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At our January 13th meeting we’ll be trying out a new format with 4 speakers presenting for 20 minutes each.  Long-time member George McKinney will be talking about using the Flex-Ajax Bridge.  Cory McMahon will be talking about image manipulation in Flex including using PixelBender shaders as filters and HDRI.  Michael Fretz will be talking about the various ways of embedding fonts in Flex with a focus on mojofont.  Michael Allman will be giving his take on Flex application architecture.

After the last presentation, we’ll all head over to Busby’s for drinks and networking.

Check out our Adobe groups site for all the details and don’t forget to RSVP!

Just posted the next Los Angeles Flex User Group event. Spread the word, tell a friend, tell a co-worker!

Spring ActionScript allows you to inject dependencies into your MXML components as they’re added to the stage. By default, it ignores any components whose namespace starts with either ‘flash.*’ or ‘mx.*’, so it only looks at your custom components. Since Flex 4 introduces a new ’spark’ namespace, you’ll need to override the default flexStageObjectSelector, which is as simple as adding this to your application context XML:

<object id=”flexStageObjectSelector” class=”com.classes.objectselectors.MyCustomObjectSelector”/>

I extended the default flexStageObjectSelector and added a few lines so that it also ignores ’spark.*’. The code for that class is below. Just drop it somewhere in your project and update the class attribute in the object tag above and you’ll be good to go. The Spring ActionScript documentation is very helpful and explains how you can extend it even further.

This Wednesday, 8/12, I’ll be giving a talk on Flex application architecture and how Spring ActionScript changes everything. Details here.

Seeing this news, I have to wonder.  Using their own player instead of Flash would allow them to push a new version any time they modify the codec in a way that reduces bandwidth (aka saves them money).  If they continue to rely on Flash Player, they have to wait roughly 18 months for new versions to come out, assuming Adobe continues to license new versions of the On2 codec.

When YouTube requires a new Flash Player version, people download it immediately, so I don’t think there would be much resistance to installing a new Google video plugin.  For embeds, they could still use Flash Player for a while until market penetration of the Google Player was high enough, or they could add a new embed option in addition to the Flash embed.

Is there any reason they wouldn’t build their own player?

[Update] This article may shed more light on their plans.

I generated a list of all the Flex-related sessions at Adobe MAX 2009 in L.A. and posted it at our L.A. Flex user group site.  Check it out and be sure to register now to get your early bird discount and help out L.A. Flex at the same time!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of doing Flex training at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and got take a VIP tour to see the next generation Mars rover that will be going up in a few years.  I even got to sit in the Mission Manager’s chair and pretend for a minute.  I’m enough of a geek that I watched the Pheonix landing live on NASA TV, so this was a treat for me.

Here’s the cruise vehicle and heat shield that will get the rover to its destination:

And the way they’re going to land the rover is incredible:

The part with the thrusters will hover there while the rover slowly descends along a cable like a spider.

Sorry for the poor quality photos, but you get the idea

I’ll be demonstrating pre-pre-release versions of Flash Catalyst and Flex 4 tomorrow night, December 3rd, at 7:30.  Don’t miss it!  More details can be found at our new group site at http://groups.adobe.com/groups/2b6ef91865/summary. Hope to see you there! 

Our Flex job posting service syndicates job postings across various Flex-related blogs, the Los Angeles Flex User Group site, our popular Flex chat room, the SearchCoders Dashboard (15,000+ downloads), and now the new and improved Flex.org.

If you blog about Flex, you can make some extra cash by putting our jobs feed on your site like I have on my sidebar. Cool Flex jobs are being posted to our site every week, so we’re doing what we can to get the word out.

In our last L.A. Flex user group meeting, I demonstrated how to build a feed reader using AIR. The source is now available here. The app supports RSS .91, .92, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom 1.0 thanks to the open source xmlsyndication library available on Google code.  It also saves feed information locally using SQLite.  Think of it as a basic example for using the xmlsyndication.swc and for working with SQLite.