ways so if the crossdomain.xml gets fixed you can check the code. Just right click to view the source.
February 16th, 2007
I will be at the 360Flex conference in March. I am looking forward the opportunity to present a session on “Flex and PHP”. I will mainly cover Flex and PHP RemoteObject integration both over AMF0 and AMF3.
The session is scheduled for Tuesday at 4:00pm, under the Integration track. Please come attend the session it will be a great session.
If anybody wants to have me cover any particular specific Flex and PHP remoting integration area let me know and I’ll try and work it in.
See you at 360 Flex! Also any one that wants to meetup at the 360 Flex conference drop me an email at renaun renaun com.
February 15th, 2007
Doug McCune just released a very nice post about the perfect tabnavigator, aka: SuperTabNavigator. I just happened to be messing with a skinning feature for TabBar’s and TabNavigator’s that I thought would go well with this awesome component.
The default Tab skin for the TabBar and TabNavigator makes the selected Tab a solid color, the same color as the backgroundColor of the respective container component (TabBar or TabNavigator). This modification allows the developer to modify the selected Tab’s color through CSS. Not just change the color but make it fancy with gradient colors and alpha’s. It does require you to override all the Tab’s “skins” to make it work but it is fine as that can be done globally.
Take a look at the result here:
The code works by creating a custom programmatic skin file called GradientTabSkin.as. This file is a copy of the Halo theme’d TabSkin.as with my modifications. Now you need to set the Tab’s skins to point to the new programmatic skin class. The following code is an example of how to do this in CSS:
Tab {
disabledSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
downSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
overSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
selectedDisabledSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
selectedDownSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
selectedOverSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
selectedUpSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
upSkin: ClassReference("com.renaun.skins.GradientTabSkin");
}
The new custom skin uses the “backgroundGradientColors” and “backgroundGradientAlphas” to modify the selected Tab’s gradient fill. I choose to use these two styles because first they are not used by the Tab component and they make sense in terms of the select Tab trying to reflect the backgroundColors of the container. You could extend Tab and put you own custom style names in, but then you would have to extend TabBar and TabNavigator, too messy for me. You can view the CSS values used in the above example with the source links below.
You can click here to get the source code of my modifications. To get the full source of SuperTabNavigator please visit Doug’s site.
February 8th, 2007
