Flashbuilder 4.6 and Flex 4.6 not allowing 'MX + Spark'

This is short and simple.  I just spent a frustrating hour trying to import a project on Flex 4.6, and kept getting error after error about Spark skins and components not being there.  I tried setting the build and compiler settings to 'MX + Spark' or 'Spark Only', but every time I set it and clicked 'Ok', it never kept my changes.  The selection kept reverting back to 'MX Only', and compiling against only MX components, so I never could even use s:Application (because Spark wasn't being recognized).

Fix: Redownloaded Flex 4.6 (soon to try Flex 4.8 from Apache using IntelliJ), and that fixed it.  Really simple, just replace the sdk, and now the switching worked again, all errors disappeared.

Yay!

Previous SDKs

I have no idea how long you'll be able to download these for, but currently, you can still get Adobe Flex sdks by updating the url below:

4.5.1:

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flex/sdk/flex_sdk_4.5.1.zip

(this works also: http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/flex/sdk/builds/flex4.5/flex_sdk_4.5.1.21328.zip)

If you want to change it to 4.6, just do this:

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flex/sdk/flex_sdk_4.6.zip

If you want 3.x, just do the same exact thing:

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flex/sdk/flex_sdk_3.5.zip

or 

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flex/sdk/flex_sdk_3.6.zip

There probably is no way of knowing what is available, but until sourceforge gets fixed, this works...hope that helps someone looking for an older sdk.

Google AppScripts: Power, Beauty, and, well, actually, a lot of work still needed

I was lucky enough to be part of Google's AppScript hackathon in Chicago.  I enjoyed meeting several people in the hacking community, and learned a bit about what AppScript is all about.  Short story: JavaScript in the cloud, connecting calendar, email, spreadsheet, powerpoint, docs, forms, databases, and everything else together, relatively seamlessly.  Think of it as VBA for the cloud

Long story: We had several tutorials, got a basic idea of how to build class files with scripts in them, how to set some properties, trigger changes, send emails, and a few other odds and ends.  My initial attempt was to scrape Craigslist based on a search query, and post all results into a new spreadsheet page (sortable) based on the results and an xml template (I missed that api).  If I have time, I'll actually build it.

Honestly, debugging was horribly slow, writing the scripts wasn't easy, and the bouncing back and forth between pages to reload was relatively unfriendly.  If there was a way to test this on the command line, or even better, have a plugin to a real environment that could save the code locally and back up instantly (or when optimized), then I'd be a fan.

This can be a really powerful step forward for business analysts, interns, and other folks who don't know a lot about programming, and want to just connect apps together with simple functionalities.  Honestly, one of the cooler ideas I saw was someone using Flex mobile to write the app, storing the js code in StageWebView, and then running their form that way...I left before I had a chance to see it in action, but it sounded quite promising.

For anyone interested in trying this out, the website developers.google.com/apps-script has good documentation, but some of it is quite buried (or relies too heavily on GWT UI toolkit documentation).  That documentation could use some examples embedded with the code, but that's just my opinion of the docs.  Otherwise, there are plenty of scripts to help you get started with writing off a few quick innovative app ideas.  Hopefully you have time to work on something and show the world.  But for right now, it has some maturation to be more robust for full development.

Why everyone should avoid Adobe Connect

Aside from the fact that it sucks, support is by a bunch of people who, shall we say, aren't speaking clear American English, and do not actually understand the technical bits behind the system, including the SyncSwfEvent.  Anyways, after hours, days, and weeks, of screaming, yelling, and cursing, I can tell you that I will never recommend to any client to go forward with this product.  Its documentation is horrendous, and as I said, the support is even worse.  sorry for the rant, just angry at it...

Polyglotting it

This is more of a ramble than a post on learning to do something...

Holy cow this railscast guy moves fast.  However I do find his tutorials quite interesting.  I moved through about 7-8 of these last night (http://railscasts.com/) and found some good gems in there (pun intended).

I spent a lot of time last year learning Rails 2.x, and Ruby 1.9.x.  Not that I'm becoming a professional rails dev (yet), I'm getting into it, especially because I want to be able to create my own servers and connect to my data source while avoiding Java and php (Scala not included cause I still like it).

I've spent a good amount of time with Rails, and while it is still maturing, using TextMate is awesome for debugging, git is hella better than SVN, and I become less dependent upon other systems/companies if I can roll my own.

Expect to hear more from my blog on other things I discover about the languages (Scala, Python, Ruby) I've been going through over the last 2 years, and their associated frameworks (Play, Django, Rails), as well as my foray into noSQL databases (Mongo).  Lots to learn, and lots to understand, but when things work, then I'm happier and more excited to build.

Cheers!

Apache Flex Logo [sexy]!

Check out this awesome new logo:Now there is a lot to be done in Apache, and hopefully I'll be able to help contribute to the future of Flex. In the meantime, congrats to the team at Fuse Collective and Tomasz Maciąg who created this piece of beauty!

I know there is some very positive energy around Apache Flex, and a bit of an uphill battle for the future of Flex, but let's keep the momentum going!

Javascript error in Flex: Why my html won't load my swf...oy!

Boy, I hate Javascript...actually I don't hate it, but I hate the errors it can throw.  Anyways, in this issue I explain why a spurious error actually was correct.  I haven't done much Flex 3 in a while, but a current client project asked me to stay within these bounds.  I checked out the code from CVS (ugh) and got everything up.  But when I tried to run the project, I never launched the swf in the html.  Finally I found the error.

Using FireBug, I found that the DetectFlashVer() wasn't firing.  Huh?

I checked the files, made sure I hadn't changed any configuation, double checked with the team that I all the code.  Everything was there, as they had it.

Only upon further investigation did I realize that I was missing the AC_OET.js and /history from my template.  This seemed strange in the beginning, but the client insisted everything was running fine for them.  I had to assume it was my configuration, trying to run Flex 3.5 from Flashbuilder 4.6, I must've been doing something wrong.

My only guess is that because AC_OET.js didn't exist a long time ago (I actually don't know when it was introduced to the SDK), when I tried to build the package, because it wasn't in the html-template folder, it wasn't going to just show up, and because the html template was probably based on the newer SDK, it was looking for the javascript, and because it couldn't find that, never loaded...

Case solved.

Old html:
if(DV(6,0,65)&&!hV){document.title=document.title.slice(0,47)....

New html:

var hasProductInstall = DetectFlashVer(6, 0, 65);

This made a big difference.  Hope this helps you.