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If you’re a Flex developer in NJ, don’t miss the first user group meeting on May 21st.  David Finnerty is one of the guys helping to get it started — you may be familiar with some of his posts about my EasyMVC Flex architecture recipe.  The official UG site is www.njflex.com and you can read Dave’s post about it as well.

I’m giving a presentation tonight about drag & drop in Adobe AIR and noticed that a lot of the examples out there were made for beta versions of AIR and don’t work with AIR 1.0.  For example, Christophe Coenraets provided some useful utility classes for working with XLS and Bitmap formats which you can read about here.  I’ve updated his source to work with AIR 1.0 and you can download it here.

There’s another example made by Rich Tretola that I’ll post soon.

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!

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.

Jon over at Clockwork Objects wrote a nice review of Chatopica. He even installed two of the chat widgets on the site — one for Flex, one for Ruby on Rails. Thanks, Jon!

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