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If you’re in the L.A. area and you haven’t been to a Flex user group meeting, next Tuesday should be a fun one.  I’ll be demonstrating how to implement drag & drop into and out of AIR applications from the desktop and other application windows.  More details at laflex.org.  Also, be sure to join our Google group so you’re on the mailing list.

My business partner, Robert Cadena, has been running the group for the last year and he’s expecting a baby in June so we’ve transferred control over to me.  I’ll be frequently presenting on the tips and techniques that Robert and I use in our Flex consulting projects, our SearchCoders Dashboard AIR application (watch interview), and our Chatopica branded chat service.  If you’d like to be a guest speaker, let me know.  Be sure to check out the laflex.org website and subscribe to our google group if you live in the greater Los Angeles area.  

Also, if you’re hiring Flex developers in the L.A. area, be sure to post your jobs at www.searchcoders.com/jobs because that jobs feed is syndicated on the L.A. Flex website, various other blogs, SimplyHired, and we point to the jobs listings from the ads in our syndicated Flex chat room.

We frequently get asked to post Flex jobs on our blogs (especially the L.A. Flex User Group blog) so we decided to create a jobs feed and an affiliate program so that other Flex bloggers can make a little extra cash by posting jobs. Once you put the feed on your blog, just let us know and we’ll send you an affiliate ID to plug in. The details of the affiliate program are here. To put the feed on your blog, you can point any feed widget to http://www.searchcoders.com/jobs/feed and you can customize the content of the feed with something like this: http://www.searchcoders.com/jobs/feed/q=los+angeles+flex. You can also just copy and paste this feed widget:

<div id=”scjobs_content”></div>
<div id=”scjobs_powered”>powered by <a href=”http://www.searchcoders.com/jobs/”>SearchCoders/Jobs</a></div>
<script language=”javascript”>
var affiliate=”";
var query = “flex”;
</script>
<script language=”javascript” src=”http://www.searchcoders.com/js/jobs_widget.js”></script>

If you’re just looking for work or want to post a job, go directly to www.searchcoders.com/jobs

Let me know if you have any questions!

A few months ago I wrote about how we used runtime styles to create a custom skin for Fox Searchlight’s movie Juno.  Well, now we’ve got another example with a completely different skin but the same underlying code.  Dell computer has a site dedicated to environmental issues and they’ve set up a Facebook Graffiti contest where members can show off their artistic talents while expressing what “green” means to them.  We’ve integrated our chat into the site so that users can talk about the latest Graffiti submissions and share their thoughts on building a sustainable future.  If you’re interested in branded, customized chat rooms, please contact info@chatopica.com or visit www.chatopica.com for more info.

Robert just posted instructions for getting a Chatopica MySpace chat room.  Three easy steps and you’ll be up and running.

Last Friday, I gave another presentation on EasyMVC which is a simple recipe for Flex application architecture.  If you’re getting started in Flex or you’ve taken a look at Cairngorm and had trouble getting up to speed, this presentation demonstrates the fundamental architectural concepts you need to understand.  I call EasyMVC a “recipe” because it doesn’t require any libraries and I don’t intend it to compete with Cairngorm or PureMVC.  Instead it’s a set of practices you can follow to help you build loosely coupled applications.  It’s also a great place to start before you learn Cairngorm.  Check out the screencast. (unfortunately it looks like you have to register for an adobe id to watch, but it just takes a minute)

Be sure to head over to www.searchcoders.com and grab the latest version.  We fixed several small bugs and we updated the chat client to the version we use at www.chatopica.com.

Let us know what you think!

If you’re not familiar with Buzzword, it’s an excellent word processing app created in Adobe Flex.  You can check it out at  www.buzzword.com. 

When I first saw Buzzword I was very impressed with it from a Flex developer’s point of view, but I didn’t think I’d end up using it.  Turns out, I use it all the time.  I especially love the collaborative editing and history management features.  It puts Google Docs to shame.

Now all I want is an AIR version I can run on my desktop.  

We recently launched a skinned version of our Flex chat widget for the movie Juno.  Since we obviously don’t want to recompile the SWF every time we change the skin, we loaded our styles at runtime using StyleManager.loadStyleDeclarations( "http://path-to-my-styles/styles.swf", true );  However, since the widget depends on runtime styles, I had a problem where the Flex default styles would appear briefly before the runtime styles were loaded.  I came up with a solution on my own using a custom preloader but then I received a much better answer from Deepa Subramaniam, an Adobe Engineer.

She suggested that I view the source on the FlexStore sample application. If you do that, you’ll notice the following: 

override public function set initialized(value:Boolean):void{ // Hold off until the Runtime CSS SWF is done loading.}This prevents the preloader from disappearing until you manually set super.initialized = true.This is a great way to preload any content you need, not just styles. For example, you could download a big XML document and populate a DataGrid before you dismiss the preloader.

We’re happy to announce that you can now create your very own chat room at www.chatopica.com. It’s easy and free.Also, we still have shared topics that allow sites that don’t get much traffic to connect with a larger audience. Our Flex topic usually has around 80 people in it these days.Our chat widget is made with Flex and the chat server is an open-source jabber server called openfire.