Sunday, November 25th, 2007
The collections in Flex are good as data providers for list and tree components, doing the dirty work of making sure that the components know of changes made to the underlying data, but frankly they suck at most other things. Most importantly they suck at being collections. In this post I’m going to show you why and how to alleviate the problem somewhat.
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
The asynchronous API:s in Flash, Flex and AIR don’t all work the same in regards to garbage collection. I discovered this the other day when testing out file uploading in Flash. I made the mistake of not keeping a reference to the object that was going to dispatch events when the user had selected a file. It took me half an hour to figure out what was happening, and once I did I cursed myself for not seeing it straight away. However, after having thought about it I think that the the Flash, Flex and AIR API:s are inconsistent and a bit unintuitve on this point.
Monday, October 15th, 2007
It’s been a while since I wrote about TextMate and Flex, but still my last post is one of the first five when I google for “textmate flex“, “textmate flex bundle” or “textmate flex tips“. This surprises me as I thought that by now there should have been more written about Flex and TextMate by now, after all it’s been almost ten months. It turns out that there actually has been things going on, but in the quiet.
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Three months ago I asked is the only thing new with Flex 3 the version number?, I was bit critical back then, but I take it all back.
Why?
OpenType font embeddning. Absolutely fantastic.
The enhanced constraints feature isn’t so bad either.
<any/>Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
A while back I wrote about using Flex with Amazon WebServices and the problems I had using Flex’ WebService component. Now I’ve tried working with web services in Flex again and discovered new problems having to do with Flex’ serialization of the request when the data type of a parameter is <any/>.
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007
Adobe has clarified the Flex 3 pricing and the good news is that The Flex SDK will remain free (not very surprising as it’s going open source). However, it won’t be much of an update from Flex 2, because the only real new feature will not be included.
Sunday, June 10th, 2007
There are lots of examples of how to access Amazon’s WebServices (AWS), and their own documentation is extensive. However a quick google on “Flex Amazon WebServices” doesn’t turn up many results. Amazon’s own examples are all for other platforms.
Let’s put together some code that searches Amazon for CD cover art.
Tuesday, May 15th, 2007
I finally got around to writing up the FlexUnit Automation kit, the FlexUnit/Ant integration I blogged about a month ago. Read on for a description and download link.
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
I’m quite ambivalent when it comes to using CSS in Flex. There are some cases where CSS is perfect, but also many where CSS doesn’t do much more than fragment the application.
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
FlexUnit works quite well for testing ActionScript code, but one thing that has been a problem is how to automate the testing. Currently you have to run the tests manually, or go to such lengths as Peter Martin (whose solution is clever, but complex). In this post I outline a possible solution using Apollo and Ant.