RIA Developer, Flex / Flash, Widgets
Posts tagged Actionscript
Tour de Flex… It’s no rubygems, but it’s a start.
Jan 13th
Mike Chambers has a blog post asking, “How can adobe make the as3 learning curve easier”?
As I talked about in my Why YOU should contribute to Flex post, Adobe wants our input. Here they are again asking the community, “What do you think”?
I commented on Mike’s post.
I think that a more centralized component library and delivery system would make the lives of many developers much easier.
Take RubyGems for example. It’s extremely easy for developers to benefit from the work of others. This has increased the value of Ruby in my eyes tenfold.
As a developer, there isn’t a uniform place that I can go check to see if someone has done this before. So I have to scour the net for a while trying to find a solution by looking through blogs, articles, googlecode, etc…
I know there are a few places out there that make this easier. RIAForge, Adobe Developer Connection, Project Sprouts, Adobe TV, flexcoders.
Most of these sites (blogs especially), have a way to externally interact with them. I think that an Adobe sponsored site or program that would allow a developer to quickly see what’s out there would be an amazing asset to brand new ActionScript developer and veterans alike.
However, I didn’t realize until now, that Adobe is already doing this. This dream “site or program” does exist as the Tour de Flex. Which if you haven’t installed yet, I highly recommend it.
As the title of this post says, it’s no rubygems (not yet anyways)… but it’s a start. Go Adobe!
Tip of the Day – Mouse wheel scrolling on the mac
Jan 10th
A friend of mine asked me yesterday if I would take a look at a Flex application that he was writing. I said, “of course!”, and pulled up his app in my browser. To my surprise, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to navigate through his application.
So I called him back as asked him. He told me that his app uses the mouse wheel quite a bit to navigate around, he thought it would be very intuitive. I guess not everyone knows that mouse wheel scroll events don’t register on the mac.
So today I’m letting everyone within the sound of my blog know that…
Mouse wheel scrolling does not work on Macs… natively!
Luckily for us, Ali Rantakari has created a solution for this very problem. You can read up about the solution in this post.
Tip of the Day – Flex Date Utils
Jan 8th
I’ve recently been working with Gareth over at flexoop.com. He has been creating a more feature rich Date utility class.
As he puts it, “FlexDateUtils expands the Flex date library to be more on par with the date libraries found in many other programming languages. Most of the methods were adopted from ColdFusion as those are very full featured.”
Gareth has done a great job putting this library together.
Check out the project on RIAForge.
There are also in depth explanations on how to use the library on flexoop.com.
