Getting on the Flex Highway – How to get up to speed with Flex (done)

Thank you all for attending the seminar…

Sorry about the glitches with the audio. I guess the bandwidth got chocked.

The seminar was in 2 parts.

1. Introduction to Flex
2. Get up to speed with Flex

To view the recording and download the presentation go to this link (and see the 3rd Seminar). It links to the flexapacseminars project on google code. The audio seems to have a bit of lag…

Getting on the Flex Highway – How to get up to speed with Flex

I would like to invite you all to a this week’s Flex APAC Tech Wednesday eSeminar. We have it scheduled on 20th June 2007. At 4pm IST.
You can check for the local time at your city by clicking this link: World Clock…

Topic : Getting on the Flex Highway – How to get up to speed with Flex

The session is a non-technical one… intended for people who are getting started with Flex and covers the set of resources that they can tap into for the same… It intends to collate the diverse set of resources available on the net for this purpose…

Duration : I hope to finish in 60 mins

Connect URL : http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/flexapacseminar/

Chennai FUG on 8th June – Pics

Being my usual self… I forgot to take pics at the Chennai FUG (same thing happened to me at Bangalore). Thanks to Uday, who rounded up who ever was left and clicked some photos…

 

We at Hey Math

After the FUG meeting with Anantaraman,

Uday & Others…

Chennai FUG on 8th June

I couldn’t write this earlier because of project deadlines… we finally have Flex 3 Beta 1 out on Adobe Labs… Go try it out.

Anyway… On June 8th,  I was in Chennai, talking in the BEA Dev2Dev Conference there on integrating Flex with BEA’s Web Logic Portal Server. I addressed a crowd of about 100 people and had a wonderful time spreading the “Flex Cheer”.

Once this finished… I headed to HeyMath Inc, where we had the first Chennai FUG. It was a pleasure meeting Mr. Anantaraman and his colleagues at HeyMath as we prepared for the FUG. While that, he showed me the work HeyMath is doing and boy, was I bowled over or what? I would definitely recommend the parents of kids between 5th and 12th classes  to take a look at HeyMath and how it would help your kid… Kudos guys.

The Chennai FUG had about 20 guys (and ladies… a sizable number at that), and I was pleasently surprised by the construction of the core. While Bangalore saw people mostly from Java, C++ & .NET background walking in… Here what we had was Flash Designers, Ruby Users along with the Java crowd.

People were talking of AS2 -AS3 differences and we had a ball of a time discussing Flex. This really seems to be an FUG that’s gonna go really well

Flex APAC eSeminar files on Google Code

During the last seminar, people complained of having lots of problems accessing the URLs of the eSeminars recordings & files. I thought we could collate it a single place. So I have gone ahead and created a Flex APAC Seminars Google Code Project which will host all the resources used in the eSeminars.

You can access the following information there…

• Use the Wiki tab to find what each of the eSeminars contained. It has a wholesome info on what the seminar was on, when it was done, the host and the topic. It also provides links to the recordings and the zipped archives of the files & resources used in the seminar.
• Use the Download tab to directly download the files (you can also go to the wiki and download from the link there)

For convenience, I have split the wiki into pages, each having information on 10 eSeminars. You can use this to access all the resources connected to each of the seminars. Do send me if you have any suggestions on this.

Flex APAC eSeminar series 2 – AS3 for OO Programmers

We had the second edition of the Flex APAC eSeminar Series yesterday. Harish from the Flex team here took the session on “AS3 for OO Programmers”. I was there with him to help with the logistics and to take the questions when Harish was doing the presentation.

It went off very well, much more successful than the initial trial run. We had a total attendance of 67 people, though mostly from India. Moving forward, we want the rest of APAC to actively participate too. We are working towards that.

Harish covered basics of AS3 and some nuances like converting an MXML code to AS and the component lifecycle workflow and things. I think it he did a great job. What’s more, there was a lot of interaction with and within the community which was very encouraging. Follow the following links for more details

1. Link to the recording of the connect session
2. Link to the resources/ppts/files, used in the presentation

Looking forward to meeting more of you in the seminars to come

Elliptical Video Display

There are cases where one might require the video to be, say elliptical, instead of the usual rectangular appearance, as below…

This is how to do it. A very easy trick, using the basic drawing APIs of Flash. We just create a mask and then ask the VideoDisplay to wear it. Follow the steps below…

1. Create a Sprite instance (say myMask)
2. Use the graphics APIs to draw the required mask – I have used beginFill() and drawRoundRect() functions on the myMask.graphics Object
3. Set the x & y properties of the mask
4. Add it to the VideoDisplay instance
5. Set the mask property on the VideoDisplay instance to myMask

In my app, I have done the Sprite object generation and addition to the component, on creationComplete itself, as I am providing a way of dynamically changing the mask. Because of this, one will find a myMask.graphics.clear(), each time the applyMask() method runs… I have also added code to add drop-shadow to the Video, using the filters property, to increase the “Flex Appeal”

View the Application | Download Source

Chennai FUG Meeting – June 8th 2007 (fixed)

I will be in Chennai on 8th June 2007, talking at the BEA Dev2Dev Techday there. Hopefully we can schedule the Chennai FUG on that day. I’m still trying to get in touch with the people there and work out the details.

I’m really excited about meeting the Chennai Flex Community….

Addendum (4th June 2007):

I have fixed the itenary with Anantaraman, who is arranging the first Chennai FUG. Here are the details…

Date: 8th June
Time: 3 pm
Location: HeyMath Inc
Century Center, #75 T.T.K Road
Alwarpet, Chennai – 600 018

You can find the Google Calender entry here…. Looking forward to meeting all

JSON to ASON

I have blogged about JSON before but forgot to provide an example for getting JSON into AS. I saw a query on FlexIndia on JSON, so I thought I’ll post it now. The problem is to convert JSON to ActionScript Objects (or ASON). You can first try the demo application to see if this is what you are looking for…

• Application Demo
• Source Code (JSONTest.mxml)

In the app, you can either paste a URL (provided you have the security permissions) of a JSON to convert or paste your own JSON into the textarea and convert it.

This is what you need to do to get this working…

1. Go to AS3CoreLib on Google Code and download the corelib-.90.zip file and extract it
2. Get the corelib.swc from the /bin directory
3. Download the app source or write your own code
4. Do one of the following:
   If you are using FlexBuilder:
   1. Right click on your project go to Properties
   2. Navigate to Flex Build Path -> Libraries Tab -> Add SWC
   3. Now add the corelib.swc to your project
   4. Confirm that you have the line “import com.adobe.serialization.json.JSON;” in the code
   5. Run and Have Fun

   If you are using the command-line compiler:

   1. Place the swc in the directory of your mxml code
   2. Confirm that you have the line “import com.adobe.serialization.json.JSON;” in the code
   3. Type the following on the command line
   4. mxmlc -include-libraries=corelib.swc JSONTest.mxml
   5. Run and Have Fun

BFUG 01

Today, we had the first Bangalore Flex User Group (BFUG) meeting at Aztechsoft office near Diary Circle (in our own office building). We had, in all about 20 people (of which 9 were Adobe guys).

It started off with introductions and the usual “chit-chat” by Prayank. I pleasently surprised that most of them knew me thru my blog. It was a small group but a good start. We went around trying to get a sense of people’s expectations from the user group and the kind of interactions that we can have to make this UG a success.

Most people had just started off with Flex (as I expected to be the case). The major part of the meeting was to know opinions, pain points, concerns, reflections about Flex as a technology. Though the crowd was small we had the whole hog of people there… guys from Java background, .NET, Freshers, J2EE et al.

The rest of the time,we introduced the resources available online about Flex, places where they can get answers to their questions and concerns, how to find custom components, open source Flex initiatives. Things that came up in this regard were…

• FlexBox
• FlexLib
• MXNA
• flex.org
  
• FlexCoders Yahoo Group
• FlexIndia Google Group
• SearchCoders

Watch FlexIndia for news of when & where the next meeting will be. Mean while Harish will be doing the next APAC Wednesday eSeminar on the topic of “ActionScript 3″ on next Wednesday, 6th June 2007. Will keep you guys posted on that too. You can find details of the same again on FlexIndia and possibly here on my blog too… If you have suggestions on how the UG should take shape, drop me a line… I’m more than interested in hearing your views on this