Archive for category Flex
SharedObjects are Awesome
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Flex on July 4th, 2009
SharedObject in your flash project can make for a much improved user experience, and can help you do things faster and more behind the sense so that your applications and web sites work the way users expect them to work. Recently I had to discover the power of SharedObject myself in a chat applications that I am building in Flex.
Because our application will live on each page of a web site I needed a way to keep the user from having to login to chat everytime they do a page load. The chat app will basically store the users login info locally so that I can easily get their login creds and log them back into the server as they navigate the site. I also went a step farther and store the last few messages that they have either sent or received and load them back into the view when the app loads.
In these examples I am going to go over a couple of fundamental things you can do to store user info locally with SharedObjects. Everything in this post was coded using the new Flash Builder Beta but SharedObject has been around for a long time and should work even back in AS2. For my examples we will of course be coding for AS3 and Flash 10.
Remembering User Cardinals
Here we have an example of storing user login information so when they return to our application we can remember there user name and password for them. Remember that all this data is stored local to the user’s hard drive so we are not transmitting anything over the internet at this point because flash player itself has the data we need.
If this is your first time viewing the the app what you need to do is fill in the info and check the box remember me. Then you will refresh the page and you will see that your info was stored. Unchecking the box will clear the data and if you refresh the page you will have to start all over. To show that your data was stored or cleared, click the check SO button. I have some code that will see if the sharedobject data matches what is in the text input controls or not and alert you if the data matches or does not match.
RIGHT CLICK SWF TO VIEW SOURCE AND DOWNLOAD SOURCE ZIP FILE
Remembering what the user did last
This next example will pretty much do the same thing with sharedobject. Remember all we are really doing is choosing what type of data we need from flash player at runtime.
What we are going to do is remember the last thing the user did so they can pickup where they left off. In this simple app we create a ball. The starting X and Y location of the ball is 50px. As you click on the stage the ball will move to the location of the ball to your mouseX and mouseY location. The next time you load the app the ball will move to the last location you clicked. We do this by storing the last mouseX and mouseY location in the sharedobject. Give it a try by clicking around a few times and refreshing the page.
If you don’t want the app to remember the location then check the box in the bottom of the app and it will not store the x and y by clearing out the data.
RIGHT CLICK SWF TO VIEW SOURCE AND DOWNLOAD SOURCE ZIP FILE
The ball example could let you do something like not skip a flash intro if the user has been to the site before or maybe you only want an animation to play on the home page so after the user goes past that point in the site you store a Boolean value to let you know if they have been there before.
Keep in mind that sharedobject data should remain simple. I have gone as far as storing my own value objects in an Array within sharedobjects but if the data grows beyond 100k flash player will warn the user and get their permission before allowing the data to be stored., so you want to keep the data storage small.
Hope some of you found this useful and please feel free to leave your comments, suggestions or questions.
Flex / Flash Camp and Adobe Tour June 19th
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Events, Flash, Flex on June 5th, 2009
Speaker List and Schedule
You must RSVP for 1 or both events http://615flex.eventbrite.com/
Half Day Flash / Flex Camp
When: June 19, 2009
Doors: 9:30am
Start: 10:00am
Where: Nashville, TN http://www.anthonybillups.com/
Speakers: Scot Clausing, Ben Stucki, Mike Orth, Deke Smith, Aaron West, Matthew Wallace
Matthew Wallace - Senior Flash Developer / RIA Architect
The mechanic behind all things Flash at RW and now Moontoast. Also under the hood, he also does some Java / Red5 development. “Tell me what you want it to do, and I will make it happen”, is basically Matthew’s goal on any project.
You can check out more and follow what Matthew Wallace is up to in a few places.
- Blog: http://flashalisious.com
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/mswallace
This session will cover the Flash IDE and Flex Builder as your code editor work flow. In this session Matthew will use Flash to set up the User interface of a comon web site layout and the show you how to set up Flex Builder to do all your actionscript coding, because we all know the Flash IDE code editor suck!
For getting your ass there early the first 15 seats will have a free book just for coming to my session. You will get and Actionscript 3 for Flash CS3 just for showing up!
Mike is a Senior Flex/AS3 Consultant & Music Industry veteran. Early in his career, he started his own record label and worked with Grammy award-winning artists. During the rise of the digital age, he quickly went from creating artist websites to creating cutting-edge interactive music applications. Mike now leads development teams around the globe and has authored code published in the Flex 3 Cookbook. Combining his creative talent and extensive RIA knowledge, Mike specializes in overall application design, architecture, user interaction, and other awesome buzzwords.Lunch brake – 1:15 – 2:15
Deke Smith started his career as an art director and graphic designer within the print world. He became enamored with the possibilities of electronic media and began a user interface design company in the early years of the Internet. That company later merged with another and he got bought out. His love of exploring how electronic media can be exploited to communicate has continued. With Flash, and later Flex, he saw the first tool that fulfilled the mission that Java and HTML never solved convincingly: to give developers the power to mesh the user’s desktop and the power and data of servers together as one application. Flash, as a tool, had the advantages of the Web without many of the user interface restrictions. Today he focuses on programming user experiences in Flash and Flex.Deke’s session will start at 2:20pm – 3:10pm – A Few Common Pitfalls in Flex.
The power of Flex is that it makes so many complex tasks easy. But problems can arise if the man behind the curtain is ignored. This session is about what Flex does to make a developer’s easier and how what goes on in the background can cause very hard to debug problems in that developer’s code.
Scot Clausing is a local Flex & Java developer with sincere interest in mobile development and 3D interactive design. While he has daily exposure to all areas of the development process, his true passions are application architecture, UI design and teaching. Since the introduction of Adobe Flex 2, RIA development has been an obsession and has provided a truly enjoyable and fulfilling career path. After three years, Flex & Flash Builder 4 re-ignite that obsession.This is the session to see if you’re interested in getting started with the Flash Builder 4 beta, now available on http://labs.adobe.com. The presentation will highlight some cool new features of the IDE, and then jump right into the goods. I may include such topics as: The Flash Player 10 Text Engine (which is awesome), Skinning components with FXG, Creating custom components, and the wonderful new syntax for States. If you have a topic you are especially interested in, please send me an email or drop me a line at http://blog.tsclausing.com.
Ben Stucki is an independent software developer in Nashville, TN. He might have had an average, every-day job selling retail electronics or installing cable, but he doesn’t. He designs and develops bleeding edge web applications using Flex, ActionScript 3, Java, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Apparently he’s pretty good at it. He speaks at events just to rub it in.From ByteArrays to Sound APIs the Flash Player has grown a lot in the last few years. In this talk Ben will take a look at Flash Platform features you may not even know existed and show you how to use them in the latest Flex 4 SDK.
Flex Tour Doors: 6:00pm – Start: 7:00pm
Where: Nashville, TN http://www.anthonybillups.com/
Speakers: Greg Wilson
Greg is an Adobe Enterprise Platform Evangelist – Flex, AIR, LiveCycle, ColdFusion, Acrobat. Photographer, Pilot and the combination of both http://www.tigeraerial.com
Greg will be speaking about some of the changes coming to the Flash and Flex Frameworks.
Beer and food will be provided before and after the Adobe event.
Prizes will be awarded during the evening. Currently some of the prizes consist of Adobe Flex and CS4 product licenses. We are also hopeful to have some sponsored swag.
Following the event will be a mixer with a live DJ. This will be an opportunity for you to get to know some of your colleagues and just hang. We will try to wrap up around 10:00pm.
Try out Moontoast and get some Flash / Flex advice or help
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Flex, Red5 on May 15th, 2009
Being that I actually work on Moontoast and develop tools for it I figured it would be a good idea to offers some services on the site. If you need to meet with an experianced Flex / Flash developer please check out my Moontoast page.
What do you know? Moontoast lets you sell that knowledge
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Flex, Red5, Remarkable Wit on March 25th, 2009
For almost 1 year I have been working as the senior flash developer for RW. We were working on this top secret project called “Moontoast“. Well, after a hectic first part of this year we launched Moontoast at SXSW.
Before I tell you my part in the project, let me first tell you what Moontoast is; why you would want to use it, and how to get started.
Moontoast democratizes information by
- Connecting those who know with those who want to know. Moontoast is making available everything anyone can think of, ever. Yeah, it’s big.
- Moontoast is the next step for the Internet, from information retrieval to knowledge transfer.
How to use Moontoast
- Search Moontoast profiles for an expert of any kind.
- Establish a live connection with that expert, link straight to calendars, send SMS or email too.
- Schedule a Moontoast session and determine price.
Who uses Moontoast
- Someone who wants to make there own beer.
- Someone who would like to know how to use there computer so you don’t have to bug a family member to help you.
- Someone who wants to take vocal lessons from Kip Winger.
- Anyone looking for any kind of knowledge. Again, it’s that big.
Who built Moontoast… funny you should ask? Well the kick ass development team from Remarkable Wit out of Nashville, TN.
Now the part I have been trying to get too… What role did I play in building Moontoast?
Enter the Moontoast live video chat application. This application is pretty much my baby, and I was blessed to be able to build this as my part of the RW development team. This application was built using the Flex Framework and an open source FMS (Flash Media Server) called Red5. This was my first application that would use FMS and Remote Shared Objects. Shared Objects are basically variables and functions that allow you to pass information and update each users application when something changes in one of the user’s applications. Basically updating user preferences, alerts, and so on, in real time. An example of this would be a text chat message in the Moontoast video chat app. One user types a chat message and when the user sends the message, both chat conversations are updated via the Shared Object.
The heart and soul of this application, of course, is the real time live video streaming. This Flash app looks at your computer’s hardware on launch to see what possible ports could have a web cam and microphone attached in order to send the video and audio data to the server. The result is a Video Stream that each user can see on their computer, so that you can have a live face to face conversation with the other user.
I am really proud of this application and I thank the whole RW team for giving me the opportunity to develop this application, and I look forward to seeing and building more innovative applications with you guys.
I personally would love feedback from users on features they would like to see improved in the application, or features they would like to see added. You can do so by leaving a comment on this blog post.
So… if you have some time today and knowledge that you feel is valuable to the world; or if you are looking for some knowledge on a particular subject, give Moontast a try.
Remove unwanted buttons form Eclipse / Flex Builder Toolbar
Posted by Matthew Wallace in Eclipse, Flex on February 11th, 2009
Something that has really been bugging me for a long time about Eclipse IDE / Flex Builder is the fact that I could not figure out how to remove items from the toolbar at the top after I install some needed plugins. Well all the plugins are needed but some of them don’t really get used all that much. A good example for me would be that I have the cfeclipse plugin but I really don’t use CF all that much and the cfeclipse plugin once installed puts a lot of extra stuff at the top in the toolbar.
Here is a screen grab of what kind of mess I was dealing with before I figured this out.
Now if you have been looking for this solution it is pretty easy once you know where to look. It is actually easier than changing your code editor font size. If you have ever had to figure that one out you know what I mean. Pretty damn difficult if you don’t know where to look.
Here are the steps
1. After Eclipse / Flex Builder is open you need to go to the Window menu and select Customize Perspective.
2. Once the Customize Perspective panel is open you need to select Commands tab.
3. In my case I clicked on CFEclipse in the left hand menu and to the right you will see all the buttons and short cuts displayed for that plugin. All I did was uncheck the box next to CFEclipse then then click OK. Now I have a toolbar that is not over loaded with buttons Yeah!
Let me know if this works for you guys as well cause for me it has been months of wondering how to do this.
TextMate may be dead when developing Actionscript
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Eclipse, Flex on December 4th, 2008
One of my most trafficked section of my blog is on installing the Flex and Actionscript 3 bundles for TextMate. Don’t let the title fool you. I still really really really enjoy TextMate. It has some great features for sure, but I have to say that Adobe has made a great move in using the Eclipse Platform for code editing Flex and Actionscipt 3 projects.
In the past I have done a tutorial on how to using Flex Builder for your Flash projects and it was a bit of a pain in the ass to set this up. Hence the reason I did a tutorial on how to do it. Even Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow was linking to my post on how to install the Flex and AS3 bundles. Well leave it to Lee to one up me and I am so glad that he did. For the last week or so Lee has been experimenting and creating tools for better setting up Eclipse so that you can do all your Flash “Actionscript 3″ coding in Eclipse. He is utilizing some existing plugins, creating some plugins of his own and has also created an AIR application that does a really good job of creating the project files and directories needed for editing AS3 code that is part of a Flash CS4 project. The last post he talked about moving this AIR app over to be an Eclipse plugin as well. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
Do yourself a huge favor and head over to Lee’s site “TheFlashBlog.com” and check out what he has been doing. It will make your Actionscript and Flex development life a lot better and you will feel like you have all the tools that you need. It also sounds like this set up is only going to get better and better.
Red5 and Flex Basics Part 1 – Keep Track Of Users
Posted by Matthew Wallace in Flex, Red5, Video Tutorials, actionscript on September 30th, 2008
In this video I am going to show you the basics of starting your first Red5 java application and we will use Flex to talk to the server and the server will keep track of a list of users that are logged in to the application. As soon as a user closes there browser or leaves the applications page the user will be removed from the applications list of users. This is really helpful for building applications where users are interacting with other users. This could be a Chat or Video application or even an online game where users can play against each other.
Before you can start you will need a couple of things installed. Eclipse with Flex Builder plugin, The Java EE development environment, and finally the Red5 Server Plugin for Eclipse. In the video I will explain a little bit about why you need this setup and where to go to get it but I will not cover installation at all.
I hope you guys enjoy and let me know if you have any questions.
Also included is the source files. Red5Tut.zip Red5TutClient.zip
Compiled Red5 App from Tutorial.
Using Flex to call CFC functions and Railo Part2
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, ColdFusion, Design, Flash CS3, Flex, Railo on September 19th, 2008
Using Actionscript 3 and Flex Builder to make AMF Remoting calls to Railo CFC’s
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, ColdFusion, Flex, Railo on September 4th, 2008
I know the ColdFusion community has been paying attention to the open source CFML servers that are either already out in the wild or are going to be released soon. One of the coolest ones that have have gotten to play with is Rail 3.0 Beta, soon to be Rail 3.1 by the end of the year.
Now just for the record I am a very new CFML coder. I mainly work in Flash or Flex all day and don’t really care to much for the backend development at all. One of the best things I learned with in the past 6 months or so was how to use AMF and Remoting with ColdFusion8. The down side to the other CFML server where at the time AMF was an Adobe thing and none of the open source server where able to put it in.
Once Open BlueDragon came out I was excited but the did not have AMF and they are still working on getting it in there in the form of BlazeDS.
Here was my experience with Railo. I went to the site, http://railo.ch/, downloaded 3.0, put it in my home directory, launched the server, created a Flex hello world project, created a CFC, set up the NetConnection to the gateway and “HELLO WORLD” it worked. This was Freaking awesome!
Right now Railo 3.0 is using OpenAMF witch is AMF0. Before the end of the year Railo 3.1 will be out and the team has said that they will be replacing OpenAMF with Adobe’s BlazeDS witch will be AMF3.
In the following video I will show you how simple it is to get set up and running.
How to set up Flex Builder for Coding with Flash CS3 IDE
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Flex, Video Tutorials on January 13th, 2008
There has been a lot of buzz about Flex and Flex Builder. This is the IDE for Building Flex RIA’s and also for building pure actionscript 3 projects. After discovering the power of Flex Builder’s coding environment it was clear to me that this would be a great Actionscript 3 editor for my Flash CS3 projects.The following video will walk you through the setup that I use on all my Flash projects. I hope this will help out with your work flow. Let me know what you think. Watch Now!
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