Wednesday, 27th of January, in Bucharest, Mark Anders, the creator of Flash Catalyst will tell us how Flash Catalyst appeared and how it got done. For anyone who doesn’t know about him, Mark Anders is a major contributor for the whole Adobe Flex platform.

The meeting starts at 6 PM but we will start gather and 5:30 PM and it will be mostly an opened discussion. Mark will tell us what’s behind the scenes not only for Flash Catalyst but also for other Flex related products.

For registration go on MyAdobe, http://myadobe.ro/2010/01/21/how-its-made-versiunea-adobe/ (Romanian only).

Hope to see you all there.

If you’ve been following Serge Jesper son Twitter, you may have seen his tweets about a secret project called Quindici. Well… the project now is finalized and public… and is a widget created especially for Adobe MAX Conference.

You can see it bellow or on MAX Conference site.

You can find some interesting facts about Adobe MAX Conference which you can tweet further, you can see video testimonials and record yourself a testimony and post it to Quindici.

The widget is built with Flex Builder 3 using Flex 3 SDK, ColdFusion, Flash Media Server and Photoshop.

Related resources:
http://max.adobe.com/widget/
http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/08/21/project-quindici-maxwidget/
http://corlan.org/2009/08/21/project-quindici-finally-revealed/

The 3.4 version of Flex SDK is available. An important vulnerability has been identified in Flex 3.3 SDK and earlier versions which could result in cross-site scripting. This technote explains the important vulnerability found in the previous version of the Flex SDK.

Please go to Adobe Open Source website and download the Flex 3.4 SDK version.

It seems that Flex 4 SDK is not affected by this vulnerability because it uses SWFObject templates.

Resources:
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-13.html
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/495/cpsid_49530.html
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3

Many of you may already know about the rebranding of Flex Builder. It will no longer be named Flex Builder but Flash Builder. Adobe took this action in order to make the Flash name (and platform) a stronger one. Flex will not disappear but it will remain as framework. Neither Flash IDE. I know many of you have questions. This is what I found on Lee Brimelow blog…

Flash IDE will be discontinued?
Of course not. Flash authoring will continue to be the premiere tool for design and animation for the Flash Platform.

Confusion when talking about Flex?
People should understant that Flex is an ActionScript framework for creating RIAs and that is not changing. This will make Flex brand more solid and understandable.

Why not earlier?
Flex Builder was created to easy the creation of Flex framework projects. Over the years massive amount of people is using it for their pure ActionScript work.

Will Flash Builder still be based on Eclipse?
Yes it will continue to be an Eclipse-based product.

Too much tools for creating Flash content?
Animators and designers are used to the Flash IDE and like its focus on creating completely custom Flash experiences. Flash and Flex developers generally do not like spending their time in the Flash IDE and prefer to be in a powerful code-centric environment like Eclipse.

Flex SDK?
It will not be renamed.

These are from Lee Brimelow post. You can read more over there.

In my opinion this is a good movement and by doing this Adobe will make many aware of the link between Flash and Flex, and that Flex is a framework on top of Flash platform.

In the previous months some of Adobe evangelists handed out licensees of Flex Builder for people without job in order to help them get a job by reconverting them. Ben Forta said on his blog:

We did not launch a full program for this, just a grassroots initiative thought up and delivered by your friendly Adobe Platform Evangelists. We were inundated with requests, and gave away hundreds of copies in the first few days. And it worked, fellow evangelist Duane Nickull gave a copy to a developer who recently told us that it helped him get a new job!

As a continuity of this start-up Adobe launched the official version of the Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional for unemployed developers program. You can register here and along with the Flex Builder license you’ll receive various offers to help you learn Flex.

Thinking about this I can only say that Adobe did a great thing through their evangelists by starting this out. I’m thinking that in this moment of world economic crisis this is the best measure of counter attack by helping unemployed people find a job.

Thanks Adobe!

To read more follow the links:
https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/
http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/3/Free-Flex-Builder-3-For-Unemployed-Developers

If you didn’t know by now, the version 3.3 of Flex SDK is released. You can download it from here.

As Mihai Corlan from Adobe said…

Basically it is about bug fixes, and including the last players. Last week the AIR 1.5.1 was launched, it was natural to come with this SDK too.

…no new features.

The bugs fixed can be found here on Adobe’s Bug List.

As Adobe said this is a stable version of Flex SDK so we will start using it ASAP.

Table of contents

1. Very First Flex Preloader Customization
2. Very First Flex Preloader Customization For Flex Builder 3/Flex SDK 3.2

In a previous article I explained how to create a custom preloader that will replace the very first flex preloader (the one that appears when starting application). That article was created using Flex Builder 2 and now needs an update because Flex Builder is at version 3 since a good time and Gumbo is on its way.

If you would try to implement that example in Flex Builder 3 you would notice a runtime error that sounds like this:

TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert dwd::CustomPreloader_WelcomeScreenGraphic@2a86781 to flash.display.MovieClip.
        at dwd::CustomPreloader()[CustomPreloader.as:22]

Not so good…

To make it work you need to use DisplayObject instead of MovieClip. So change those lines like bellow:
from

public var wcs:MovieClip;

to

public var wcs:DisplayObject;

and from

wcs = new WelcomeScreenGraphic();

to

wcs = DisplayObject(new WelcomeScreenGraphic());

This should do it. If you found another way please tell us.

I think some of you may encountered this “wonderful” runtime error, mostly when you work in a team, building different applications that will load in another one.

Shortly the application is telling us that parts are build using different versions of Flex SDK. In my case the main application was build using Flex SDK version 3.1.0 and the application to be loaded was build using Flex SDK 3.2.0

This are some possible errors:

VerifyError: Error #1053: Illegal override of removeChildBridge in mx.managers.SystemManagerProxy.

ReferenceError: Error #1065: Variable _*_mx_managers_SystemManager is not defined.

VerifyError: Error #1014: Class ISWFLoader could not be found.

ReferenceError: Error #1065: Variable _SWFLoaderStyle__embed_css_Assets_swf___brokenImage_1003344314 is not defined.

To get rid of these errors compile your application’s parts with the same Flex SDK.

You can download Flex SDK from here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3.

Also you can update your Flex Builder to the last version which includes also the last version of Flex SDK: http://www.adobe.com/support/flex/downloads_updaters.html.

Last week I had to write a small piece of code to send to a webservice a number from a text input. All was fine for the normal test values (0,1,100). The problem appeared when I tried to send the number -9223372036854775808. Instead of receiving this number I got -9223372036854776000.  So I started to do some debugging I saw that the problem was in the soap functions from the Flex SDK when they did a number.toString().

I did a small test project to verify that the issue is with the toString() function. Here is the code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" width="160" height="70">
	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			[Bindable]
			public var stringValue:String = "-9223372036854775808";
			[Bindable]
			public var numberValue:Number = Number(stringValue);			
 
			private function testToStringIssue():void
			{
				lbl.text = numberValue.toString();
			}
		]]>
	</mx:Script>
	<mx:Label x="10" y="10" text="{stringValue}" id="lbl"/>
	<mx:Button x="10" y="36" label="Button" click="testToStringIssue();"/>	
</mx:Application>

As you see we first display the stringValue and that is ok. Then we do a number toString() and display that result.
]]> http://www.flexer.info/2008/11/20/numbertostring-bug/feed/ 6 http://www.flexer.info/2008/08/21/flex-builder-301-update-includes-flex-sdk-31/ http://www.flexer.info/2008/08/21/flex-builder-301-update-includes-flex-sdk-31/#comments Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:03:44 +0000 Andrei Ionescu http://www.flexer.info/?p=243

On 18th of August Matt Chotin announce the availability of Flex Builder 3.0.1 Update which includes Flex SDK 3.1.

This is what it contains:

• bug fixes (jira list here)
• support for Flash Player 10 – just base support
• support for AIR 1.1
• support for Eclipse 3.4

You can update your Flex Builder 3 by selecting Search for Flex Builder Updates… from Help menu. I tried this and runs very smoothly.

If you want to do it manually follow the instructions found here.