Nouvelles Solutions

I’m exited to announce a version of Tour De Mobile for the iPad. Tour De Mobile Flex is a great showcase of the different components that the Flex SDK provides. You can download an (old) version for Android on Flex.org. Unfortunately this version was build with the preview release of Flash Builder (Hero) and doesn’t compile with the Flex SDK 4.6. I started to update it but realized that James Ward had a more fleshed out version on Github which I used as starting point. That version, even though more recent that the one on Flex.org, wasn’t updated since more that 11 months and didn’t have any of the new Flex 4.6 mobile features. I guess that my coincides with James move to Salesforce.

I really wanted to see how Tour De Flex works on the iPad, so I rolled up my sleeves and adapted it for the Flex SDK 4.6, added a split view and tab navigator, and added a couple of examples of the new Flex 4.6 mobile components like the DateSpinner and the ToggleSwitch. I intend to add a few more examples, like charting, some mapping examples and hopefully some of the new 2D and Stage3D features.

For now there are still few details to be fixed, like re-enabling source code view and fixing few bugs. You can follow the progress of this effort on my Github account.

Check out the following video of Tour De Mobile Flex on the iPad:

Come see my Building iPad apps with Flex talk at 360Flex to find out many of the technics that are used in Tour De Mobile Flex…and much more ;-)

Enjoy!
Daniel

UndoManager is A simple ActionScript library to add undo/redo functionality to your Flex/ActionScript projects.

I just extracted the UndoManager library from one of the project I’m working on. Check it out on Github.

This library provides three main class, the ManagedCollections, the ManagedObject and the UndoManager. The ManagedCollections and ManagedObject keep track of any underlying changes to themselves, i.e. adding and removing items from the collection and the changing attributes on an Object. The UndoManage keeps track of which object was changed. So in your application you can extend ManagedCollections and ManagedObject for any data structure you want be able to do undo changes.

Actually I did setup this whole website using Octopress because I want to blog more. The reality is that I’m currently working on many pretty awesome projects, a Rails project, an iPad project, a Flex project, and some consulting projects that when the evening comes…I code some more instead of blogging. But I’m learning so much cool stuff that I want to share. So here a few of the things I want to talk about:

I just read Optimizing Performance for the ADOBE FLASH PLATFORM from Adobe.

This is a good read and contains many useful tips and descriptions of optimization you can apply to your application. This become really relevant when developing Flex mobile applications.

Here are the 67 tips highlighted in the document…

I’ve received so much feedback from many of my friends on Flex projects being cancelled or scheduled to be rewritten in another technology than Flex. Great Job Adobe, you did it!

So what was really announced last week is the following:

At first I thought “Wow, Adobe really messed up their communication”. They could have focused on what they are adding, strong support for HTML5 and CSS4, Adobe AIR for Mobile, and not on what they are removing, the Flash Player in the Browser. But then they also announced that they opened sourced Flex via the Apache Foundation. And the main stream media, the blogosphere, and many developers I know went crazy and said Flex is dead, it’s over, time to convert all your projects to HTML5.

At least so says my good friend Sean Voisen in his latest blog entry Thoughts on test-driven development.

What, you are calling me a liar? :-) I must respectfully disagree with Sean. Not on the fact that he may think it’s not fun, that’s his opinion like many other Flex developers that don’t do testing. I disagree because I see many developers, in other communities, that actually really enjoy testing. If you look at the Ruby community you will see many developpers enjoying doing test driven development, enjoying writing tests, and even expanding the way you can write tests. Check out rspec, Cucumber, and the many of books and screencast on the subject. Checkout all the ruby libraries, they are all pretty well tested. There are many training classes on people that really want to improve doing testing. Many Rails projects are extremly well tested. Many Ruby developers cannot even code without writing tests first.

Announcing redis flex An ActionScript Library to integrate with Redis.

A while back I looked into accessing Redis directly from Flex and I found an existing library, as3redis that however didn’t support the new unified request protocol. So I wrote a minimalist wrapper that now allows to send commands to a redis server.

To access the Redis server from Flex just instantiate a Redis instance:

In this screencast we are going to show how to build a Rails app in a couple of minutes that is optimized for Rich Client. The application is a todo application build in Flex connecting using the bulk_api to the Rails server using my new bulk data source Flex framework.