tombray.com

New Flex User Group in New Jersey

tombray — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:19:43 +0000

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.

Updating AIR Drag & Drop examples for AIR 1.0

tombray — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:26:29 +0000

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.

5/13 L.A. Flex UG Meeting: Drag & Drop in AIR

tombray — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:08:12 +0000

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.

Taking over the L.A. Flex User Group

tombray — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:16:15 +0000

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.

Flex jobs feed: put it on your blog and make some cash

tombray — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:41:57 +0000

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:

powered by SearchCoders/Jobs

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!

Another win for Flex runtime styles: custom branded chat for Dell’s environmental site

tombray — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:41:16 +0000

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.

Installing our Flex chat on MySpace

tombray — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:52:51 +0000

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

Screencast: Flex Application Architecture (a Cairngorm primer with EasyMVC)

tombray — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:55:30 +0000

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)

The SearchCoders Dashboard has been updated for AIR 1.0

tombray — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:34:53 +0000

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!

I actually use Buzzword, and it’s great.

tombray — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:12:38 +0000

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.