machine501

Someone in our chat pointed me to this great article by Yakov Fain, of Farata Systems. This is a must read for anyone evaluating Flex, either as a developer or as a product manager. Here is the article in summary:

1. Flex 2 is not a RAD tool
2. The pool of Flex developers is still limited - retrain your developers
3. Check the credentials of the vendors you hire
4. Be careful with frameworks - use components
5. Architecture - Avoid monolithic applications

I want to add another point: Think about user experience.

I get the feeling from talking with many developers, clients, and prospective clients that they think adding a little bit of Flex will compensate for the poor look and performance of their existing site. I recently had a potential client ask me to help re-write a web application that was not performing well. They felt that certain features were being underutilized because the existing HTML-based site made it hard for the user to figure out where to click, what to do next, what was available to do at the time.

They thought Flex would be able to solve this. But when I saw the initial design for the Flex rewrite it turned out to be very similar to the old HTML app. Sure, Flex offers new affordances and UI elements like transitions and effects to guide the user’s action through a complex form, but can this overcome a confusing information architecture? Why jump right in and recreate everything from scratch? Take incremental steps instead. Figure out what can be changed on your site/app to make it easier to use, easier for the user to figure out what actions are available to them. If you’re starting from scratch, Flex might be the way to go. But, take some time first to evaluate the pros and cons in terms of development and user experience.

Hey everyone, Tom and I are demoing our SearchCoders/Dashboard app at max. We are one of five winners of the Adobe AIR derby and so we have a booth in the community pavillion where we’re showing the app. There are other derby winners, like Ed Finkler, demoing their apps here too.  So, come by and say hi.   We’ll be here tomorrow and we’ll be in the chat all day.

I’ve put a little chat widget for chatting about python on my blog sidebar.

I use IRC to chat with other programmers and I’m used to showing my code using a pastebin.  But when Tom and I started writing this flash chat widget I decided to come up with something that would let me paste code inline but not pollute the chat with a ton of code, so we came up with the syntax hiliting and code folding you see in this Flash chat widget.

There are other programming topics available for the widget but I decided to put the python chat room on my blog because that’s the language I love to work in.   Many of you come here looking for help with Tomcat and FDS so you figure I might be more of a Java guy …  I’ll explain why the emphasis in an upcoming post and how Python will come to play a greater role in my work.

If you want to put the flash chat widget on your blog just check out: http://www.chatopica.com/.  There are many more topics, like Java, Ruby on Rails, and even a Book Club for the literary types.  If you have WordPress there’s a widget you can use to install the Chatopica widget.

When you tried to open an AS file in FB did you suddenly get this message?

An error has occurred. See error log for more details.

Or maybe this message when you tried to open an MXML file:

Unable to create this part due to an internal error. Reason for the failure: The editor class could not be instantiated. This usually indicates that the editor’s class name was mistyped in plugin.xml.

No worries! try this:

go to:

[workspace directory]/.metadata/.plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.codemodel/searchCache

backup the directories in there that end with “.index”. zip them up and put them somewhere safe. then delete the directories. leave the file “catalog.xml”.

start flexbuilder. it should work.

The problem is that the lucene index was corrupted or lost, probably during a failed FlexBuilder shutdown. So when FB starts up and it tries to load the lucene index it fails horribly and you can’t use it anymore. Hmm … maybe the FB team can add a “try … catch” block and save us the horror? :)

Make sure your log file has an error that says something like this:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: [workspace]\.metadata\.plugins\com.adobe.flexbuilder.codemodel\searchCache\SWCReference.index\segments (The system cannot find the file specified)

The log file is located in:

[workspace]\.metadata\.log

Happy coding.

/r

Not just eye-candy, but useful too.

Saffron is an AIR-based UML app that looks phenomenal.

Check it out.

You’ll also find a good-looking showcase of Flex/AIR apps over at scalenine. I’m amazed at the creativity and concern for the user shown in Flex and AIR apps.

Design is important, just look at the iPod [i don't have an iPhone .. yet .. so ... :)]. AIR+Flex make it easy and enjoyable to tackle both design and functionality.

Send me links to other flex/air apps.

Hey everybody,

the next Los Angeles Flex Users Group is all about using Flash CS3 and Flex. Check out the announcement on the laflex site for more info:

Flash meet Flex: Los Angeles Flex Users Group Meeting: June 12th, 7-9

Hope to see you there.

Here’s a little widget we just finished up that shows our international audience:

This is the total number of people from each country that’s using the SearchCoders/Dashboard. It’s great to see so many people around the world using and working with Flex and Apollo. It’s also fun to chat with people all over the world. So download the app and drop in for a chat.

Nathan over at bsi has just announced the release of his Flex barcode component. It has support for various types of barcode formats, from code 39 to 128b-c and intervleave. Very nice. I can imagine this being used in a sales application to print out the barcode/label using Flex print support.

I am not a number! I am a free man!

A demo is here: http://flex2.bsi-scs.com/BarCodeDemo/index.php

You can download a compiled SWC from the same page.

I think we’ll continue to see useful Flex components, libraries, and applications delivered by companies and independent developers. These types of demos help developers and companies make the case for using Flex in real-world applications.

Nice work Nathan!

I’m happy to announce the release of my syntax highlighting library written in ActionScript 3. It’s released under a BSD license, so have at it.

I wrote this library for the SearchCoders/Dashboard. It’s used in the chatrooms so that geeks can send each other pieces of code and have that code show up nicely colored and styled, just the way we like it ;) You can easily add a language to parse some other type of content that is not currently supported. And it’s based on the language grammar definition that TextMate uses, so you can bring your own definitions from there instead of having to figure out how to write them on your own.

Here’s an example:

Here’s a screen cap:

The project home page is here:

http://labs.searchcoders.com/text/

Tom and I will be releasing additional components and libraries that we wrote for the Dashboard. We want to support the use and development of these projects so I will be setting up SVN and a bug tracking system. For the moment, download the library’s zip file and post any bugs, comments, questions, and suggestions to this blog. Or, drop by the SearchCoders/Dashboard chatroom and chat with us.

Enjoy!

Today tom and I released the next version of our apollo app and it’s awesome. you should check it out:

http://labs.searchcoders.com/dashboard/demo/

There’s a screencast and instructions for how to download it.

/r