Joshua Dobbs

Happy Holloween!

2008-10-31T07:58:06Z

My wife and I carved pumpkins with the kids tonight.

Google's Android soon to be on the loose

2008-09-23T20:57:50Z

T-Mobile started taking pre orders today on the first mobile phone to run Google’s Android OS. If you haven’t checked it out you should. The device hasn’t even shipped yet and the lineup of available applications looks awesome.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these primarily because it’s not powered by Microsoft. I have had my share of windows mobile devices and I am ready to move on.

As far as I know there is no flash support at this time but this may be time for me to dive into Java.

Hubdog - podcast client for Windows Mobile

2008-09-22T20:39:03Z

I was looking for a podcast client for my pocket pc with hopes of watching video podcasts while on the go. I downloaded Hubdog only to find out that I cant watch the video podcasts. Well it’s not really hubdog’s fault that I can’t watch them but more due to the fact that windows mobile does not support certain media types. I figured if I installed TCPMP(formerly Beta player) I would be good to go but apparently the required codecs were removed from the player due to legalities. Even without the ability to watch video podcasts I will still use hubdog because it’s simple and easy to use. I may not be able to watch video podcasts but I can easily download and listen to audio podcasts.

Pros:

Pretty decent (audio)podcast client for the pocket pc
It’s free!
Browser toolbar to easily add rss feeds with the click of a button
Easy to add feeds from your Desktop or your windows mobile device

Cons:

Video won’t play on ppc

Pac Man Cake

2008-09-22T10:47:54Z

A fellow classic arcade collector recently had the folks from Charm City Cakes provide a custom Pac Man arcade game cake. This has got to be one of the coolest Video Arcade related cakes ever!

Tweener

2008-09-19T22:10:04Z

While I have used Mc Tween in the past I was oblivious to tweener as the built in transitions in Flex have been more than enough for what I do on a day to day basis. Tonight I started working on a pet project in Flash(thanks to the fact that you can’t launch executables from an air application) I went to download the latest version of Mc tween and came across tweener. So far so good! I was able to do everything I needed to do just by looking at the few examples posted on google code. I also like the fact that you can access the source code, I haven’t had to yet but it’s nice to be able to step through it in case I have to.

Flex is great BUT...

2008-09-18T18:50:21Z

...why can't i launch an executable from an Air application?

I LOVE Flex! It’s awesome! The debugger works great and there the support is awesome! Well that’s how I felt until yesterday! How come I cant launch an executable from a desktop application written in AIR? Why!?!?!?!?

I can do it with a flash projector and have been able to do so for years!

Merapi? Merapi is cool but what if you don’t know Java? Yes I can learn Java but why should I have to use a third party application for such a simple task and what happened to Rapid Development?

I’m sure I can figure out a way to do this in .net however I don’t have time for this right now so it seems my only option is to write a flash projector to do my bidding.

I’m done ranting now .

How to use an Adobe Flex Application as your Windows Desktop Wallpaper

2008-09-14T17:52:47Z

A few months ago I was playing with Doug McCune's Coverflow component and made a simple photo carosel to display some photos. I was going through some of my projects yesterday and when I came across the Photo Carosel I thought it would be cool to use it as My Desktop Wallpaper. I have never used a swf for wallpaper before so I googled the topic and found this cool free(for personal use) swf wallpaper tool called Flash Wallpaper from Tenmiles. Im sure I could figure out how to do it myself but this was quick and painless and took less than 5 minutes to set up and install my first Flex Wallpaper.

Below is a screenshot of it on my laptop, I also installed it on my Asus eee and it works great on both machines.

It's nothing too fancy but I like it and so do my kids!

Now i'm wondering if there is a better way to do this with Air. If anyone has done this or can point me to some online resources that I may have missed I would greatly Appreciate it!

coding away...

2008-08-22T20:48:11Z

I have been too busy coding to post a thorough review of the presentations that I watched but I will post it soon...

360|Flex Conference

2008-08-22T13:48:09Z

I'm at the airport waiting for the plane home from Flex|360 so this will be a quick post. I have been to other conferences before but this was my first time at a 360 Conference. Overall I'd say theres something for everyone no matter what level you are at in your career as a Flex Developer. This particular conference had a whole day of free online training sponsored by the folks at Lynda.com. Although I did not attend the training sessions from Lynda a few of my friends did and had nothing but great things to say about it.

Should you go to 360|Flex?......YES! Every day there were four classes going on at the same time during the entire course of the day and they are all arranged by skill level. Not too mention everyone there is a Flex Developer so it's a great opportunity to meet wit h other developers and exchange ideas! I had a great time and learned a lot and will be posting the details in the next day or so once I catch up with my projects.

I almost forgot! Here are a couple of pictures of the ebay center which was just an awesome place to be!

Getting started with Flex

2008-08-07T13:30:29Z

A fellow developer that I know asked me for a list of Flex/AS3 books to get him started with Flex so I figured I'd post them here for others as well.

2 books that I like are
Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0
ActionScript 3 Design Patterns

There are also a lot of very good online resources and a lot of them are FREE! Here's a list of a few off the top of my head. I know there are many more than this so if anyone knows of any that are especially good please let me know by leaving a comment.

The Flex Show has a great video series called 15 Minutes with Flex that is geared towards beginning Flex Developers.
Adobe also has a series of videos that aim to teach you Flex in one week!
Adobe's Flex 3 Developer's Guide

Tip! - for those of you that are still parsing xml the old fashion way with all that firstChild.nextChild.yadaYadaYada you should check out e4x! The team at Adobe has really done a great job at making short work of parsing xml.
e4x makes it much easier to parse xml and thus reducing development time!

e4x is great and all but it's not the only way. My preferred method is to load the xml results into an array collection although both ways allow you to reference each xml node by it's name. Here's a sample...

var ws_resultHandler:WebServiceHandler = new WebServiceHandler(this, _WSDL, "handleResults", "ws_faultHandler");
ws_resultHandler.CallMethod("getStuff", null);

  public function handleResults(event:ResultEvent):void
  {
       _resultArray = ArrayCollection(event.result);

       var i:uint;
       for (i=0; i < _resultArray.length; i++)
       {
            trace(_resultArray[i].itemName);
            trace(_resultArray[i].itemDescription);
            //etc,etc,etc
       }
  }

The 411

2008-08-05T20:07:33Z

Since a few of you have asked...

I haven't had the time to post Flex tips as often as I had anticipated but I will get back to it soon. I have had a lot going on lately and thus have rescheduled the exam until things settle down. I'm anticipating being able to hit the books about a week after I return from 360|Flex.

On a side note I got some time to watch Jesse Warden's Being Independent & Making Money Using Flex which is a must watch for Developers that are considering becoming an Independent contractor. There is a TON of useful information covered and I am just want to thank Jesse taking time out of his busy day(s) in order to inform the Flex Community.

How to pass an individual property to an event handler

2008-06-27T17:16:33Z

I usually just pass the entire Event object to my event listeners however it is possible to pass an individual property to an event handler.

First you have to set up the handler something like this:

    private function handleThis(val:String):void {
        trace(val);
    }

Now since your handler is expecting a string you just pass it one like this:



In this case I'm passing the id of the button to the event handler but you can pass pretty much whatever property that Flex can access.

Flex Tips

2008-06-27T09:01:34Z

I am currently preparing myself to take The Flex Developer Exam. While making my way through tons of material and taking notes I figured it may be helpful to some (especially if your just starting out with Flex) to post things that I think may be useful. Thus I have created the Flex Tips category and will post anything I think is cool. I expect it to be updated several times a week up until I take the Exam which is scheduled for a little less than a month from now. I plan to post periodically after the exam but for now you can expect several new posts a week for the next month.

How to view the ActionScript code that Flex generates

2008-06-26T23:01:46Z

To be able to view the code you have to tell flex to keep it by right clicking on your Flex Project in Flex Builder and then go to Properties>Flex Compiler and add "-keep-generated-actionscript" into Additional Compiler Arguments.

Flex is smart enough to prevent bloated SWFs

2008-06-26T22:53:22Z

Did you know that Flex is smart enough NOT to include imported classes that are not used in the SWF? This means you can that you can import an entire package (even if you don't use every class) without resulting in a HUGE SWF file.

OC Flex User Group

2008-06-06T09:07:03Z

I attended the OC Flex User Group tonight where Iman Khabazian gave a presentation on SCUGE. SCUGE is an open source framework used to develop Flash/Flex games that will eventually become a game engine. It incorporates MVC and looks like a great framework for game development. I noticed that the presentation was being video taped so maybe it will be posted online in the future. Until then you can read more at www.scuge.com.

Flex Blogs!

2008-05-28T21:46:21Z

Where the heck have I been?

When I was assigned my first flash project and given a flash MX book to get me up to speed there was not much help to be found on the web. Sure there was a site here and there with a little actionscript but no real meat to chomp down on. I spent many hours researching the web when I would get stuck and there was absolutely no help to be found. As time passed my team increased from 1 to 4 when we were able to find and add one great developer after another. That was great because I finally had other knowledgeable developers to work with and wouldn't have to worry about that one bug and the fast approaching deadline that had seemed to always pop up.

About 3 months ago a new developer joined the company and was nice enough to introduce me to Flex Blogs by telling me about Doug McCune's flexlib, I never new that they even existed and I have found myself to be a manual web crawler as I try to cram the past year or so into my brain. I have listed a few below and will be adding more as I think of them. If there are any that you feel are valuable please feel free to post a link in the comments section.

Doug McCune - FlexLib, open source Flex components.
The Flex Show - podcasts about FLEX!
Ted on Flex - it's Ted on Flex.
David Tucker - Some great cairngorm tutorial videos.
OC Flex - Orange County's Flex User Group.

Photoshop Express?

2008-04-03T19:42:43Z

Today as I was perusing the Flex Developer Center visited I saw an article about Photoshop Express Beta has been released and that it was created with Flex. I decided to try it out and after signing up(optional) I was prompted to install Flash Player. I am a Flex/Flash developer and of course I already have Flash Player but I figured that there was an update so I continued on and downloaded it.

When the installation was complete I again received the prompt to install the flash player which left me perplexed. I did everything from rebooting, installing the player 3 times and still received the same message. I searched on Google to find a solution for the issue and found nothing. I looked at the message again and realized that it said my browser may not allow Javascript so I started to play with the security setting in IE and loaded the page again but I still received the same message. At this point I was pretty frustrated and just rebooted again.

After the machine was back up I went to the Photoshop Express Page once again and since I received the same message I just went through the process of downloading the player once more and it looked different this time...

This time it displayed a status bar but took en excessive amount of time. I am currently going through this step on my laptop as I am typing this post and so far it has taken at least 25 minutes. I will post my thoughts about Photoshop Express as soon as I get to use it...

After an hour of letting the Flash Player Download I gave up and decided to give it a try in FireFox and it worked so apparently there is some issue with Internet Explorer that possibly has to do with t he newest version of Flash Player(9,0,115,0). Ill post more details on this in a later post but for now take a look at the picture I edited with Photoshop Express.

Overall I think this is a pretty cool application. Very handy for the typical end user wanting to post pictures on the internet. I also like the fact that Adobe gives you 2 GB of free storage and they give you the code to embed the images into your Blog which is how I posted the above image. I'm not going to go over all of the features but I recommend you try it out if your looking for a online photo editing application.

In conclusion not only is this a very cool use of Flex it's also a very handy application to have at your disposal.

What now?

2008-04-02T13:17:13Z

Well here it is...another Flex Blog!