Factum Vicesimus Quartus » Flex

Aptana Studio plugin conflicts with Flex CSS

Wietse Veenstra — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:47:52 +0000

After installing Aptana Studio, the Eclipse plugin version, it changes the standard Flex CSS editor to it’s own version. This gives you a lot of errors because of the syntax differences. Luckily this can be changed back to normal (Flex) by going to Window > Preferences > General > Editors > File Associations. Here you can change the default editor for the CSS file type from the ‘Aptana CSS Editor’ to the ‘CSS Editor’. Then after restarting Flex Builder everything should work fine again.

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Flex Builder 3 thinks it’s Flex Builder 2?!

Wietse Veenstra — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:05:35 +0000

Last week I requested a free student license for Flex Builder 3 from Adobe, and this week I found it in my mailbox. After downloading the Flex Builder 3 trail version from the Adobe website and applying my license key to it, it said I now have the Education version. But the strange thing is that when I open the ‘About Adobe Flex Builder 3…’ window, it tells me I have Flex Builder 2 and then freezes the entire application (see screen shot below)! All of the menu buttons in the top bar are gone and the application stops responding to anything. I had to restart Flex Builder in order to continue my work.

After installing the trail version of Flex Builder 3 on my Windows XP machine this afternoon I checked the same window. At first I didn’t apply my license key to it so it was still in trail mode. No strange things, just the normal black ‘About Adobe Flex Builder 3′ window. But after applying the student license key the window was corrupted again! The only difference between the Windows and OS-X version was that on the Windows machine it didn’t completely crash my Flex Builder, and I was able to return to the development screen by clicking the corrupted window.

Apparently there is a little bug in the educational license system in Flex Builder 3.

Click screen shot for a larger version…

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Adobe’s big day: Flex 3 and AIR beta 2, and Buzzword aquired!

Wietse Veenstra — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 07:57:49 +0000

Adobe just released the newest beta versions of Flex 3 and AIR. These new releases are nearly feature complete. Matt Chotin wrote a nice article about the new features in this new release, but you can also find a full list of features on the FlexWiki of Adobe. Some of the newest features were already discussed by Ted Patrick last week and those features are looking really promissing. The other great news of today is that Adobe aquired Virtub, and with it their main product Buzzword. This application is a complete online word processing tool which was in private beta for a long time, but recently Virtub annouched more openings so that everyone can get an account today! Check it out because it’s awsome!

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Flex 3 beta & Adobe AIR available on Adobe Labs

Wietse Veenstra — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 04:51:32 +0000

Finally! After a great week of feature lists (by Ted Patrick) and quite some speculations on when the beta of Flex 3 would see its first daylight, here it is! It just got released together with the beta of Adobe AIR, which is the new name for Apollo and a new update for Flash Player 9. There is a big list on the Adobe Labs Wiki with a lot of Feature Introductions concerning Flex 3. It looks very promissing and great!

Download the new stuff from Adobe Labs or directly from:

Flex 3 Beta
Adobe AIR (Apollo)
Flash Player 9 update

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Flex book component (alpha)

Wietse Veenstra — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:59:35 +0000

Sitting first row (next to Ruben), I have watched my fellow trainee Ruben Swieringa working on his pageflip book in Flex for the last few months now. And I must say that it’s already the best pageflip book out there, as far as I know. It includes features as pageflipping, hardback option for every page, tearing-a-page-out functionality, automatic flipping, support for transparent pages and a lot more. Go check it out by clicking on the preview-image below. Read more overhere…

Very impressive Ruben! Keep up the great work!

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Adobe Flex 3 sneak preview

Wietse Veenstra — Wed, 30 May 2007 19:59:41 +0000

Today we got to see one of the first sneak previews of Flex 3 by Waldo Smeets and I must say that there are some very nice features and improvements coming up in this new release. All of the new features which were shown us today are still in the ‘thinking’ process so they might not even survive till the official release but most will I think! A public beta release will be published on Adobe Labs very soon according to Waldo and the official release will be somewhere at the end of this year I guess. I summed up some of the cool new features below.

One of the new features is that the Apollo SDK will be integrated in Flex 3 from the beginning on so you don’t have to download a patch to ensure the functionality in Flex anymore. Another great thing in the new version will be, and they listened very good to the users of Flex over at Adobe for this one, is the ability to zoom in the Design View. You can zoom up to 500% (at least in this early build). The datagrid has also improved a lot (this is the one component where Flex users get a lot of problems with), there will be an Advanced DataGrid with support for multiple sorting, merging cells, tree-like structures within the datagrid and some other cool new features. Furthermore, the new Flex will allow you to select the version you want to compile for, Flex 2.0.1 hotfix 2 or Flex 3 were in that list in the preview. Also new is the Profiler which lets you build another version of your project from which you can review a lot of statistics, including memory usage of each separate component in your project, etc. The last new feature I want to name is ‘Refactoring’. This allows users to select for example a function name, and then quickly rename this in your entire project. So every copy of the function name in the entire project will be renamed in one click. A very good feature in my opinion. I hope the beta will be released soon because I’m very eager to start working/testing with it!

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Reflection Manager 1.0

Wietse Veenstra — Tue, 29 May 2007 18:31:27 +0000

I have updated my Reflection Manager to version 1.0. I have implemented a blurring option like suggested in the comments on my previously posted version (0.9). I have also built in the functionality to update the reflection when its target component is dragged or resized. Furthermore I made some minor updates to improve the performance even a little more. I hope this will be of some good use to you. Let me know when you use it, what you think of it and/or if you have found a bug or have other suggestions on improving it. Thnx!

Open the Reflection Explorer (right-click for the source).
Open the source-view directly.

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ReflectionManager v0.9

Wietse Veenstra — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 09:59:00 +0000

<– I have updated the Reflection Manager. The new version can be found overhere –>

Last week I needed a reflection at the bottom of the application I was working on. After searching the internet for a while I found some reflection classes on my favorite Flex resource, Flexbox. But after testing 2 of these I saw that the smoothness and speed of my application was decreasing drastically. So I took some time to figure out the structure of the reflection and came up with some ideas on improvements that I could built in. I wrote a new Reflection Manager, which I think is a little more efficient in some ways. I separated the bitmapdata for the alpha gradient and the component copy so that I can update them separately and then combine them into 1 bitmapdata by using the copyPixels method. I did this so it only draws the alpha gradient bitmapdata once and only updates the component data when the Flex UpdateEvent occurs. When the component or the reflection is resized, it also updates the alpha gradient data. This saves quite some CPU power.

The height of the bitmapdata is equal to the height given by the user for the reflection and not the entire height of the component your reflecting. Less pixels are drawn this way which you don’t see after all. There are still some improvements to be made but it’s a good start I think. Check it out!

Open the Reflection Explorer.
View source.

Let me know what you think, suggestions on how to improve the Reflection Manager are welcome as always.

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Flex, Adobe now announces you Open Source

Wietse Veenstra — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 07:10:58 +0000

Today, in an official press-release, Adobe announced strategic plans to make Flex open source under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Check out the official press release and the info on Adobe Labs. David Wadhwani and Ely Greenfield explain Adobe’s decision a little more in this video. Great news!

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Tuning Flex Builder 2 and Eclipse performance

Wietse Veenstra — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:37:40 +0000

The last few weeks my Flex Builder is becoming slower and slower. Therefore I started looking for the reasons why this happens and searched for some performance tuning tips for Flex Builder 2 and Eclipse. I found some really useful tips which increased performance quite nice.

- Close the projects your not currently working on.
When you compile a project you are working on, Flex Builder checks all other projects that are open to see if compiling is required. By closing the projects you’re not currently working on, Flex will not check them which saves you quite some build time.

- Disable code folding.
By disabling this feature, you will gain some more speed.

- Install the latest Java Runtime Environment.
Update the JRE via the Java website.

- Install Memory Monitor and Status Memory Monitor from Kyrsoft.
By installing these Eclipse plugins, you gain complete control over the memory garbage of Eclipse. Install them via Help > Software Updates > Find and install – Search for new features to install and choose a new remote site. Enter http://www.kyrsoft.com/updates/ as the URL.

- Increase min/max amount of memory for Eclipse’s startup.
Eclipse standard has a startup memory heap minimum of 40M and a maximum of 256M. By increasing these settings Eclipse will startup faster. Change these settings only if you have sufficient memory. To change them, edit the flexbuilder.ini/eclipse.ini file. The settings you should change are -Xms40m and -Xmx256m.

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