the singularity of being and nothingness
Flex
Quick Link: Flex Skin Design Extensions for CS3
May 12th
Honestly, I haven't done anything in Flex for a while (and I loathe that fact daily). Nonetheless, I ran across a pretty cool thing today. Flex 3 now has skin design extensions for CS3. This allows designers to create skins in Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks (yawn) and Flash, and then import them straight into Flex 3 using the skin import tool.
I think this is a very important development–Flex is awesome, but difficult to skin out of the box. These extensions should help make an already killer development framework infinitely more sexy, which is really all that matters (of course!).
So enough of this. Grab the extensions, and also check out Flex 3 if you haven't already.
Share this:Coming Up for AIR
Mar 24th
(Please ignore the absurdity of the title–I couldn't help myself!)
A little over a week ago, Adobe officially released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) 1.0 along with Flex 3 . While I've looked into a AIR a bit in conjunction with Flex apps, I've not really gone beyond that.
However, with the official release, I decided to take another look.
What is AIR? As the full name explicates, it is a runtime that can be used to, um, run programs on your computer, mobile device, etc. So as with Microsoft's .NET framework, AIR allows developers to create programs that can be packaged up and installed on these devices.
However, unlike Windows-only or Mac-Only (or Linux-Only) programs, AIR is ambivalent about the OS. As long as the client machine has the runtime installed, any application developed in AIR can run on it. This in itself is really cool, and takes the bite off the exclusivity of OS platforms.
But the coolest part about AIR is that you can leverage different technologies when building applications. For example, a while ago I built an extremely simple Countdown application using Flex 3. Easy enough.
But what if I don't want to use ActionScript 3? No problem! Using the HTML, CSS More >
Coming Up for AIR
Mar 10th
(Please ignore the absurdity of the title–I couldn't help myself!)
A little over a week ago, Adobe officially released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) 1.0 along with Flex 3 . While I've looked into a AIR a bit in conjunction with Flex apps, I've not really gone beyond that.
However, with the official release, I decided to take another look.
What is AIR? As the full name explicates, it is a runtime that can be used to, um, run programs on your computer, mobile device, etc. So as with Microsoft's .NET framework, AIR allows developers to create programs that can be packaged up and installed on these devices.
However, unlike Windows-only or Mac-Only (or Linux-Only) programs, AIR is ambivalent about the OS. As long as the client machine has the runtime installed, any application developed in AIR can run on it. This in itself is really cool, and takes the bite off the exclusivity of OS platforms.
But the coolest part about AIR is that you can leverage different technologies when building applications. For example, a while ago I built an extremely simple Countdown application using Flex 3. Easy enough.
But what if I don't want to use ActionScript 3? No problem! Using the HTML, CSS More >
First Look at Adobe's Thermo
Dec 12th
I've written at least one post about Adobe Flex, the killer fusion of XML and ActionScripting 3 that makes the development of Rich Internet Applications extremely easy, fast and–let's be honest–extremely sexy. The one drawback of Flex up until now (IMO) is the clunkiness of the design interface. While it is easy to layout and manipulate design items, I have found it a bit tedious to style applications they way I want them.
Well, Adobe has made inroads to solving this issue with the development of their now Labs-interred Thermo. Thermo is basically the designer's Flex. Designers can import Photoshop files (and hopefully Illustrator…) into Thermo and begin creating working examples of functionality and animations in Flex. For example, graphical text boxes can be point-and-click converted to real, manipulateable input boxes; lists of items can be converted to real data-driven lists; and so on.
The purpose of this, of course, is to bring the design and development community closer together. Instead of the designer simply handing a flat PSD file to a developer with illegible notes about what they would like the final product to look like (e.g., transitions), the designer can herself create a mockup of the functionality in Thermo.
But More >
Quickly Falling in Love with Flex
Nov 6th
The last several weeks, readers will note that the majority of my posts have been devoted to AJAX, particluarly Adobe's Spry Framework. My main infatuation is that AJAX allows for clunky page-reload based web activity to be replaced with instant, on-the-fly interaction, not only with constituent portions of the website, but more importantly, with server-side processes (especially databases).
All this time, I have flirted around with Adobe's Flex 2, an incredibly rich platform for developing ActionScript 3.0 applications. While I have played around with it from time to time (basically, when I get a new computre–the trial period is only 30 days), I have not really gotten into significant development…until now.
One of the issues with Flex is that, like javascript, it has not native way to interact with a database. For this, one needs an application server of some kind, or to create myriad XML files to store data. Now I've always known that Flex could integrate nicely with ColdFusion, allowing the developer to access independant ColdFusion components to leverage processing logic and database interaction. However, I did not know how ridiculously simple it was.
So one might wonder what the big deal is. So Flex can easily connect to More >
