timwalling.com

I’ve been meaning to experiment with this for some time and was reminded of it with the recent release of FlashInterface. Currently there’s no Flex 2 component for Yahoo Maps and since Flash 9 content can’t talk directly to Flash 8 content I wondered how one might use the Yahoo Maps Flash component in a Flex 2 application I always knew LocalConnection was a possibility but hadn’t thought about using ExternalInterface until I came across the solution I mentioned above. I figured this would be a great chance to try out FlashInterface and complete my proof of concept all in one shot.

I’ll post the source code soon as I plan on making more updates to this. I might also use it as a chance to play with UrlKit some more and knock out another task I’ve been meaning to get done. There might be a few issues with this example right now, I’ve noticed that the mouse handling seems to be a bit funky when one tries to click on the map marker. I think the Flex application is intercepting the click before the Flash component is so I’ll have to fix that.

Launch Flex 2 Yahoo Maps

I took my contact form down a long time ago due to all the spam that was being sent through it. I put it back online this weekend with a security image that I found googling for “php captcha”. I’ve incorporated a PHP security image script into Ryan Duff’s WP-ContactForm and hopefully all should be well again. If there are any interested WordPress users out there, I’d be happy to package it up as a modified plugin. I’m not completely happy with the location of the security image though so before packaging I’d be interested in getting some input on the contact form layout.

I’ll be speaking at the Web Builder 2.0 conference coming up December 4-6. I’ll be covering the topic of how Flash developers can best utilize their skill set within a Flex project.

I’ve come across many Flash developers (myself included at one time) who immediately see Flex as a replacement for much of what they do. When I finally jumped into Flex development I quickly realized it fit very well with how I liked to author Flash applications. My goal with this talk is to give Flash developers an understanding of what Flex offers as well as where they could get involved on a project.

This will be my first speaking engagement so I’m pretty excited about it and it also happens to be my first trip to Vegas so overall it should be a great experience. I’m making sure I go out a few days early of course to get some poker playing out of the way.

Due to the efforts of various developers and supporters, FlashDevelop is becoming more and more Flex friendly, so to speak. It’s great to see the progress that has been made in the past few months. It started sometime last winter or spring with a post or two regarding some Ant build files and instructions for adding a new button to the toolbar to launch those build files. It’s now at the point where syntax can be quickly checked at the press of a button and autocompletion works for Actionscript 3 files as well as MXML files.

Philippe has been extremely supportive in getting a lot of this incorporated into FlashDevelop and various community members have been key as well. Keith contributed some great project templates to get people started quickly and autocompletion wouldn’t be possible without Ben’s AS3 intrinsic classes. I’m also amazed at how Philippe finds the time to work on FlashDevelop 3, answer all the forum posts that he does and at the same time investigate the workings of the Flex compiler to see what he can do for us Flex developers.

So what’s the latest on Flex support within FlashDevelop? Well it’s looking good. Philippe has made it possible for plugin developers (or wannabe plugin developers like myself) to easily call the compiler. There are really only a few areas that I see lacking for a full Flex development experience.

• Mixed files such as MXML and AS3 don’t highlight and autocomplete correctly.
• Custom tags don’t work in MXML files.
• Debugging needs to be done command line.

Currently one has to follow a few steps to add Flex and AS3 support to FlashDevelop and this also assumes that you have Java and Ant installed. As I hinted before, I’ve been playing around with plugin development and I’d like to develop a Flex plugin which allows one to configure their project as well as capture debug output within the editor. Since some of the shortcomings might not be fixed until FlashDevelop 3 (with it’s new completion engine), my goal is to make Flex support setup as easy as possible. I’ll hopefully make some progress on this and post updates along the way.

Dickson Brothers Co.

This hardware/home goods store has almost every product imaginable. I thought I almost had them stumped yesterday when I went in looking for a plastic/zip garment bag. I was looking around the home goods section, where the hanger were, didn’t see anything and finally asked. “Upstairs, over to the left.” Hmmm, you win today Dickson Brothers.

This is by no means a big store either. It’s only 2 small floors but seems to fit an entire Home Depot’s worth of stuff into the limited space. They offer some 2×4’s, paint, hardware, home appliances, bakeware, make copies of keys, the list goes on.

They don’t make stores like this anymore. Just wait until I come in looking for a replacement top for a 1985 Michael Graves tea kettle. Wait, I think I saw one of those upfront…