tombray.com

We’ve been really pleased with the reception that our little Flex chat widget has had. The shared “flex” room has consistently had between 20 and 40 people in it since yesterday afternoon. I’d like to thank these bloggers for installing the widget on their sites.

www.beedigital.net

blog.everythingflex.com (Rich Tretola)

hat6.com (Dusty Jewett)

www.mikehuntington.com

blog.as-is.ca (Martin Arvisais)

London Flex User Group

www.foundry01.com/blog

www.felipeandrade.org/blog

debabrataa.blogspot.com

blog.franto.com

www.flexdude.de

www.roksmedia.com

www.diamondtearz.org/blog

www.triopticon.com

www.chrissharon.com

flashimp.blogspot.com

www.ratemyfx.com/chat.htm

www.waq177.com/blog

If I missed your blog, please leave a comment with a link to where you installed it. If you’d like to put the shared “flex” chat room on your blog, just check out www.chatopica.com/widget for instructions.

If you’ve been using our chat widget, you’ll be glad to know that we’ve added a toggle to turn the sounds on and off and they’re off by default. We also keep your nickname in a SharedObject so you don’t have to type it in everytime. More enhancements are on the way.

If you’d like to add a chat room to your Flex-related blog, check out www.chatopica.com/widget.  This widget will connect your site to a chat room shared by the Flex community.  The more blogs that host the widget, the more Flex developers the room is likely to have.  Our chat widget has a code input mode designed specifically for programmers and our ultimate goal is to create a place where developers can go to get their Flex-related questions answered in real time, no matter what time of day.

Want to chat about Flex? Want to help connect the Flex community and make your blog more fun at the same time? Now you can by adding our chat widget to your blog. This isn’t a normal chat room, it’s a shared chat room.

What’s a shared chat room you ask? Each website that installs this version of our chat widget will be connected to our “Flex” topic. Using this approach, we can combine traffic from multiple domains to make sure that the chat room is always occupied. Take a look at this diagram:

That single visitor at laflex.org wouldn’t have anyone to chat with if the room wasn’t shared across multiple domains. Sharing a room in this way helps to cure Empty Chat Syndrome (ECS).

If you have a blog and you’d like to help connect the Flex community, just go here and follow the very simple installation instructions.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback on the last version. It became pretty clear that people weren’t seeing that they could change their nicknames. I just uploaded a new version that hopefully remedies that. Please let me know if you think I’ve made it better. If you’ve used a previous version, you may need to clear your cache (if there’s a chat-bubble icon at the bottom left, you have the new version). Thanks again.

Does this use Flash Media Server or Flex Data Services?
Nope. We used openfire, a free Jabber-based server. FMS and FDS are great products, but openfire has all of the multi-user chat administration features we need and we didn’t want to roll our own.

I like the code input feature. Are you going to offer this for other languages as well?
Yes. Within the next few weeks.

Are you going to release the source code?
Sorry! I am going to provide some tutorials about certain aspects of the app, but no wholesale release of the source.

Is this going to stay free?
Yes, you’ll notice some Flex job advertisements occasionally (perhaps too occasionally at the moment). Just apply for a job every now and then so we can keep our sponsors happy

When can I embed the Flex chat room on my blog?
Within the next week.

Will I be able to skin it to match my blog?
Eventually, yes.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or feedback.

Thanks!

Tom

Update: To get your own chat room, visit www.chatopica.com.  To chat about Flex with other Flex developers, visit www.chatopica.com/topics/flex.

Thanks to everyone who helped us test our Flex-based chat widget last week. We’ve made a lot of improvements and I decided it was ready to put on my blog’s sidebar.

Be sure to try the code input mode. It lets you send code without having to worry about filling up the chat and interrupting the conversation. It also does AS3 syntax highlighting.

Soon we’ll provide the embed code so that you can put it on your blog, too. Send me an email if you’re interested and I’ll let you know when it’s ready. We’re hoping we can get enough Flex developers hanging out regularly so that people can use it as a way to get their questions answered.

You can submit bugs here: www.searchcoders.com/bugs

Update:  Look no further than the sidebar for our Flex chat widget.  Thanks to everyone who tested. 

We just put up an early preview of the new chat module that’s going to go into our SearchCoders Dashboard AIR application (screencast|download). We’ve designed it specically so that Flex programmers can easily chat about code. There are two input modes, text and code. Code mode allows you to send as much code as you want without filling up the chat window. When you send text in code mode, the message that appears will have a button that shows/hides your code. All code is highlighted using Robert Cadena’s open source AS3 syntax highlighter.