All posts in Flash

Repeating backgrounds in Flex3

Here’s a great way of repeating backgrounds in your Flex containers using Degrafa:

http://bjw.co.nz/developer/flex/83-background-image-repeat-in-flex-3

(If you’re on a mac you’ll probably have issues extracting the Degrafa swc, if you do head here for a solution: http://mattguest.com/archive-utility-annoyance)

AIR SQLite Optimisation

I’ve been working with SQLite quite a bit on my current AIR project and came across this interesting article about how to get the best performance from your AIR app’s SQLite database:

http://www.zedia.net/2009/air-sqlite-optimization-tricks/

PureMVC/Fabrication Reactors

While working on an AIR application recently, (built using PureMVC Multicore & Fabrication), I had the need to swap different instances of a view component within the one mediator.

Swapping them over is easy enough:

myMediator.setViewComponent( instanceOneComponent );

The only problem is if you are using “Reactions” to handle your ui events you’ll notice they no longer work. Continue reading →

Debug AIR applications with Charles Proxy

Here’s a little trick to allow Charles Proxy to debug your Adobe AIR AMF-based applications whilst developing on your localhost.

Continue reading →

ZendAMF, beyond the bootstrap. Part2

In the last post we set up the groundwork for our application. Now let’s start building our Zend MVC application and hook it up to a MySQL database.

Database

Use the SQL code below to create the F1 Drivers table we’ll be accessing later on.

CREATE TABLE `f1_drivers` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`name` varchar(250) default NULL,
`team` varchar(250) default NULL,
`points` float default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=8 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
INSERT INTO `f1_drivers` (`id`,`name`,`team`,`points`)
VALUES
(1,'Jenson Button','Brawn-Mercedes',21),
(2,'Rubens Barrichello','Brawn-Mercedes',15),
(3,'Jarno Trulli','Toyota',8.5),
(4,'Timo Glock','Toyota',10),
(5,'Nick Heidfeld','BMW Sauber',4),
(6,'Mark Webber','RBR-Renault',9.5),
(7,'Sebastian Vettel','RBR-Renault',10);

Continue reading →

Flash & Flex Developers Magazine – Free issues

The guys over at “Flash & Flex Developers Magazine” have made their previous issues available for download:
www.ffdmag.com/prt/view/back-issues/issue/1015.html

Definitely worth checking out!

Editing Flash projects in FlexBuilder

I’ve been working on a flash project at work recently using FlexBuilder to edit the code instead of the Flash IDE. I had a problem though when I checked out the project out at home on a different machine. The code completion and auto-imports weren’t working and unrecognised AS3 imports, such as “flash.net.URLLoader” were being removed constantly while I was working! :x

Solution – Make sure you include the Flash AS3 classes in your project:

Et VoilĂ ! You’ve got CS3/4 code-completion and auto imports for your actionscript project.

ZendAMF, beyond the bootstrap. Part 1

After scouring the many tutorials & posts following the release of ZendAMF I felt a lot of the examples were somewhat lacking. I couldn’t find a reason to ditch AMFPHP and start using ZendAMF.

Being new to the Zend framework, the bootstrap setup was certainly a lot more complicated than getting a AMFPHP service up and running. I decided stick with it though and found some real gems to help out in the production of my remoting applications. Over the next two posts I’ll build a simple ‘F1 Driver Standings’ application using Zend, Flex & Flash. (Updated to work with Zend 1.9.6)

Continue reading →