| Subcribe via RSS

I’m speaking at 360|Flex San Jose!

November 16th, 2009 | 2 Comments | Posted in 360|Flex

I was waiting for the official badges to post this, and now that they are here I can proudly announce that I will be speaking at 360|Flex San Jose this coming March!

I’m really excited to have the opportunity to present at this event. 360|Flex conferences are always the most valuable and enjoyable conferences I attend and to be invited to be a part of it this year is just awesome.

The title of the session I’ll be doing is “Intro to Flex Typography using the Text Layout Framework

We’ll be diving into the text APIs introduced with Flash Player 10 and the components that Flex 4 provides on top of them to show you what it really means to think outside the (text)box. Come see what you can do when you throw the web-safe fonts list out the window, peek under the hood, and start creating dynamically flowing text layouts, embedding inline images, and getting creative with ligatures, kerning and baseline settings. By the end of the session you’ll have a good idea of what all of those terms mean in practice and how you can begin using this powerful addition to the Flash Player in your own projects.

If you’ve never been to a 360|Flex (or any 360|Conferences event) then you should definitely check it out. These guys have really got the formula down. Unparalleled content produced by real working professionals, combined with great fun, food, and drink.. what more could you ask?

I’ll see you there!

Cool stuff from 360|Flex

May 21st, 2009 | 1 Comment | Posted in 360|Flex, Development, Flex

There were a lot of great sessions at 360|Flex this year. As usual, the tech sessions were very well presented and informative, but I found the new business track and the design centric sessions particularly helpful. It was great to gain some insight into how companies like Universal Mind and Phenomblue manage projects, their creative processes and just get a general glimpse into their inner workings.

I learned a lot and had a ton of great conversations with my fellow Flex coders, but there was also quite a bit of new stuff that was either announced at 360|Flex or came across my radar for the first time that I thought I’d list the ones that interested me the most. So, without further delay here is my list, in no particular order.

Axiis (http://www.axiis.org)

Axiis is an open source project for creating data visualizations. It’s built on top of Degrafa and is meant to make building simple charts extremely easy while providing tools to facilitate the creation of much more complex interactive visualizations. If you’re doing anything in the data visualization space, or currently using the Flex Charting stuff, then this is what you should be looking at. Check out the examples (http://www.axiis.org/examples.html) and don’t forget to right click and view the source.

FlexUnit 4 (http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexunit/FlexUnit)

FlexUnit is the pinnacle of unit testing for Flex. It’s been updated to include all of the functionality of its JUnit counterpart, but rather than a direct port it was built specifically with Flex in mind. I attended a session on this and a few things really struck me. First off, it’s very easy to implement, using metadata tags. It now handles asynchronous calls very easily, which has been kind of difficult in Flex unit testing in the past. They also added a lot of extra features, like Hamcrest support for asserts, which means you have asserts like “closeTo” where you can check if a value is within a certain variance. Another great addition is Theories and DataPoints, which allow you to run the same test with a series of different inputs.

Basically, if you were putting off trying unit testing or have tried and found that the tools were too immature in Flex then it’s time to give it another shot. FlexUnit 4 is mature and seems to have been really well thought out.

Check out the slides from Jeff Tapper’s presentation which goes over some of the new features: (http://blogs.digitalprimates.net/jefftapper/index.cfm/2009/5/20/FlexUnit-4-feature-overview)

Bifff (http://bifff.seanhess.net)

I think this was the most exciting new thing I discovered at 360|Flex this year.

Bifff, or Behavior Injection Framework For Flex, is completely, incredibly, awesome. It’s JQuery for Flex. If you’ve ever used JQuery’s selectors then you’ll immediately understand the power that this library brings to Flex. You can very easily apply modifications to visual classes in your app by finding them by id, style name, class type or class ancestors like interfaces or base classes. Want to make all Canvases with a stylename of “draggable” draggable? Just add a few lines of code and it’s done. The other great thing that Bifff adds is the ability to assign mutiple style names to an object. Fex can’t do this natively, but Biff will combine them so you can have something like <mx:button id=”mybutton” stylename=”mybuttonstyle largefont redtext”/> where the mybuttonstyle might be a basic style for all buttons, largefont is a style that sets the font size to 16 and redtext makes the text red. Additionally, you can then reference any one of those styles to inject additional bahavior into the button.

If my description doesn’t really make sense then just go to the GitHub site and look at the examples (http://wiki.github.com/seanhess/bifff). I think the power will become apparent after you view the source there and get a feel for what Bifff can do.

Glue (glue.seanhess.net)

Glue is a framework similar to Mate that was built by Sean Hess using Bifff. Because its built on Bifff the data injection that is core to Mate is taken to a new level and at the same time simplified. It makes for a simple to use, unobtrusive, and very lightweight framework.

StandingWave (http://code.google.com/p/standingwave/)

StandingWave is a sound sampling library for Flash and Flex. The demo presented in the closing keynote was pretty impressive. The library allows you to take wav and mp3 samples and algorithmic sound generators and sequence them across time hierarchically. It also allows you to apply effects like echo and fade. It was built for use in the Noteflight application (which is incredible in its own right) and looks to be incredibly useful to anyone looking to generate sound or sequence music in Flex.

I know there were more, but these are what came to mind first. Of everything I saw I have to say that Bifff was the most useful for the type of work I do, and also the most unexpected. The session on it was a write-in at the last minute and if Sean Hess hadn’t been given a few minutes in the closing keynote to explain what Bifff was I don’t think I would have attended his session and discovered this amazing tool.

Some other quick observations from sessions I attended and conversations with others in the Flex community..

  • Cairngorm and PureMVC are out, Mate is in.
  • FDT is an incredible editor for Actionscript and now Flex as well. I mean, really productive x10 incredible.
  • Flex 4 is going to be awesome. Spark is a game changer in terms of component creation and skinning.
  • Flex 4 will use Degrafa style code, but the flex compiler will convert it into actual flash player shapes during compilation, making for much improved performance.
  • The Flex community is incredibly open and friendly. Everyone wanted to talk about the work they do, problems they face and where they felt they were and weren’t overcoming them.
  • Tom and John put on a great conference!

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll post individually about the projects I listed here as I get to know them better, and will be looking forward to next year’s 360|Flex.

360|Flex Camp NJ

September 28th, 2008 | 1 Comment | Posted in 360|Flex, Flex

I just got back from 360|Flex Camp NJ, put on by the 360|Flex guys and the folks from the NJFlex user group. As expected it was a great time. I think they were hoping for a larger turn out, but between the economy being what it is and the fact that we can still taste 360|Flex San Jose with MAX right around the corner, I don’t think they did too bad.

I didn’t get to go to the training on Friday, but the sessions today were very good. I especially liked seeing Fluint in action, which I can see has come a long way. I think the thing I get most out of the sessions at these things is the quick overview of a technology or library that you know is out there, know vaguely what it does, but just don’t have the time or energy to chase down on your own. That 40 minute session is worth at least a day of futzing around at the keyboard just to give you an idea of whether something is worth pursuing. Back when I first started with flex I was coming from .net and unit testing was a big part of what we were doing. When I looked into the unit testing options available for Flex at the time in comparison to the .net tools I was not impressed. Fluint now looks like a viable toolset, which I probably wouldn’t have looked at anytime soon on my own.

The sessions are always great of course, but my personal favorite aspect of these events is the socialization. After the conference we had a fun time at The Office Beer Bar and Grill which, as you can probably infer from the name, had a really impressive beer selection. As developers tend to do when you get them alone in a room with a pitcher or two, we had a blast comparing projects, workloads, past experiences and the obligatory developer-to-developer lamenting over how clueless and/or ruthless our respective clients and companies can be. I kind of feel bad that I don’t have anything to complain about any longer - it’s not my fault that Nxtbook really knows how to treat their employees. Oh well, I still have a deep well of debilitating scars in my past to pull from when the group wants to ghost story about the feature creep monster or a dastardly dismal deployment.

Tom and John and the rest of the guys that pulled this together did a great job, and I hope we see more of these in the future. It was a perfectly sized snack right in the middle of 360|Flex and MAX - where I look forward to seeing this group again at the 360|MAX Unconference in November.

360|Flex - Let’s not call it goodbye.

August 21st, 2008 | 6 Comments | Posted in 360|Flex, Flex

Well, 360|Flex San Jose has come to a close. It was a lot of fun - lots of great people, some really decent sessions and, as I pointed out the in the last post, just a great overall vibe of community and optimism surrounding Flex.

As I sit in the gazebo of the hotel courtyard, surrounded by beautiful rose bushes and palm trees, a perfectly tempered breeze lightly titillating my scalp with featherlight fingers and the sky as blue as ever, I can’t help but reflect on the great data visualization tools that Tom Gonzalez presented on, or the excellent session on the intellectual hows and whys of data visualization provided by Tony Hillerson and Juan Sanchez. And as I sit here, with several martinis diligently, but ever so gently, working to maintain my relaxed state, I am reminded of the comfort provided by Troy Gardener speaking the gospel of Finite and Hierarchical State Machines… oh, and who could forget RJ Owen and Brad Umbaugh’s walk through of the component lifecycle. Yes, these things I have experienced will remain with me always, forever a testament to the power and purpose of the almighty Flex and our place in it’s world.

And so 360|Flex, let’s not call it goodbye.. only farewell for now - for we shall meet again. I don’t know where or when, but I’m sure you’ll keep in touch.

Ehem.. so yeah, it was ok I guess.. if you’re into that sort of thing.

360|Flex - Day 1

August 19th, 2008 | 3 Comments | Posted in 360|Flex, Flex, General

Terrific day at 360|Flex today. I attended some good sessions, had a few fun conversations about flex and development in general, and then had some really good beers. Seriously, the organizers have impressive taste in beer.

The keynote was pretty cool, though no earth shattering new news. Justin Everett-Church was showing off Flash player 10, and even though I’ve played with the beta I didn’t realize just how great the hardware accelerated graphics are going to be. I had originally heard that only the 3d and video would be accelerated, but apparently I was misinformed as according to Justin all display objects will be created on the graphics card, which is very good.

Shining through for me though was a reaffirmation of how incredible Flex 4 (Gumbo) is going to be. There’s a whole new paradigm for working with states, which have always been great in concept but, for me at least, incredibly frustrating to use in practice. The new mxml shape and drawing tools are looking really good, and the true separation of component and skin is incredible. We’ve all been talking about skinning as a way to separate functionality from design for some time now, but seeing what can be done in flex 4 is the first time I’ve felt like it’s truly been achieved, which brings me to Thermo. Being billed as a designer tool, Thermo is going to make everyone’s life easier, whether you hand it over to a designer or not.

So, while the keynote didn’t have too much new stuff for us, I got to see some demos I hadn’t before and definitely got re-jazzed about where Flex is headed.

The sessions I attended were pretty good:

Flex and Accessibility
I did not realize how much control you have over this. If you truly want to make your app accessible, then the tools are there.. even if they’re not fully documented.

Encrypting Flex
Some good techniques were covered here for encrypting and decrypting modules or external swfs on the fly.

Introduction to Swiz
I had been curious about this after listening to an interview with Chris Scott on the Flex Show. It looks great. If we weren’t already so invested in PureMVC on the project I’m working on I think I’d switch us over.

Advanced Actionscript APIs
This was a fun one, Jacob Wright is a good presenter and the material was interesting. He covered Metadata tags, The Proxy class and Namespaces, all of which I’ve used in the past, but I picked up a few new tricks in his session today.

One thing I’ve noticed here at the conference is a general feel of prosperity and optimism surrounding Flex. I suppose this is to be expected at a Flex conference, but I talked to a lot of people today and I think it’s really cool that many, when asked what they like best about flex development, replied somewhere in their answer that they couldn’t think of when they’d had this much fun as a developer.. I couldn’t agree more.

California, here I come!

August 17th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Posted in 360|Flex, Flex

I’m heading off tomorrow morning for 360|Flex in San Jose, CA. It’s going to be a blast. There’s a lot of really great stuff going on for the conference, I’ll be the heart of Silicon Valley- a.k.a nerd heaven, and then Wednesday night my wife will arrive and we’ll head up the north CA coastline to take in some scenic wonders for a few days.

I’ll be posting updates here about the goings on at 360|Flex and all of the cool stuff I see and hear. There’s a pretty good line up of sessions all three days and it sounds like there will be plenty to do after the official speakers have done their thing as well.

I should probably go pack a suitcase or something.. stay tuned for updates from the left coast!

  • Who am I, you ask?

    Matt Guest is a RIA developer, enthusiastic coder, independent game developer wannabe, sometimes artist, amateur home brewer and a pretty decent dad and husband to boot.



    email: matt@mattguest.com
    twitter:mguest
    wave:mattguest@googlewave.com

    Subscribe to the feed.

    Interested in iPhone development? Check out my site dedicated to iPhone game development at brokenPlatypus.com