I was reading some Flex docs online the other night, and in the live docs section I noticed a link to where you could download the example scripts for many of the examples shown in the Flex docs. The zip file is available here and contains some great Flex/AS projects including a Wiki Editor, Video Jukebox, Display Object Transformer and many more.
If you use Firefox as your primary browser for debugging your Flex applications, you may want to read this bug report before you upgrade you browser to Firefox 3…
[#FB-13064] Firefox 3 and Flex Debug Not Working
If you must have the latest and greatest Firefox, you can always use the workaround of debugging with Safari or Internet Explorer!
The OpenSource Flex site has released the team’s Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices. If you’re planning on committing code to the SDK, these are the guidelines that you will have to follow. These guidelines are also useful even if you’re just looking to be a better AS3 coder.
Earlier this week, I wrote a Firefox extension to prevent duplicate tabs from opening. Reader Jimmy Fung posted a comment with a link to Firefox 2 and Flex: Launching builds in the same window. It makes my extension somewhat (alright completely) useless - but hey, I learned a lot about making Firefox extensions in the process!
One thing that has always bugged me about Flex Builder (or more specifically Eclipse) is that when you click the Run/Debug/Build button (or F11/ctrl-11) your project is always opened up in a new browser tab. It doesn’t take long until you realize that you have 20 tabs open – or at least in my workflow it happens!
So last night I built a Firefox extension that I have been wanting to make for a while. It’s called Prevent Duplicate Tabs, and ensures that only the most recent tab of a given url is open at any one time. After its installed, you will notice that there is a menu item in the Tools menu called “Prevent Duplicate Tabs”. By default it is checked, and if you want to turn the extension off, you can simple toggle the menu item.
This is my first ever Firefox extension. It was a bit of a pain to develop, and I now have even greater appreciation for the Flex documentation ;-)
Feedback is welcome – source is available by request.
I’ve been wondering lately how many Flex/Flash developers we have on Vancouver Island. I know there are a few here, here and a couple more here so there must be a fer more kicking around. I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a Flex/Flash Users’ Group, but would only do so if there were enough interested developers. If you’re interested send me an email (jim.rutherford[at]gmail.com) or leave a comment that includes your name and email address on this post.
You gotta love the Mac rumor mill! Gear Live is reporting that Flash on the iPhone is just around the corner and will be available along side Apple’s release of the iPhone SDK near the end of this month. I can’t wait to start hacking some cool Flex apps if and when the Flash Player is made available on the iPhone.
If your Flex projects use a crossdomain.xml security policy file, the Adobe Developer Center has a great series of articles around the Security changes in the new Flash Player 9 Update 3 (9.0.115.0). I’m surprised I have not seen more posts in the Flex community about these changes. We have already been affected by these changes a number of times when trying to access media on Amazon’s S3 storage service due to an incorrect content-type header. All cross domain policy files must have a content type of text/* (any text type), application/xml or application/xhtml+xml. There are a number of other changes that you should be aware of, and the DevCenter article discusses them all.
David Zuckerman from Adobe’s Flex Builder team offers up a Flex Builder editor cheat sheet that is sure to make your FB coding much more productive. My favorites are:
Andrew Trice recently posted on how to Improve Flex Builder Performance. His instructions are for Windows and point in the direction editing FlexBuilder.ini. On the Mac, FlexBuilder.ini is well hidden and not easily found. To change your memory settings on OSX you need to:
I upped my -Xms and -Xmx to 1024 and have noticed a performance improvement on my compile/build time.
