timwalling.com

The company I work for is looking for solid developers, preferably with some Flex experience, to work either full-time or contract (on-site). I say preferably with Flex experience because we’re always looking for people who have good OO design and development skills but right now getting people who have experience with UI development is more important. If you’ve worked with Swing or some other UI library, that’s a plus too. So if anyone in the Boston area is looking for work or a job change please check out our job listings.

Feel free to contact me with any questions as well. I know I’m leaving the description of “developer position” pretty wide open but I think we really value strong development skills regardless of language. It would be a shame to miss out on a good developer who could quickly pick up the Flex specifics of our work.

I’ve updated my Yahoo Maps application to use the latest version of FlashInterface. Robert re-worked the API a bit so it’s even easier to use and requires less coding. I’ll try to post the source tonight. See my earlier post for more details on what this Flex 2 / Flash 8 Yahoo Maps application is all about.

One downfall to this approach of using Yahoo Maps in a Flex 2 app is the fact that you have to code a Flash 8 SWF which exposes all of the functionality of the Yahoo Maps component. Now that Robert has released SWFAdapter, I’d like to see if it’s possible to use the same SWF that the Yahoo Javascript-Flash API uses. After a little digging around in the javascript I noticed that a SWF is loaded and then talked to via a javascript API. By looking through all of the code I’m guessing one could use SWFAdapter to make all of the same calls on that SWF. I’m not sure if this goes against anything in the Yahoo Maps terms of use so I’ll have to read that over some more before I release anything for distribution.

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.