Maybe a user rotates the device and the view changes from landscape to portrait view and you have a popup that needs to be re-centered. So what to do . . .

Well, I’m glad you asked. Basically, you need to listen for the Stage to dispatch a StageOrientationEvent.ORIENTATION_CHANGE event. When the orientation does change, you’ll need to wait for the view to update (or whatever magic you’re doing), give Flex a second to redraw the view by waiting a frame then center the popup. (PopUpManager.centerPopUp)

Additionally you could set a flag and wait for the updateDisplaylist method to be called before centering your popup.

Ok if that wasn’t clear, maybe a little code would help:

protected function addedToStageHandler(event:Event):void
{

}

protected function showSettingsPopup():void
{

}

protected function stageOrientation_eventHandler(event:StageOrientationEvent):void
{

}

protected function centerPopup():void
{

}

So in this code we’re using a popup called ‘settingsPopup’. You’ll need to make your own popup and have a reference to it in order to center it.

Best of luck,
Matt

Whoops, for some reason the TextArea that I was using had text that was disappearing. It was really odd. I’d push a view and the textarea text would show for a second and then disappear.

Then oddly come back when clicking on stuff. What is this? Black magic? Is this the work of the devil?

Nope, this is the work of new Stage Text feature in Flex 4.6.

Stage Text is super helpful because it allows for the native application to display the text and do cool things like use the native OSs text auto-complete but it’s tricky.

Stage Text has many limitations. For example, It’s not going to work well in items that scroll.

Solution

If you don’t want to play around with Stage Text or you’re experiencing blinking / disappearing oddness don’t stress. You can just change the skinClass:

skinClass=”spark.skins.spark.TextAreaSkin”

Best of luck and hope this helps!

It took me a second to find out how to get rid of this Adobe Welcome screen popup up each time I started Flash Builder. Just so you know it’s under Preference -> Flash Builder -> ‘Show welcome screen on launch’

Here’s a screenshot:

Yeah, I’m mostly posting this so that I can personally find it the next time I forget.

Here is their wording:

We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook

link

This follows, what I would describe as, 2 years of the worst PR given to any software or platform that I can remember.

My question to Adobe is:
How would you think this little announcement would be received by the already bitter tech community?

Here’s a few headlines:
– Apple’s Steve Jobs vindicated as Adobe kills mobile Flash‎
– Adobe kills Flash on mobile devices
– Adobe kills Flash Player for mobile browsers
– Why Adobe Failed and Where Startups Can Swoop In

When Adobe makes strategic decisions like this, I’m guessing they do it for the following reasons:
1. Reassure their investors and
2. Increase share prices

It is my opinion that Adobe’s PR ninjas failed at both of these tasks today.

Flash Player 11

AIR 3

There are tons of new feature in each but I’d like to highlight one on each runtime.

Adobe Flash Player 11 has a new API called Stage 3D. Now Flash has had 3D for a while. Projects like Away 3D and Papervision 3D having been doing 3D within the Flash player for years. However these projects relied on computer’s CPU to do the 100% of the 3D rendering.

With Flash Player 11 projects like these can now take advantage the GPU’s 3D rendering capabilities. This allows for 3D performance on the flash platform with an order of magnitude greater performance and complexity.

OK, here’s a fun multitouch demo:

Adobe AIR 3 has added a fun new feature called ANE. ANE stands for Adobe Native Extensions and allows users to used the Adobe Air runtime in conjunction with natively executing code. This allows Adobe AIR to do fun things like integrate with phones that have NFC capabilities or view compass data (these aren’t available by default to Adobe AIR)

Here’s a round up of helpful links to follow up with up with:

List of features
Stage 3D devnet article
Developing native extensions for Adobe AIR
Extensions for AIR
Press Release About Flash 11 and AIR 3
You’ll also need the new AIR 3 SDK

I’m a Flex developer. I get paid to use the Flex SDK to build rich internet applications. I woke up feeling guilty about how much our community complains about the Flex framework.

Yes there are issues with Flex and we complain because we love it and want it to be perfect. And I don’t think we focus on that last part nearly as much as we should. Many of us love the Flex framework.

I’m posting a picture of my family below because the Flex team should know that their work has directly affected my ability to provide for them.

Flex work has paid for a lot of trips to the grocery store. Flex has paid for a lot of diapers. Adobe Flex has paid for a number of amazing vacations. Flex has enabled me to meet some of the most amazing developers and friends that I have in my life.

We’re finally looking for a home and we’ve been able to save up a sizable down payment, mostly, from working on Adobe Flex projects. When I say I owe the Adobe Flex team a big thanks you, I’m not being sarcastic or exaggerating.

My little family on our summer vacation:

Now I know that the Flex team gets paid, but I’ve noticed many of them going above and beyond their 9-5. I’ve seen team members hanging out online responding to FlexCoder mailing list in the middle of the night. I’ve seen team members showing up at user group meetings to ‘learn’ about some Flex 101 topic. Just generally being supportive of the Flex community.

I simply want to reminding the Flex team that their work makes a direct difference in many families like mine. Thanks and keep up the good work!

The title of my talk is named “Multitouch. Small, Medium and Large”.

In Seattle, I will be going over the basics of developing multitouch applications and as the title suggests, we are going to look at using that multitouch development skill set across a large variety of screen sizes. I plan to have multiple examples running on a variety of devices.

Lastly, we are going to look at a few valuable tools, frameworks and components that will speed up your multitouch application development.

The Seattle Flex user group is fantastic. I’ve spoken in Seattle before and this is a really fun group to hang out with. If you are in the area I highly recommend you become a regular SeaFlex user group attendee. Here is a link to their website: http://seaflex.groups.adobe.com/

If you are interested in multitouch development (from mobile to kiosk), please make sure to earmark some time to join us.

Thanks!

(wallpaper of presentation title image)
Multitouch. Small, Medium and Large (1080p or 1024×768)

Today my video has been posted. So take the hop, skip and a jump over to their site to check it out:
Multitouch – Small, Medium and Large on Zaa.tv

Personally I love to learn via video tutorials. And there’s tons of great presentations on this site. So grab some popcorn and be sure to explore all of the great content on Zaa.tv. You will not be disappointed.

Here’s a link to my slides from the presentation:
HTML slides
PDF slides

All of the code and more demonstration code can be found at GitHub:
Demo Code on GitHub

And a link to the wallpaper of presentation title image:
Multitouch. Small, Medium and Large (1080p or 1024×768)

If you have constructive feedback on the presentation feel free to drop me a comment below.

Thanks!

Adobe Flash Builder Update

We’ve been able to make pure actionscript project into iOS apps for quite sometime. We were able to do this in the CS5 Flash Professional application back in April of 2010. Recently, with the release of Flash Builder 4.5, Adobe has made it easy to do a pure ActionScript projects for iOS.

This update is a bit different. This update makes it easier for developers to create ‘Mobile Flex’ applications that target the iOS platform. You can lean on your Flex know-how and use new components and tool in the mobile Flex framework to build applications using tags like the ‘ViewNavigatorApplication’ or the ‘TabbedViewNavigatorApplication’.

One major oddity is that all of this targets AIR 2.6. But didn’t Adobe just release AIR 2.7 a few days ago?

The answer is, well yes, but I’m guessing that there is a fair amount of testing, QA, and review that requires the code to be locked down for weeks. That might be the reason that this release targets AIR 2.6. But that’s just a guess, I’d love to hear more details from someone who knows.

But the Adobe marketing department is making a big deal about AIR 2.7 being 4x faster, and I think I want that.

OK, that’s a fair request. here’s the link to the AIR 2.7 sdk

My suggestion is that you taget that sdk if you are going to be building Flex application for the iOS platform. Seems like people have been very pleased with the increased performance on iOS with this update.

The next major oddity is that Blackberry Playbook still requires AIR 2.5. And while I know Adobe doesn’t have access to what software Blackberry chooses for it’s devices, it still feels odd that the Adobe Flash Builder has them listed as one of the three major devices to target and yet requires a developer to target an older SDK. And the process isn’t dead simple.

In order to get your application deployed to the Playbook you need to do a bit of monkey patching. Here’s a quick link to an ‘unsupported’ work around:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jasonsj/2011/05/flex45_air25_playbook.html

Something doesn’t feel all that smooth here. Am I the only one that feels like Adobe is having difficulties getting the timing of all of their pieces together?

Just to review: the AIR 2.7 sdk comes out then Flash Builder gets an update that targets AIR 2.6 and you still have to monkey patch your project if you want to target the Blackberry Playbook because it targets AIR 2.5.

Does this feel a bit out of whack to anyone else?

The title of my talk is named “Multitouch. Small, Medium and Large”.

In East Lansing, I will be going over the basics of developing multitouch applications and as the title suggests, we are going to look at using that multitouch development skill set across a large variety of screen sizes.

Lastly, we are going to look at a few valuable tools, frameworks and components that will speed up your multitouch application development.

The Michigan Flex user group is fantastic. The group meets at Michigan State University and Nick Kwiatkowski has been doing a great job running this user group for as long as I can remember. (Flex 2 around 2006 maybe?) Here is a link to their website: http://www.theflexgroup.org/

If you are interested in multitouch development (from mobile to kiosk), please make sure to earmark some time to join us.

(wallpaper of presentation title image)

Multitouch. Small, Medium and Large (1080p or 1024×768)