aron / philipp development blog

Hiho. Been busy these last couple of weeks … For me it’s the first time looking deeper into this whole Flex stuff. And Aron is getting his hand dirty with iPhone development and Google Web Toolkit (GWT). But as the title already says, this post is all about Flex.

Right now, I’m building some Flex-modules that are heavily data-driven – that’s basically why I chose Flex in the first place. After trying to build my own datagrids and excel-like tables in Flash/AS3 I quickly decided to turn to Flex and use the built-in components to get everything working.

So …. after getting to know Flex a little better, I can say one thing for sure: I don’t really like it :)
You got components for almost everything, but if your requirements differ just a bit from the features the flex-components offer, you are screwed. and especially the DataGrid – it’s very easy to get some rows out of your database and display them in the grid, but don’t event try to use complex data … then everything crashes and you have to write dozens ans dozens of ItemRenderers and work-arounds to display the data in the DataGrid.
yadda yadda yadda … I’m still working my butt off to get everything as I want it to be – but I thought I’ll share my thoughts and especially my “tricks” with you.

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Hi there.
Just wanted to post that our new (second revision) Flash CS4 book is out and you can get it here:

www.galileodesign.de
www.amazon.de

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… grab your super-early-bird-ticket now: FOTB.

see ya in brighton!

Joshua Davis – Image by John via Flickr

I’m back from the OFFF and had a wonderful time. First to say, that Lisbon is an amazingly pretty city. I actually plan to come back sometime later this year and recommend everyone to visit this city.

Like always on conferences there are ups and downs. Besides the obvious facts like lame speakers and organization issues it’s sometimes hard (at least for me) to keep the pressure up a whole conference day especially since having loots of beers at night seems to be an integral element of those conferences… ;)

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hi there.
just returned from cologne where FFK09 took place for the 9th time.
we met a lot of people and had a great time with the different talks – some i’d like to point out. so, if you’ll have the chance to check them out – don’t miss ‘em.

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hi there …
just wanted to share our schedule for the next weeks to come.
so for all you flash- and design-lovers out there, here are the facts (not chronological).

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We recently finished a pretty untypical project. The client wanted to have a portfolio site, where the “cases”-pages were so different, that they did not fit in any cms or xml structure. And since the client has their own flash developer (well, more of a designer type…) they wanted to be able to maintain the FLA files themselves.

So we built the basic structure in an index.swf. The “cases” FLAs had a document class which inherited from a super class. So what if something in the superclass changes? Yes, you have to open every FLA and export it all over again.

For this case we wrote a little JSFL script with a XUL user interface. Interestingly this feature exists since Flash MX 2004 without much notice.

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hi there, long time no see … but we are very busy working on some interesting projects and writing the second edition of our “workshops for flash” book.
the latter is also the reason why we are using flash cs4 more than we usually would … and especially the cs4-built-in-actionscript-editor … *phew* what a mess that is. no real auto-completion, no auto-import and the flash-help keeps opening my browser with the online flashhelp :( really annoying.
but there are some ways around this behavior.

offline browser solution:
http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/2008/12/09/offline-as3-language-reference-no-air-application-necessary/

air app:
http://labs.bigspaceship.com/2008/12/09/air-app-as3-language-reference/

great stuff :)
cheers

Recently we had the problem to change the embed setting of tons of textfields instances inside of at least a gazillion MovieClips. We got the FLA-file from a designer (we maybe haven’t briefed enough… :) ) and wanted to use them in a lib swc for a AS3-only project. So we started to change them “by foot”, internship work, damn it!

Finally we came up with the idea to write a jsfl script which does the job.

There you go: Change Textfield Embed Settings.jsfl
As zip: ChangeTextfieldEmbedSettings.zip

Copy the file inside the command folder here:

Mac: /[user]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CS3/en/Configuration/

Windows: \Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS3\language\Configuration\

How to use:

Create a dummy TextField on the timeline and set it to the embed setting you want to apply to all TextField instances of all MovieClip timelines inside the library. Make sure that this TextField has the same font name as the TextFields you want to apply the setting to. Select this TextField and run the script by clicking “Change TextField Embed Setting” inside the Command menu of Flash.

The script now opens every MovieClip of the library and searches for TextField instances. If found and the font matched with the previously created dummy TextField, the new embed setting will be copied.

Note: The script only works with MovieClip library items and TextField of the type “dynamic” or “input”. Only the embed settings of the dummy TextField will be applied, all other properties will be ignored.

Great news from our favorite ActionScript Editor FDT. After we post the Unofficial FDT Buglist the Powerflasher (the Company behind FDT) came with an update to version 3.1 (which fixed some of the mentioned bugs and added new features). Some day later they initialized (just like we suggested) a public buglist. We will transfer the open bugs to them and close our post.

Thanks FDT Team. We are looking forward to the future of the best ActionScript editor on earth.