LCDS 3.0 Beta Free On Adobe Labs - Yesterday

Source: FLEX{er} by Andrei Ionescu

Two weeks ago Adobe released LiveCycle Data Services 3.0 beta on Adobe Labs. This is an early preview release and anybody can participate.

Check it out here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/.

Andrew Trice said:

The two big features in LCDS 3.0 seem to be Model Driven Development and Quality of Service/throttling/caching from the server side.

in his article on insideRIA and I agree with him.

Also LCDS 3.0 beta comes with a plugin for Flash Builder 4. IT allows data modeling from Flash Builder itself.

This is a short article letting you know that you can have it and play with it.

More about LCDS 3.0 beta:
http://www.insideria.com/2009/06/lcds-30-available-on-adobe-lab.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/articles/lcdses3_whatsnew.html
http://www.dcooper.org/blog/client/index.cfm?mode=day&day=17&month=6&year=2009

Download link:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_livecycle_dataservices3

About Fiber/Model Driven Development:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/gettingstarted.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/

Flash Player Version Penetration - Jun 27

Source: FLEX{er} by Andrei Ionescu

Table of contents

1. Some Stats About Flash Player and Browsers
2. Flash Player Version Penetration

Last year on 1st of August I presented some stats on Flash Player Penetration. Now we have some new stats regarding the versions of Flash Player.

What to notice?

1. That in a few month Flash Player 10 will overcome Flash Player 9.
2. That Japan is the fastest adopting country of Flash Player 10.
3. That in half of an year any new version of Flash Player is fully adopted.

The stats are here: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html.

Regarding the enterprise medium Adobe give us this: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/enterprise_penetration.html.

All this shows us that Flash Player is a central part of the internet.

How To Create Bindable Properties (using Getters and Setters Methods) in Flex - Jun 26

Source: FLEX{er} by Andrei Ionescu

Let’s say you created a new component and you want to add some properties that need to be bindable. Something like this:

<flexer:myComp width="400" height="200" myNewSetter="{_myData}" />
<mx:Script>
    [Bindable]
    private var _myData:String= "";
</mx:Script>

And when we do this

_myData = "new_val_1";

the myComp component should know that _myData has changed and should modify itself according to the new value.

This is quite simple. Do the following:

1. On the getter, just above it, use the bindable meta tag like this
    

   [Bindable(event="mySpecialEvent")]

2. On the setter, at the end but in the setter’s body (just before closing the setter), dispatch the event used at point 1 like this
    

   dispatchEvent(new Event("mySpecialEvent"));

Let me show you the following example…

The second text area field is not a TextArea compoment but a new created component that is extending the regular TextArea. I called it AlteredTextArea because the new property it has will alter its content. This is our component that implements a new property called alteration that is bindable.

The combo box will say to the AlteredTextArea component in which way to alter the content: lowercase or uppercase.

Now the code. It is short, commented and has 2 files: the main application and the AlteredTextArea component.

This is our component AlteredTextArea…

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:TextArea xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
    <mx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            // private variable saving the current alteration
            private var _alteration:String = "";
 
            // Getter
            // Allow other components to bind to this property
            [Bindable(event="changeAlteration")]
            public function get alteration():String
            {
                return _alteration;
            }
 
            // Setter
            public function set alteration(s:String):void
            {
                _alteration = s;
 
                // We dispatch an event when the value changes
                dispatchEvent(new Event("changeAlteration"));
             }
 
             // overiding the text setter
             override public function set text(value:String):void
             {
                 // adding alteration to the text
                 var newValue:String = "";
                 switch (_alteration) 
                 {
                     // applying lowercase
                     case "toLowerCase":
                         newValue = value.toLowerCase();
                         break;
                     // applying uppercase
                     case "toUpperCase":
                         newValue = value.toUpperCase();
                         break;
                     // no alteration
                     default:
                         newValue = value;
                         break;
                 }
                 // calling the super
                 super.text = newValue;
             }
        ]]>
    </mx:Script>
</mx:TextArea>

Now the main application…

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
    layout="absolute" xmlns:flexer="com.flexer.*" 
    height="299" width="459">
    <mx:ComboBox id="alterationCombo" x="118" y="138" width="158"
        dataProvider="{_alterations}" 
        change="handleAlterationChanges(event)"/>
    <mx:Label x="10" y="140" text="Alteration:" width="100"/>
    <mx:Label x="10" y="11" text="Input text:" width="100"/>
    <mx:Label x="10" y="169" text="Output:" width="100"/>
    <mx:TextArea id="inputText" x="118" y="10" 
        width="330" height="120" 
        text="{_testText}"/>
    <flexer:AlteredTextArea x="118" y="168"
        id="alteredText" 
        width="330" height="120" 
        text="{inputText.text}" 
        alteration="{_currentAlteration}"
        editable="false"/>
 
    <mx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            // alteration available
            [Bindable]
            private var _alterations:Object = [
                {label:"Default",value:""},
                {label:"Lowercase",value:"toLowerCase"},
                {label:"Uppercase",value:"toUpperCase"}
            ];
 
            // the test to start with
            [Bindable]
            private var _testText:String = "Test TEST test";
 
            // the current alteration
            [Bindable]
            private var _currentAlteration:String = "";
 
            // handler for changes
            private function handleAlterationChanges(e:Event):void 
            {
                // setting current alteration
                _currentAlteration = e.target.selectedItem.value;
                // setting the text again
                alteredText.text = inputText.text;
            }
        ]]>
    </mx:Script>
 
</mx:Application>

I think you already noticed the get alteration and set alteration methods and understood how is done.

If you want to know more take a look inside the TextArea component which has lots of getters and setters using this tehnique.

It seems that it can even be used like this

[Bindable("changeAlteration")]

without saying “event=“. But to be make the code more readable I use the first case.

Also on DevNet found the following resources:

• http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/quickstart/building_components_in_mxml/ (go to the end and see the last example)
• http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/quickstart/building_components_in_mxml/src/MxmlComponentAdvanced/index.html

Happy coding!

Does Your Flash CS4 Professional Crashes When Trying To Edit Text Objects Containing Corrupted Fonts? - Jun 23

Source: FLEX{er} by Andrei Ionescu

If your Flash CS4 crashes when you try to edit some text object is because there is a problem with the font - it may be corrupted or may contain ambiguous data or there are more than one font with the same name or the font symbol name is identical to the Postscript name of the underlying font, etc.

The crash looks like this…

This can be easily fixed by going to adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html and download the 10.0.2 Flash CS4 Professional Update.

Numerous bug fixes and improvements were added with this update. Some of them are listed bellow.

• Performance issues when dragging objects on stage, scrubbing the timeline, entering symbol edit mode in large AS 2.0 and AS 3.0 files.
• Performance issues when opening large files or files with many nested symbols.
• Performance issues when working in the library such as scrolling, selecting items in the library, dragging item to stage, editing symbol from library.
• Crash when selecting text field on stage with many fonts on user’s system.
• Text Property Inspector is stuck and some controls on the PI are not drawn with certain fonts on user’s system.
• Crash when creating a text object on stage when there are corrupted fonts.

More regarding the fixes on KB407415 and on Galvan on Flash blog.

Hope this will help you improving your Flex CS4 Professional experience.

Google Is Indexing Flash with External Resource Loading - Jun 22

Source: FLEX{er} by Andrei Ionescu

On 18th of June Google announced that now they support Flash indexing with external resource loading.

Quoting Janis Stipins, Software Engineer at Google:

This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file - whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc. - we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

If you didn’t know what kind of Flash indexing was before please read these articles from Google Web Master Central and Adobe Developer Connection:

• Improved Flash indexing
• SWF searchability FAQ

These time this is what is new:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2 and AS3, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in indexing process.

Guys from Flash’n'SEO did some experiments before this improvements and you can read their findings on their site.

Waiting for new experiments that will test these new improvements.