Some of you guys asked, why even using the PreLoader instead of the original Loader from Adobe in the first place. The PreLoader queues the load requests, that’s all… :) Read the full story here. For quick starters here an …

Hi there. After some inquiries we finally added the possibility to customize the Apdev VideoPlayer – only changing colors at this time but it’s a first step in the right direction … You can now change any color of any object/control that is used within the videoplayer – but check the ApdevVideoPlayerDefaultStyle.as for all the attributes that can be manipulated. And it’s up to you whether you change the attributes using pure ActionScript (1) or our html-version of the videoplayer and pass the values in via flashvars (2). With approach 2 you don’t even have to know ActionScript or open a flash-file – just embed the videoplayer-swf into your website and customize it via flashvars. For further information, see the upcoming examples.

This is just a small update to the sources of our Flash / Indexhibit example we posted earlier. I added a FLA file for all of you that never used the Flex-compiler before :) Just download the sources and open …

… and the server is going to be down for a while but we hope that we’ll be up and running again on monday morning. so don’t worry :)

Because some of you asked for an installation guide for the example I posted earlier – here comes a small how-to so that you can get the demo up and running on your own computer/webserver. There is more than one way to get this done …

I’m currently working with SOAP web services. While making adjustments to the classes of the wsdl Flex Builder class generator I discovered, that there is an easy way to decode / parse XML to VOs (value objects). The XMLDecoder inside the rpc package does the trick. I’m still confused why there are not more resources on the web regarding this topic but If you want to digg deeper, I strongly recommend reading these blog posts by Dominic De Lorenzo: Flex 3, XML Schemas & automatic mapping of AS classes to XSD element definitions (Part 1) Flex 3, XML Schemas & automatic mapping of AS classes to XSD element definitions (Part 2) I’m not an XML pro and some things in his example I’m still not getting (namespaces in XML, yes well…). Also, his example is in Flex and I just wanted to have a basic example on how this could be useful for my work.

FOTB 09 Beach Barbecue – Image by Keith Peters via Flickr Second time (after 2007) for us being at FOTB in Brighton this year … and I just wanted to write a small roundup to let all of you who couldn’t be there in person know what you missed out on ;) All in all it was great – again! Not so much about Flash and ActionScript but nonetheless there were definitely some speakers that totally blew my mind.

I just uploaded the new 1.01 version of our Apdev VideoPlayer to google-code. We fixed/added some features some of you requested, like e.g. Volume button behavior changed VideoPlayer now fires events when the video’s play-state changes and some other minor …

Some days ago Adobe released the spell-checking library called “Squiggly“. According to Adobe the library “allows you to easily add spell checking functionality in any Flex 3 based text control” – but because most of our projects are AS3 only, we decided to build a class which allows you to use the SpellChecker’s functionality with every normal TextField in Flash. Unfortunately Adobe messed up the Docs of the library’s current version (BTW, why do we need to download it? every other doc is accessible online) – they are talking about Events and EventDispatcher where no Dispatcher can be found and not even one Event is fired. Great that Adobe releases such a tool but they should definitely try to get the facts/info/docs right! Otherwise it’s really hard for us developers to work with (and maybe improve) the tools they offer. So here is the first version of our spell-checker for ActionScript 3 / FlashPlayer 9. Currently there is only error-highlighting, the other features will hopefully come within the next few days (suggesting and replacing words). Try it for yourself …

Last week I wrote (see Flash frontend for Indexhibit CMS) about our flash-indexhibit-example. Today I also uploaded the sources … I cleaned up the code but didn’t have the time to write any detailed comments. So take a look at …

Philipp and me have been using the PreLoader class as a Loader replacement for some years now. It loads asset SWFs more convenient and has some nice improvements over the usual Loader. Key features: Works similar to the Loader class …

Hi there. After working with different content management systems over the last few years – like Typo3, Joomla and even some custom made ones – I came across a very neat one called Indexhibit. It’s not like you can compare Typo3 to Indexhibit – except maybe that they both are called CMS – but many projects we did in the past required only a small kind of management system. And that is exactly what Indexhibit has to offer. It’s an easy-to-use CMS with the most common features: create categories, add projects to category, edit headline/copy, upload images, etc.

Last week Adobe released a nice tool called FlexPMD – it can help you and your development team to improve the quality of the code you generate by looking for common bad practices like i.e. unused or inefficient code. To better understand how FlexPMD works and what it exactly does, have a look at “About FlexPMD”. You can use default or custom rulesets to control what FlexPMD is looking for. With the Custom Ruleset Creator you can – guess what – create your own rulesets and check your code against these rules. There are three ways to use FlexPMD with your projects: from the command line from Ant from Maven

We’re proud to announce our first open source project: the Apdev Videoplayer. It’s an ActionScript 3.0 script-only videoplayer that we’re releasing under the MIT license. So you can do with it whatever you want – change it, skin it or just tear it apart and use some snippets of our code. It’s up to you.

Hi there … some weeks ago I blogged about my struggles with Flex and its built-in DataGrid. After some time of getting to know “my Grid”, I decided to refactor the previous example.