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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’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.

The company I work for, Allurent (http://www.allurent.com), is in need of good creative/UI designers. The needs vary, in one case we need a product designer to lead on a project and in the other we’re looking for a mid/senior level designer (strong visually and with a strong UI background) to work on a large project who is able to take creative ideas and implement them.

We’re based in Cambridge, MA (Harvard Square) and candidates should be local. The positions/needs I just mentioned are more fulltime as opposed to freelance but we’d also like to establish a relationship with people who may just want to occasionally take on design work on a per project basis.

Drop me a line if you’re interested or have questions.

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve played around with Flex 2 and FlashDevelop. I wanted to briefly follow up on that by sharing what I added to my toolbar in FlashDevelop. There are a few posts on the FD forums which go over how to add your own toolbar or menu options which is super easy since they’re driven off of some xml files.

Assuming you already know what Ant is and you have it installed, you can easily create a build.xml file which will send off your mxml or actionscript to the Flex compiler, magically producing a finished Flex app. I wanted to add a shortcut to my toolbar in FD so that I didn’t have to keep an extra window open to run ant so I add the following to my ToolBar.xml file in FD:

<button label="ANT" click="RunProcessCaptured" image="23" tag="C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe;/k ant" />

Add it wherever you like, I just added it right next to the command prompt button which I basically just copied. All I added was the /k ant which tells the command prompt to run the command “ant” when it launches.

Update: I changed the above code snippet to reflect some input from Philippe. Now the output from the command prompt window is directed to the output panel in FD. You might have to change your path to cmd.exe, but most likely not.

Regarding the build file, I just copied the one Sam made and modified it for my own use.

If you want to copy mine to get started, here it is:
build.xml

The property name “source” refers the name of the mxml or as file you want to send to the compiler and “ext” is the extension, since you can send either an as file or an mxml.

Over the weekend another release of FlashDevelop was announced. There were a few fixes, plus some new features:

* ActionScript/XML completion fixes
* Import statement auto-generation (new)
* ActionScript tree quick search (new)
* ActionScript tree display options (new)
* Improved search/replace dialogs
* Some general application fixes
* Improved colored printing

My favorite is the new auto-generation of import statements. For example, in your code if you were type the full path to a class such as mx.util.Delegate, the code would automatically change to just say Delegate and the import statement for mx.util.Delegate would be added to your class.

Looks like they’re getting close to an official 2.0 release, now if I can just get them to add some settings to point to my flex2 compiler so I can quickly work on some flex2 projects from within FlashDevelop. Currently I’ve just hacked the toolbar xml so that I have a new button which launches ant, which then just runs my build.xml file for the project I’m working on. I’d love to see an actual project type for flex2 and maybe a setting which points to the compiler just like the setting for mtasc.