Wednesday, March 24, 2010 from 12:00 AM – 1:00 PM (GMT+0200) join our friend Mihai Corlan (Platform Evangelist for Adobe) while he goes through the basics of debugging a Flex and PHP application.

See how to work with: Flash Builder 4,  Xdebug and Eclipse PDT to ensure a bug free project.

The presentation will take about 45 minutes, leaving 15 minutes to answer any questions you might have on this subject.

For registration go to http://flexphpdebug.eventbrite.com.

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.

Flash MiniBuilder is a lightweight IDE created for developing programs written in ActionScript 3. Flash MiniBuilder is itself written in ActionScript.

Two of the main raison tobe of MiniBuilder are:

• provide a completely free and cross platform alternative for developing ActionScript projects.
• provide an editor with a small footprint that would eventually run on smaller computers like netbooks or even pocket-size devices.

Extending, changing (and even integrating MiniBuilder with other software) is easy: MiniBuilder is itself written in your favourite language, AS3!

This and some of it’s unique features and concepts will make it the IDE of choice for lots AS3 developers.

MiniBuilder will benefit from Adobe AIR’s ability to launch applications from the browser. Code samples, online tutorials, code libraries will be able to provide a direct launch link for their projects: “launch this project in MiniBuilder” (This feature will be available in the first beta version.)

Because ActionScript virtual machine is now an open source project, we expect lots of solutions to adopt it for embedding. From the start, MiniBuilder targets several implementations of Tamarin AVM:

• Flash Player
• Adobe AIR
• Tamarin AVM shell
• Mod ActionScript (experimental web server module running ActionScript)

MiniBuilder will be available in 2 versions:

• Desktop MiniBuilder
• Web MiniBuilder

More about MiniBuilder and download information you can read at: http://code.google.com/p/minibuilder/.

Starting today, Flash Catalyst & Flash Builder 4 are in public beta.

You can download them from Adobe’s site by following these links:

• http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/ for Flash Catalyst
• http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/ for Flash Builder

If didn’t hear about them, Flash Catalyst is:

…a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating user interfaces without coding.

And Flash Builder 4 is the former Flex Builder but rebranded:

…we are renaming Flex Builder to Flash Builder. This name change will create a clear distinction between the free open-source Flex framework and the commercial IDE

There are lots of examples and content for these two new tools. Get started following the links bellow:

• Flash Builder and Flex 4 SDK – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/tutorials/
• Flash Catalyst – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/tutorials/
• Flash Platform videos – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/

Enjoy the public betas and give us feedback about both products.

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

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.

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.

It just hit me!! I missed one very important news for us developers from the free comunity:

Adobe has opened up AMF specification and has announced plans to release the source code of BlazeDS, a messaging and remoting framework based on LiveCycle Data Services.

More information can be found here.

One of my friends was so kind and tell me about his tool and I think it’s really good.

SO, Flex-Spy allow you to inspect and dynamically change most properties and styles of the visual components in your Flex application.

Check it out a live at: http://www.mieuxcoder.com/data/2007/12/FlexSpy-1.2/dashboard.html (in the application, click the flexSpy button on the top-right corner) and installation instructions can be found at http://code.google.com/p/fxspy/wiki/InstallationInstructions.

To download this application go to http://www.mieuxcoder.com/data/2007/12/FlexSpy-1.2.

Enjoy!