The next Midlands Flash Platform User Group meeting is tomorrow, at Warwick University, Ramphal Building room R.0.21. Hopefully it’ll be a good one as I’m helping organise it and we intend to run more over this end of the Midlands in future, possibly in September and November. I’m going to demo some of the apps we’ve built with the marvellous people in the web-dev team at Warwick University during my secondment there, including our AIR Media Converter Client, the Files.Warwick Desktop Client, a nice combination of MySQL, BlazeDS, Lucene, Spring, Flex 3.0 and Cairngorm by Rob O’Toole and maybe if I get time, our media recording applications in Sitebuilder, the University’s CMS.
July 10, 2009
July 8, 2009
MOO cards and good experiences
Our MOO cards arrived today and very swish they are too. This means I can now go to all the cool places and not be the only one without a business card to put in the prize draw bucket.
MOO is a great service as well – the easy upload and design process is one thing I think is well-executed, but most of all I just like the language used on the site and in all its communications, warm and friendly without being patronising. Take ‘Little MOO’ for instance, the bot that confirms your order that freely admits it’s a piece of software, but says it will look after your order while it’s processing:
Hello, I’m Little MOO – the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on its way to you.
and when the order was done:
Hello, it’s Little MOO again. I thought you’d like to know, the following items from your order are now in the mail…
I don’t know why, I just like that. Maybe that approach is dependent on your company persona to some extent but for me it felt more fuzzy and friendly to get an email like that from what is in fact just an automated system. Positive vibes, positive experience.
July 4, 2009
A better font for programming in Flex Builder/Flash Builder
Whenever I use Flex Builder I don’t like the standard Courier or monospace font used in Windows or OSX. Instead I prefer to use the excellent Proggy Programming Fonts – they are excellent, concise fonts designed to be readable while remaining compact enough to allow me to see more code at the same time. Up until now though I’d only installed the fonts on my PC development setup, so today I thought I’d do the same on my iMac Flex Builder setup. For OSX, installing the font is as easy as downloading the font(s) you want, and dragging it to /Library/Fonts. To get it working in Flex Builder, go to Preferences > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > Text Font, and change the default font there to the one you want.
However on OSX I did this and hit a snag – the Proggy fonts are designed as pixel-fonts, that is they don’t look very nice when anti-aliased, so on OSX Flex Builder they look a bit rubbish at any size, even the 16pt they were designed for. One option is to turn off the global font-smoothing for 16pt and below in OSX’s System Preferences, but because that’s a global option it will affect the appearance of all fonts, and I didn’t want that. Fortunately I’m not the only one to have hit this problem, and I’m grateful to dispatchEvent() guys for their ingenious solution, involving resizing a whole set of Proggy font glyphs to something massive (you can download the fixed Proggy font from the post), which then allows you to set the actual size to 4pt in Flex Builder, thus bringing it under the default font-smoothing threshold in OSX. Works a treat! In their post on the subject some people also contribute some other solutions, including a command-line fix.
So now I have my favourite font working in OSX Flex Builder, I can get back to work…
July 1, 2009
New Training Courses: Flash CS4 Professional, Flex/AIR and Actionscript
YAY! is now offering the following on-site courses for Flash CS4 Professional and Actionscript 3 development for Flash CS4 Professional and Flex/AIR.
- Flash CS4 Professional for Beginners
- Flash CS4 Professional Application Development
- Introducing Adobe Flexbuilder for Flex and AIR
For more details, email us at enquiries@yaymedia.net.
June 17, 2009
Flash Camp Birmingham
Flash Camp Birmingham yesterday was a great success. From my point of view, every session was interesting and informative, and I learnt a great deal more about Flex 4, PureMVC, Degrafa, the Spark component architecture, FXG, Flash Catalyst, Away3D, mobile UI design and much more. Now all I have to do is go away and try some of this exciting new stuff out. It was also good to meet up with people in the community and talk about the latest developments and the Flash Platform generally.
Thanks to Jodie, all the speakers and everyone at Midlands Flash Platform User Group for a great day. Hopefully they’ll run more of these events in future.
June 15, 2009
FlashCamp Birmingham is nearly here!
Quick reminder that tomorrow Tuesday 16th June is FlashCamp Birmingham. If you’re interested in the Flash Platform in any way at all, try and grab one of the last few remaining places. The presentations and list of speakers is really great and should make it a fantastic day for beginners and experts alike. See you there!
June 10, 2009
Welcome!
This is our new, shiny blog for everything related to Flash Platform development, news and updates on the things we’re up to. Stay tuned for entries about AS3 development, MXML, and anything else we think you might find interesting along the way. Welcome to YAY! 
May 28, 2009
FlashCamp Birmingham, June 16th
Here’s some news of what promises to be a great (and completely free) conference coming up in June for Flash Platform developers. FlashCamp Birmingham is being held on June 16, arranged by the Midlands Flash Platform User Group, and will consist of a range of presentations and talks for novices and experts alike. Events like this are a great opportunity to network with other novices, experts and developers and will also be an opportunity to see the new Flash Builder 4 in action. Some of the most knowledgable people in the Flash/Flex/AIR community will be there speaking, including Stefan Richter and Simon Bailey, while Adobe will be providing the keynote.
Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned pro, everyone will learn something at Flash Camp in Birmingham. We’ll explore existing Flash Platform technologies like Flash, Flex and AIR , before looking ahead at Flash Catalyst and beyond. Our keynote will be from Adobe Systems, who will also be running an hour-long session later in the day. We have a group of sessions dedicated to the creation and customisation of Flex components, and to add some creative inspiration, there will be presentations on real-time 3D in Flash, and how to take your Flash application architecture to a new level.
More information at http://www.flashcamp.co.uk/ and hopefully see you there!
April 12, 2009
Back to writing about Flex, AIR and Wowza
It’s been a busy few months since my last blog entry about anything related to Flex and AIR development. I blame a Twitter addiction, but there are still some things you can’t write about in 140chars and I do have a few development-related things to blog about, so expect some hopefully interesting entries over the coming weeks. Since November I’ve been working on two projects: an AIR-based media conversion client and a new chat application in Flex and Wowza Media Server. Some things I plan to write about: AIR file upload, more on using the local filesystem APIs in AIR, using Remote Shared Objects for communications, and lots of tips and tricks. I’ve also been playing with Gumbo, AFCS and PureMVC recently, so I hope to post some of my experiences with those as I go.
Anyway, good to be back. 
November 4, 2008
AIR FileReference and scope
I ran into a small problem recently in my AIR application when using FileReference to initiate and monitor a download operation; no events from a FileReference object created within a method were being fired. After a quick check of the Livedoc entry I found the issue:
if the FileReference object goes out of scope, any upload or download that is not yet completed on that object is canceled upon leaving the scope. Be sure that your FileReference object remains in scope for as long as the upload or download is expected to continue.
So basically a FileReference object needs to be created in such a way that it stays in scope for the duration of your operation; if you instantiate it within a method it there’s a good chance it will go out of scope and any events you were waiting for from it will never fire. The easiest solution is to declare it outside of the method, so instead of:
private function download(event:MouseEvent):void
{
var fileRef:FileReference = new FileReference();
fileRef.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onIOError);
fileRef.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onComplete);
//etc.
}
private var fileRef:FileReference();
private function download(event:MouseEvent):void
{
fileRef = new FileReference();
fileRef.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onIOError);
fileRef.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onComplete);
//etc.
}
Sorted. Afterwards I also found more info about this via a couple of useful blog articles here and here.
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