Rich Internet Talk

Yesterday I wasted an hour or so debugging a Flex itemRenderer that I was using to display an image instead of a value in a DataGrid column. The renderer had to simply pick one of six images based on the column value, and so it contained a single <mx:Image> tag and a function that set the Image source dynamically. And then I called that function on the renderer's creationComplete event.

ColdFusion is case-insensitive, and Flex MXML and ActionScript are very case-sensitive. For consistency's sake, when ColdFusion variables are sent from ColdFusion to the Flash Player via Flash Remoting, names are converted to uppercase (that's the default behavior, and it can be changed if needed). So, a structure member named FirstName will be named FIRSTNAME when it arrives on the Flash Player (and referring to it as FirstName in MXML or ActionScript won't work).

First, I personally apologize for the downtime. We've been meaning to find MXNA a new home for quite a while now, and we finally decided to make the time to do it. Ironically, as we were working on moving the code over to the Adobe cluster, the old weblogs server went down in a big way. We're still not sure what happened, but for some reason, Java was core dumping a few minutes after starting JRun. Rather than spending too much time fixing the old server, we decided to look ahead, put up an "under construction" page, and focus on the new platform.

Some Random Dude does a lot of work in Flash and he’s asking people what their biggest gripe about Flash is. I think it’s really good to see Flash developers ask questions like this. Flash is far from a perfect technology but there are some things that every Flash and Flex developer can do to make the Flash experience better and more web-like.

Panscendo (who has a blog after my own heart) posted a quick and dirty walkthrough to get you up and running with Flex Builder Linux alpha 3 on the latest release of Ubuntu. If you’re hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu and you’re giving the latest version a shot, these are all the steps you need to get your Flex Development up and running.

Rob Adams has been doing a bunch of user testing for Thermo and he has a post up that talks about the process. He describes it as “Thermo: The Board Game” and in reading it, that’s basically what it is because we’re using paper prototyping at the moment to see what works best for people. If you’re interested in the process or just user testing in general, it’s worth a read.

Today Adobe is announcing the Open Screen Project, something that continues our steady march to being more open and at the same time should help foster the community around the Flash Player by freeing up how and where people use it.

In this walkthrough I’m going to take you through using ColdFusion (which contains LiveCycle Data Services) to create real time communication between an application in the browser and one on the desktop built with Adobe AIR. Both applications are written in Flex. You’ll see how we can create a better user experience on the desktop by using things like drag-and-drop and still tie that into a real time scenario inside of the browser.

Thanks to CrunchGear I just caught wind of the Beatport Downloader.

TechCrunch has a post about the just-launched beta of TOPO! Explorer, a site which provides a Google Maps interface on top of real topo data and it lets you upload your GPS data as well as geotag videos and photos of the trail.