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.

I’ve updated my Prevent Dupliate Tabs Firefox extension to allow for whitelisting of URLs that should be prevented from being opened in duplicate tabs.  You can grab latest version here.  Read the instructions about the new UI, checkout the changelog, and take a look at what I have planned next.

I created the extension to solve an annoyance that has always bugged me about Flex Builder, or more specifically any Eclipse based tool (ie. Aptana).  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!

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.

So the iPhone is powerful enough to run Spore & Super Monkey Ball  but not powerful enough to run Flash or Flex applications?  Seems odd to me.

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.

I just came across a Project Maestro video on YouTube where the clever people at Cynergy Systems have created a Minority Report style user interface and pointing device.  Written using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and a finger tracking, Wii Remote hack the demo is truly remarkable.  It would be really cool to hear from the Cynergy people to see how hard this would be to do in Flex?

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.

The Adobe Edge Newsletter has a goot article on Using the BitmapData class in ActionScript 3.0 to render video.  The approach described in the article uses the NetStream and Video classes to handle the loading and playback of video and then takes that data and displays it in a Bitmap object.  Once in the Bitmap object, you will be able to apply filters to give your video some very interesting effects.