Use this offer code "communitymatters" and register NOW! This year promises to be the best yet. Check out the schedule.

April 15-18, 2012.

Join us in Denver CO April 15-18, 2012! Tickets are on sale now!

360|Flex has quickly become THE conference for Flex/AIR/ActionScript developers to attend to connect with the community, learn from the Adobe Engineers, as well as community experts, and get the deepest, most technical understanding of Flex and what’s coming for Flex, anywhere.

360|Flex was the first and is still the best all Flex/AIR themed conference. Our inaugural conference in San Jose was a sell-out success. 360|Flex takes you into the nitty-gritty of Flex development, with well known community leaders, giving some of the most advanced Flex talks anywhere. Anyone serious about being the best Flex developer they can be, owes it to themselves to look at 360|Flex as they best option for raising their game to a new level!

360|Flex is a community driven event. The sole purpose of the show is to bring the best of the Flex community together in one place to share war stories from the trenches and to allow the experts to share their deep technical knowledge with the community at large. Another benefit is finally being able to put a face, voice and personality to the bloggers, flexcoders and article writers that you’ve come to depend on.

Adobe is a strong supporter of the community and therefore, a strong supporter of 360|Flex. They make sure that the Flex Team is available to speak and that someone comes to deliver a killer keynote, and there’s a networking dinner “party” as a way for them to thank you for supporting them. You won’t find more Flex team members in one place, outside of Adobe MAX, than at 360|Flex.

360|Flex is a production of 360|Conferences, a company devoted to putting on low-cost, high-content, killer value conferences. Oh and of course, FUN!

I recently had to create a sliding menu for a game I am working on. Coming from a Flash background I usually think in terms of, "how would I do this in flash?", and it translates really well. Same goes for the functionality that I came up with for the menu component that I created so the user can swip from left to right to get to the next set of buttons.

The difference in Corona and flash that I found was the way you listen for events on the "stage". The following video has some great little bits of info for advanced touch event features and logic. The first tip solved the issue I was having and it only took adding a couple more lines of code.

No more excuses. The best Actionscript and MXML editor is now FREE. Download it now and give it a try. Commit to using it for at least 2 weeks and you will not want to use anything else.

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FDT Free is free of charge and the perfect editor for small projects or simply to give FDT 5 a try without any time constraints. This edition is recommended for smaller projects.

Coming in the next daily build (2011.645—should be up around 2am on the 25th of October), is a MAJOR update to the widget library.

The documentation pages have already been updated to reflect the changes, and I recommend viewing the list of "Known Issues" and "Recent Changes" to become familiar with this update.
http://developer.anscamobile.com/content/widget

Here are the main changes:

 

tableViews and scrollViews

These have been completely redesigned for stability and flexibility. Those who had problems with the tableViews before should immediately notice that there is no more losing rows, no more strange issues with category items, and now, you are completely free to decide WHAT goes in each row.

Each row, to include category items, are just another display group. You'll decide what goes into each row by specifying an 'onRender' listener for each row and inserting objects into the listener's event.view property. This means there's a little more "setup" involved when it comes to creating tableViews, but you are now given a tremendous amount of flexibility that was not possible before.

During testing, we've noticed that on older devices (which include 2nd generation iPod touches and older), tableViews with 500+ rows (or just a huge amount) do tend to stutter and cause some problems. It's not very user-friendly to have that many rows in a tableView anyway, so we recommend splitting up your lists by having a 'Load 25 More' row as the last item.

While the scrollView hasn't changed all that much, the parameters have been made to be more consistent with the tableView (as well as the other widgets), and an unfortunate side effect to all the refinements of this update is the absence of scrollBars (same goes for tableViews). Please be patient as we're working on restoring these in a future update. Until then, please enjoy the enhanced stability and flexibility these widgets now provide.

 

pickerWheel

Since the pickerWheel actually relies heavily on the tableView widget, we had to revamp this widget as well. You'll notice there's more customization options and no more limit to how many rows you can have. We've also added an "alignment" and "startIndex" property to each column.

Currently, there are two known issues that we're working on addressing in a future update. The first one is the fact that rows do not soft-land on specific items (as they do with the native iOS pickerWheel). The selected item will be whatever is in the selection area, whether it is centered or not.

The second known issue is that if you change the 'y' value of the pickerWheel (such as with a transition.to, to slide the pickerWheel up), then the 'getValue()' method will stop working. We recommend you instead "fade" the pickerWheel in if you want some kind of animation, as you cannot move the pickerWheel once it has been created without experiencing issues.

 

tabBar (brand new widget)

This is the much-requested tabBar widget that is brand new to this upcoming version of the widget library. It supports plenty of customization and an unlimited amount of tab buttons.

For iOS users, the default tabBar should look and feel just-right. For other platforms, or apps that need to deviate from the standard look, there are plenty of parameters you can set to get it looking just the way you want.

Here is the API documentation for the new tabBar:
http://developer.anscamobile.com/reference/index/widgetnewtabbar

 

Widget Themes

Prior to this version, themes were hard-coded into the widget library and relied on updates to provide you with new themes. That is no longer the case.

Now, themes are Lua modules which contain tables (similar to config.lua) that correspond to specific widgets. Since widgets have been made to be more flexible, themes are simply preset parameters for the widget (that you can override on a per-widget basis). Themes will have a folder that also needs to be included in your project folder (along with the Lua module), which will contain the graphical assets that are required for that particular theme.

At the moment, there is only an iOS theme. We are working on an Android theme. You can take the iOS theme and modify it to create your own custom themes to share with others, or to simply have unique-looking widgets for your game or app.

 

Text

Previously, the widget library modified the display.newText() function, which caused problems with the new multi-line text capabilities.

Now, the widget library no longer touches the display.newText(), and as of build 2011.645, there is now display.newRetinaText() and display.newEmbossedText() to take care of your retina-display and embossed text needs.

 

Removed Widgets

The segmented control has been removed from the widget library, but has been made open-source for anyone who still wants it:
http://developer.anscamobile.com/code/segmented-control-widget

The tabBar is more cross-platform friendly and serves almost the same purpose as the segmented control, still, the source is available for those who absolutely need/want it.

The toolbar has also been removed, because you can now create an empty tabBar (or just use an image) and place embossed text over it using the display.newEmbossedText() function.

 

BETA Reminder

Unfortunately, if you were currently using the widget library in your projects and you update to this new version that will come out with build 2011.246, your code will break. This library is still in beta and is subject to changes, but we feel like these changes were necessary to keep moving this library forward, and closer to a more stable condition. Most-likely there will not be anymore changes to this widget library as major as this one, since I believe this update addresses most of the major issues that were present in previous versions.

Please take a moment to look over the documentation, and prepare to migrate your previous widget code to be compatible with this new version—you'll be glad you did :-)

http://developer.anscamobile.com/content/widget

The WidgetDemo in Daily Build 2011.646 has also been completely revamped to take advantage of all these changes, and to further demonstrate basic widget usage.

All year I have been playing with the Corona SDK. I took a bit of a break over the summer because I got busy with my full time Flex / Flash Consulting. I started back working on a game about a month ago.

Anyway ... I am really excited to have a subscription to coronasdk now so I can use all the great daily builds that are coming out. It's apparent that the team is really working hard to roll out features that make the sdk more usable and I am sure we will continue to see a lot of great stuff come our way.

Starling Framework with Box2d SWC

If you are using FDT and you are running into issues using the new starling-framework source code then the fix (by John Olson) was to create a Flex Library Project in Flash Builder and export a swc that has all the source from starling in it. I tested this out and sure enough it works.

I prefer swcs in my projects when using frameworks anyway so I packaged up starling and box2d into a swc and you can download it for your convenience. Enjoy!

Github Link:

https://github.com/PrimaryFeather/Starling-Framework

FDT displays errors on some Class definitions and imports in the framework.
Also in the AGALMiniAssembler.as are some errors, saying "File could not be parsed.", "Unexpected Token" or "Found 'true' but newline or semicolon was expected"

Especially the semicolon shoun't display an error, because it is not a duty to use them. Instead FDT should display a warning

In the Framwork itself FDT can't handle Class definitions with pre package names properly,
e.g. flash.display.Stage in line 144, starling.core.Starling class

see:

by troy on January 4, 2008

I Recently upgraded to FDT 3.0 Professional...I highly recommend if you're doing heavy actionscript projects. It's pricey, but will pay for itself quickly.

Using fl.controls with the syntax checking took a bit of research. Turns out you have to follow the steps as

• Create a new FLA, name it CS3Controls
  
• drag all the components you need into the Library
• In File> Publish Settings > Flash > checkmark "Export SWC"
• publish it
• copy the CS3Controls.swc to someplace you'll remember (e.g. a common classpath or whatever app that uses them's lib folder)
• - Now in FDT, add your SWC to your project, and in the Flash Explorer panel, right-click and add that SWC file to your classpath
• once that swc is visible in the FDT Flash Explorer, right click over it. "Source Folder">"Add to Classpath"
• after a moment you will see it above the packages, if successful, clicking the plus will show you all the classes inside it...very cool FDT team!
• in your AS class just proceed as normal eg.: <code> import fl.controls.*</code>

found this cool little tip and it worked great

There’s something even more limited than time. It’s your attention. Attention is a subset of time, therefore it’s more limited. How you spend your attention is more important than how you spend your time.

As always I am learning more and more about ruby and rails. Recently I choose to take a stab at using Mongodb as my database and move away from using more traditional DBs such as Sqlite and Postgres.

It has been a little strange not having to run rake tasks such a migrate to setup new database tables and such. If you find yourself needing to clear out all the data in the database and you are using the Mongoid gem such as I am in your rails project then you can run the rails console and do the following to clear everything out. I find this useful if you have been developing and need to clear out all your test data.

Mongoid.database.collections.each do |collection|
      unless collection.name =~ /^system\./
        collection.remove
      end
    end

require ‘uri’

if ENV[“MONGOHQ_URL”]
  mongo_uri = URI.parse(ENV[“MONGOHQ_URL”])
  ENV[‘MONGOID_HOST’] = mongo_uri.host
  ENV[‘MONGOID_PORT’] = mongo_uri.port.to_s
  ENV[“MONGOID_USERNAME”] = mongo_uri.user
  ENV[‘MONGOID_PASSWORD’] = mongo_uri.password
  ENV[‘MONGOID_DATABASE’] = mongo_uri.path.gsub(“/”, “”)
end

These environment variables should get picked up in the mongoid.yml file and configure everything to work correctly. Also make sure you add the uri: argument under production.

production:
  uri: <%= ENV['MONGOHQ_URL'] %> 
  host: <%= ENV['MONGOID_HOST'] %>
  port: <%= ENV['MONGOID_PORT'] %>
  username: <%= ENV['MONGOID_USERNAME'] %>
  password: <%= ENV['MONGOID_PASSWORD'] %>
  database: <%= ENV['MONGOID_DATABASE'] %>

I just recently started using Pastebin. Basically you can past some code in and then share a link so that you can send other friends or developers to look at the code you are talking about. They have a great API and I am sure I will look into what else can be done with there platform but for now it is a great and really quick way to share code if you need someone to see a block or two that you are talking to them about.

Google Chrome Extension

With this Google Chrome Extension you are able to create new pastes directly from your browser. A recommended extension for all Pastebin users who use Google Chrome.

Version	Download	API Version	Developer
2.0	DOWNLOAD	3.0	Joshua Luckers

Download Google Chrome Add-on