This looks interesting: two Air Apps that help localize languages for Flex apps; made free by David Deraedt:

Hmm – this looks interesting:  advanced data vis components for Flex – Diagram, Timeline, Gauges and Maps with spark-like renderers (mxml).

IBM ILOG Elixir 3.0 beta | RIAgora.

A few good videos by Doug Winnie showing the steps from inception, wireframing to handing off the UI to a developer:

All the episodes can be found here.

Christian Cantrell showed an example of how to better control nested loops by labeling each of the loops… very cool, had no idea.

Mike Morearty, developer of the Flex Builder team listed all the macros available in Flex Builder here:
http://www.morearty.com/blog/2007/01/24/macros-that-are-available-in-html-template-files/


${project}
The name of the project, e.g. MyProject.
${application}
The name of the application, e.g. MyApp.
${version_major}
The major version number of the version of Flash that is required to run this app, e.g. 9 for version 9.0 r28. You can change this and the other ${version_...} macros by going to Project > Properties, then â??Flex Compilerâ? or â??ActionScript Compiler,â? and then changing the player version number in the â??HTML wrapperâ? section.
${version_minor}
The minor version number of the version of Flash that is required to run this app, e.g. 0 for version 9.0 r28.
${version_revision}
The revision number of the version of Flash that is required to run this app, e.g. 28 for version 9.0 r28.
${build_suffix}
This is equal to "-debug" when building the debug version of the SWF, and "" when building the release version.
${swf}
The name of the SWF, not including the .swf extension, e.g. MyApp or MyApp-debug. This is essentially a convenience macro which is equivalent to ${application}${build_suffix}.
${bgcolor}
The background color of the application, as specified in the backgroundColor attribute of the tag, or, in the case of ActionScript-only projects, in the backgroundColor field of the [SWF] metadata attribute of the main application class, e.g. [SWF(backgroundColor="#ffffff")] public class MyApp extends Sprite (see this post for more information on setting the width, height, and background color of an ActionScript project). The result is in the form #rrggbb, e.g. #ffffff. This can actually be a little tricky to use, because by default, the background of a Flex app is actually a gentle gradient from one color to another; if you want the HTML background to match the background of your Flex app, you may need to fiddle with both the backgroundColor and backgroundGradientColors attributes of the tag.
${width}
The width of the application, as specified in the width attribute of the tag, or, in the case of ActionScript-only projects, in the width field of the [SWF] metadata attribute of the main application class, e.g. [SWF(width="300", height="400")] public class MyApp extends Sprite.
${height}
The height of the application, as specified in the height attribute of the tag, or, in the case of ActionScript-only projects, in the height field of the [SWF] metadata attribute of the main application class, e.g. [SWF(width="300", height="400")] public class MyApp extends Sprite.
${title}
The title of the application, as specified in the pageTitle attribute of the tag, or, in the case of ActionScript-only projects, in the pageTitle field of the [SWF] metadata attribute of the main application class, e.g. [SWF(pageTitle="flex r00lz")] public class MyApp extends Sprite.


* this is not overheard at a Superhero convention.

Adobe recently announced that Flex will now be known by Flash Builder; my feelings about this are mixed however.  There were many times I had to explain the differences between Flex and Flash (and, saying ‘Flash’ in that sentence I mean the capital ‘F’ Flash CS4 authoring vs the little ‘f’ flash which is the compiled output), as well as explain in the end that there really WAS no difference as it was all flash in the end (note the little ‘f’).

But at the same time being an old Macromedia Director developer who remembers when Flash was still FutureSplash, was part of the Flash 3 and 4 beta team and was one of the first using Flash inside of Director for my work for Marvel — I still shy away from saying I ‘do Flash’.  Why? Because my experience with Flash (big ‘F’) as an authoring environment has been painful to say the least.  FutureSplash originally was just a little vector graphics drawing and animation package; there was never really any room for any scripting other than the most simplest imaginable.  When Macromedia bought it and renamed it Flash, Actionscript 1 was things like the old ‘goto(20)’ stuff; Flash was still very much an animations package and tied down to the use of a timeline.  Even coming from Director – where one could use the MessageWindow to create objects in memory and manipulate them without ever committing anything to a script as such (and common now with things like Ruby and the irb) Flash seemed like a step BACKWARDS.  Director had objects – Flash didn’t.  Director had bitmaps. Flash didn’t. Vector graphics? Really? Why then was Photoshop the standard and Illustrator not so much?

But for the web, Flash started to grow, to overtake it’s big brother. Now I could go off on Macromedia’s choices in this and why this happened (the difference with the plugin installs, Director’s unfocus in regards to platform, it’s shirking of really interesting technologies such as Beatnik which I have strong opinions about, how Macromedia just kept glomming onto a busted engine without re-writing it) but irregardless of grandpa’s tirades, it DID happen.  Flash became the standard, and I left Director behind. But it was painful; having seen what an (almost real) programming tool could offer, Flash 4/MX/CS3 was just…urrrgh.

But then I picked up Flex and it was …. different. In some ways I’d say it was BETTER than Director — ok in a LOT of ways. Here was a true programming language (either with ActionScript3 or MXML), and EXTENSIBLE in ways that Director never was. A real skinnable interface.  Things that originally were first in Director (bitmapData) were now in Flash. Now once in awhile I do still miss the MessageWindow but on the whole, I’ve drunk the Kool Aid and found that it was good…

At AdobeMax in 2007 I got to see what was coming – Gumbo (Flex 4) looked fantastic, and Thermo took photoshop and allowed designers to add the rudimentary logic to an interface. I’ve been waiting…

And so Gumbo — I’m sorry, Flex 4 — I’m sorry, Flash Builder beta has just been released.  And I’m still drinking the Kool Aid.  I’ve had a little bit of a poke around it today (I’ve got work I gotta do!) and there are some really cool things I’ve found..

First off, while scripting I found you were given hints and additional information while adding components; this will save time if a developer just needs some quick information rather than have them open up the full help. Another huge time saver is having the IDE generate additional functions automatically either while scripting or in a component’s properties window for all the scriptable items.

Themes are huge as well – especially after developers like Juan Sanchez of ScaleNine and Degrafa fame brought Flex’s skinning engine the attention it deserved.  Though I really don’t like the new default ‘spark’ theme (it seems like we’ve gone back in time to retro computer land) support for the extension, creation and packaging of themes are stronger than ever.  Working hand in hand with Flash Catalyst the skins output can be selected with Flash Builder’s new theme browser, with single items still being customizable.

I’ve yet to really play yet though; I want to dive into the CSS support; I was confused by the previous incarnation of Gumbo’s CSS editor — it seemed as if one couldn’t get to the visual representation of the ui elements as one could in Flex 3, but it might have been my bunglings… I had a weird issue with this version of Gumbo – the Flash Builder beta — when ‘tab’ wasn’t finishing the autocomplete, but was instead tabbing out of eclipse, but again, suppose that was my fault as well…

Strangely enough, I’d probably have more time for play from work if I was using ‘Flash Builder’ – as I’m dealing with skinning issues in Flex 3. The universe mocks me.

A quick test of the current Flex interface for iDesign communicating to the Creston control system 2 states away..
Using the Flash Crestron SDK, no longer is e-Control tied to a windows only system. Created in such a way that the subcomponents listen for their own joins, the Flex UI loads in the XML that is created by the installer and displays the proper devices listening on the system.

The amp audio channel templates are programmed in such a way that it is repeated for the amount of audio channels the amplifier has; iDesign created the joins in such a way that the channels are iterated 21+ for every channel so that the system can ‘find’ itself.

Added more flexified goodness for the Flex to Crestron interface I’m building for Abercrombie and Fitch that I described here.I have to say, being an old Macromedia Director guy  that migrated to Flash (grumpily as the world did) I find Adobe Flex to be …well… it’s a joy to work with; I’ve actually become very excited about coding again.

Have to say it’s quite fun — sort of reminds me of the old Director3d — or at the least the stuff that Barry Swan was coding as billboards before Director added true 3d support.

I’m writing a class for it for a sort of flipping card interface; I’ve seen this done before in Flash but not in Flex (if anyone has examples, feel free to send them my way).

Click the above image to launch it in a new window from it’s home on Amazon S3; for the time being it’s a bit large. Once I finish debugging I’ll post an example here.

Note: Flash does seem to play much slower in the lightbox; click on the top right video tab to see the 3d action.. it really seems to chug in the iframe.

I’m working on a Flex front end talking to a Crestron backend – and one of the things we’re doing is creating templates of different devices, one being a family of Crown amplifiers, each of which might have 2, 4 or 8 channels of audio to display. Each channel starts out with a Crestron join, but the next channel up it’s join begins at 21+ from the previous channel’s (if you know Crestron you’ll know what I mean).

What I love about the extensibility of Flex and it’s MXML Components: I’ve created one channel with all it’s internal joins as private properties. The parent amp template has only one property it needs to keep track of – channelCount – and I instantiate channels on the fly and only tell them their channel – both to display information (ie ‘Channel 1′) but also so each channel can remap it’s internal joins to send and receive the correct information – ie (channel-1) * 21 basically gives each channel’s subitem it’s join. All they have to do now is listen to the Singleton I’ve created for communicating to Crestron and they get their values by the event broadcast. Very cool. Also have to add I love how easy it is to make things pretty. Just these few lines:

Give me these nicely animated volume controls by merely controlling the height of the mask.

http://www.axelscript.com/2008/04/02/introducing-acjeditor-its-a-rte/

* sung to the tune of  "Lovely Rita" by The Beatles.  Yeah, ok - doesn't make it any funnier...

David Deraedt created this nifty little Air/Flex app for administrating your SQLite databases — helpful for developing your own Air applications. How very meta.

Looking at older code I could see that the FCSubscribe was being polled – but I couldnâ??t understand why the new code in Flex not using this FCSubscribe would work with our own FMS servers, but not with Limelight.

I tried looking up what the problem could be via google but found nothing. I asked the flexcoders list but was pretty much ignored. Through searching Flex blogs, I found John C Bland II, who recently left Limelight as an AS3 coder.

John was kind enough to explain to me that the real problem was how FCSubscribe works with Edge Servers:

A normal FMS install is just a straight up 1 server install. A CDN install uses edge servers which means there is an origin server with many other servers on the â??edgeâ? that communicate back to the origin. In order to connect to the proper stream, an FCSubscribe has to be called. That call basically calls the edge server which does a â??searchâ? to find the stream. Thatâ??s why you have to do the â??timerâ? trick to continuously ping to see if the server found the stream yet. My method isnâ??t a timer. It is with â??connected callsâ?. So, try to connect (subscribe), if it fails, wait 1 second (setInterval) and subscribe, if it fails, wait 1 second again and subscribe. Do that over and over until the maximum amount of connects is reached. Of course before each setInterval I clearInterval so I donâ??t have multiple running at once. You get a pretty much immediate response from the server so you can get away with firing off multiple setIntervals/subscribes but it could get hairy. I prefer to try and only try again if it fails (with a 1 second pause between the retries).

Kind enough to show me some example code, I changed it just a tad to fit in the way I was calling it (and I believe Iâ??ll make it into a subcomponent as part of the cleanup:

private var connection:NetConnection;

private var stream:NetStream;

private var video:Video = new Video();

private var vidTimer:Timer;

private var _fcSubscribeCount:int = 0;

private var _fcSubscribeMaxRetries:int = 3;

private var _fcSubscribeInterval:Number;

public function videoInit():void {

connection = new NetConnection();

connection.client = this;

connection.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, videoStatusHandler);

connection.addEventListener(SecurityErrorEvent.SECURITY_ERROR, vidSecurityErrorHandler);

connection.connect(streamURL);

}

private function subscribe():void{

connection.call(�FCSubscribe�, null, streamName);

var nsClient:Object = {};

nsClient.onMetaData = ns_onMetaData;

}

public function onFCSubscribe(info:Object):void{

switch(info.code){

case â??NetStream.Play.StreamNotFoundâ?:

clearInterval(_fcSubscribeInterval);

if(_fcSubscribeCount >= _fcSubscribeMaxRetries){

_fcSubscribeCount = 0;

}else{

_fcSubscribeCount++;

//subscribe failed; wait 1 second then try again

_fcSubscribeInterval = setInterval(subscribe, 1000);

}

break;

case â??NetStream.Play.Startâ?:

_fcSubscribeCount = 0;

clearInterval(_fcSubscribeInterval);

connectStream();

break;

}

}

private function videoStatusHandler(event:NetStatusEvent):void {

//Alert.show(event.info.code);

switch (event.info.code) {

case â??NetConnection.Connect.Successâ?:

subscribe();

break;

case â??NetStream.Play.Startâ?:

//Alert.show(�netstream play start�);

break;

case â??NetStream.Play.StreamNotFoundâ?:

//Alert.show(�Stream not found: � + streamName);

break;

}

}

private function vidSecurityErrorHandler(event:SecurityErrorEvent):void {

Alert.show(�securityErrorHandler: � + event);

}

private function connectStream():void {

var nsClient:Object = {};

nsClient.onMetaData = ns_onMetaData;

stream = new NetStream(connection);

stream.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, videoStatusHandler);

video.attachNetStream(stream);

stream.play(streamName);

stream.client = nsClient;

uic.addChild(video);

uic.addEventListener(ResizeEvent.RESIZE, resizeVideo);

video.width= uic.width;

video.height = uic.height;

}

private function resizeVideo(ev:ResizeEvent):void{

video.width = uic.width;

video.height = uic.height;

}

** originally posted at scribemedia

Yahoo already has some examples, screencasts and other fun bits.

And to think, I was just visiting Yahoo to grab their latest Flash and Flex components.

** originally posted on scribemedia