tombray.com

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.

If you tried to install earlier today or last night, you would have encountered an error saying that that our application requires a newer version of the apollo runtime. We just uploaded a fix for that.

I downloaded the new version of Moxie and noticed that the namespace in the application descriptor said “air” instead of “apollo” so I made that change to my old project and got things working. Let me know if you have a similar problem with your app and I can provide more details.

Remove “Adobe Apollo.framework” from /Library/Frameworks and empty your trash. You can install the AIR beta before or after. Then you should most certainly install the SearchCoders Dashboard (screencast|download).

One of the coolest things about launching our SearchCoders/Dashboard Apollo application (screencast|download) a few weeks ago has been seeing it spread around the world. At the time of this writing, 66 countries are listed in the grid below. It looks like Belgium is in the lead in terms of per-capita installations, while Germany and the United States are almost tied for second place. Maybe we should have a SearchCoders/Olympics? Don’t forget: the Apollo version of our app has chat built in, so you can use it to connect with other Flex developers in your area. Scroll down past the chart for a more detailed description of the app if you’re not familiar with it yet.

[flash http://www.searchcoders.com/swfs/widgets/countries_widget.swf w=450 h=300]

The SearchCoders/Dashboard provides a resource where Flex developers can find information and share their knowledge with others. Developers can search the entire FlexCoders mail archive, read Flex-related RSS feeds, create notes, save favorite messages and blogs, and chat with other developers. An advanced search feature allows users to build complex queries and save those queries for reuse. The Dashboard makes extensive use of Apollo’s filesystem API and the new HTMLControl for rendering complete web pages within the application.

Check it out!

From iLounge:

When asked what “designed for Apple TV” meant, Moody said that YouTube will soon be encoding videos in the H.264 streaming-efficient compression format preferred by Apple TV, and that all new videos submitted to YouTube as of the mid-June launch of the AppleTV update will be playable by the device. From then until fall, YouTube will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format, adding videos in chunks until everything is accessible to Apple TV users.

When I first heard the news that the Apple TV would be supporting YouTube video, I thought it was another huge win for Flash video. Oops.