// Playground of Jens Krause
Renaun Erickson did a great job to describe the usage of the Flash Builder Burrito plugin for BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR. However, if you have already used Burrito as a plug-in version for Eclipse (and not as a standalone version), it will not find the new installed PlayBook SDK by default. Therefore you have to do a further step “by hand”.
UPDATE [10/31/10]: Example and its full source has been updated using latest commit of Swiz 1.0 RC2.
Cafe Townsend is a well known application to demonstrate any MVC framework for using Flex or ActionScript. There are already ports of Cairngorm, Mate, PureMVC, Spring ActionScript, RobotLegs and now Swiz.
In cooperation with “my partner in crime” Sönke Rohde we have built a Swiz port including unit tests. Check out the following example and its source.
For an upcoming Flex 4 training I do need a good example for using Mate framework. At the moment you will find a lot of examples on Mate’s official website or at the project called “mate-examples” at Google Code. But it seems that there is not any Flex 4 example available.
Anyway, I just ported the current Cafe Townsend example (Flex 3) created by Laura Arguello to Flex 4.
Do you remember the very old school global function called asfunction? It was used to call custom ActionScript methods clicking an HTML link. The definition in HTML was something like this: < a href='asfunction:myFunction' >my link< /a > .
In Flex 3 is it pretty painful to extend a custom container component for adding children to it using MXML. The following example will throw an error like this: Error: Multiple sets of visual children have been specified for this component (base component definition and derived component definition).
Flex 4 is Rock ‘n’ Roll! However, Flex 4 is still beta and it can’t be perfect right now. Today one of the most missing feature for me is using the ApplicationUpdaterUI of the Adobe AIR Update Framework in Flex 4. This bug is already documented. (BTW: Please vote here to fix this issue! )
Anyway, I can’t wait for the final release of Flex 4, so I decided to build a custom ApplicationUpdaterUI component based on the new Spark skinning architecture. The custom ApplicationUpdaterUI is built on the top of the current version of Adobes AIR Update Framework and most of the current features are available (e.g. auto check, localization etc.) The component is full skinnable using it as an external window (as before) or as an embedded view component in an application (without the need of a popup window).
WSSkinStatesTester is a handy tool to test visually all states of any skin classes in Flex 4 (Gumbo).
For skinning Flex 4 components you have a lot of great options. One way is using a custom skin class, which extends a Skin or a SparkSkin class and defines all needed style properties by itself.
Imagine a custom button skin, which is more complex than the standard Spark ButtonSkin. It declares additional gradients, rectangles, transitions etc. If you code all needed values for any style properties within this skin class, you may have to create another button skin class for using only one or two different style properties. Doing this, the amount of skin classes can be increased rapidly!
Few weeks ago Thibault Imbert published an optimized version of Adobes JPGEncoder. And it rocks! However, if you may have very big-size bitmaps it takes too much time to encode images. For example: A bitmap with a size of 2000px x 1500px takes 22 sec. (BTW: Adobes version 30 sec.!!)
Today I came across to a post by Manfred Weber, which points to a discussion at Adobes Alchemy forum. There you will find a great solution published by metalbot for encoding JPEGs using Alchemy. It’s based on a C library for JPEG image compression by IJG and it’s pretty fast (2,7 sec. for 2000 px x 1500px ) !!! Check out the example:
ThunderBolt AS3, which is a lightweight logger extension for Flex 3-4, AIR and Flash 9-10 applications, has been updated to version 2.2.
Check out the new features: