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Xmarks The Spot

Mike Jones — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:10:54 +0000

Developers make the worst testers – mainly because we either ignore the issues (consciously or sub-consciously) or we “knit” with the code until it is perfect and therefore doesn’t need testing in the first place. That said, we are generally very good at solving problems in a logical and methodical manner. So with this in mind, I thought I’d document an issue I came up against earlier today in case anyone else finds themselves in the same predicament.

This all came about as I was updating my Flex Builder plugin in my established installation of Eclipse. I would get as far an defining the eclipse instance in the Flex Builder installer and then it would throw a dialog up on the screen informing me that I had to close my browser. The strange thing was that I didn’t have any browsers open. Thus began my trawl through the Activity monitor to determine what – if anything – on my system was “pretending” to be a browser.

After much prodding and poking I finally found the root of the issue – it was the Xmarks ‘plugin’ for Safari. That’s not to say it’s an issue with Xmarks, far from it, it’s just it obviously contains a browser for synchronizing your bookmarks with the server and in doing so sets off the alarm bells with the Flex Builder installer. On killing it via Activity Monitor I could happily continue installing.

So if you have the Xmarks plugin for Safari installed, make sure you stop it via its PrefPane entry before you attempt to install Flex Builder.

Flex Builder 3 Free for Creative Suite Owners

Mike Jones — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:29:17 +0000

According to this information it’s true, but not for all Creative Suite owners. It appears that if you bought Creative Suite 4 Master Collection or Web Premium after September 15th 2009 you can snaffle yourself a free license for Flex Builder 3.

Just follow the instructions (reproduced below, but you’ll need to go to the site to proceed) and Adobe will send you a serial for Flex Builder 3 – pretty cool huh?

Adobe® Flex™ Builder 3 Standard serial number request
As a Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Master Collection customer, you are eligible to use Adobe Flex Builder 3 at no additional cost. You will need to first download a trial version of Flex Builder 3 and then activate Standard edition using the serial number we email to you.

Proof of Eligibility
To receive a serial number to unlock the product, you must prove that you are a Creative Suite 4 license holder by uploading an electronic copy of your Creative Suite 4 Sales Order Receipt from Adobe or from an authorized Adobe reseller, in addition to providing a valid Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Master Collection serial number. A Flex Builder 3 Standard serial number will then be emailed to you.

Terms and conditions:
Flex Builder 3 serial numbers are only available to customers who have purchased a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection on or after September 15, 2009. By submitting this request, you are confirming that the serial number you enter has been obtained by acquiring a valid Creative Suite 4 license from Adobe or from an authorized Adobe reseller. Once installed, the use of Flex Builder 3 is restricted to the license holder of Adobe Creative Suite 4.

So just head over to https://freeriatools.adobe.com/cs/ and start the process rolling :D

Cairngorm 3 Beta

Mike Jones — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Initial documentation for Cairngorm 3 has been uploaded to Adobe’s open source site. There’s not a huge amount of info there at the mo’, but what is there is worth a read – especially once they get more detail up about the Presentation Model and how it functions with the Presentation Graphic Layer and the Presentation Behaviour Layer.

It’s obviously early days, but good to see that Cairngorm hasn’t fallen by the wayside, as it’s been quite quiet when it comes to updates over the past year or so. Hopefully with this version there will be more focus on helping those new to Cairngorm get up to speed but without sacrificing those who are already familiar to the older version 2.x framework (and vice versa).

Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 Now Available

Mike Jones — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:12:17 +0000

What seems like a lifetime since the first public beta of Flash Builder 4 has ended with the release of Beta 2 this morning. There are a heap of new things that have been added / moved / refactored since the last beta. One of the big things for me is the fact that there are far more Spark components included now. However we have generation of getter / setters, DCD and Unit testing. As well as enhancing the debugging / profiling

For a overview of wwhat’s in the latest beta check out Tim Buntell’s article on Adobe.com.

There is also an introduction to Flash Builder 4 video – you can view that here

Animated Colour Tweens in Flex 4

Mike Jones — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t sleep last night so I thought I’d play with the new effects in Flex 4. With the ultimate intention of actually sleeping at some point I decided to try the AnimateColor effect first – my thinking was I could soothe myself to sleep with subtle colour changes over time.

I was surprised how quickly and easily I could achieve a colour changer and after playing with it for a while, it did indeed have the desired affect. So first thing this morning I thought I’d post up the tiny amount of code required to animate colors in Flex 4.

The animation has a duration of five seconds from the beginning of the transition to the end, and it will automatically set the rectangles colour based on the colour you pick from the “From Color” colour picker (As you can see when coding I fall in to the US spelling of colour – even on labels :p, but when blogging I revert back to my normal UK spelling)

Developing Flex Components Book

Mike Jones — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:00:18 +0000

If you weren’t already aware I’ve been writing a book on Flex component development which will be published by Addison-Wesley, called Developing Flex Components: Using ActionScript 3.0 & MXML to Extend Flex and AIR Applications. Originally it was targeted at Flex 3; however, as Flex 4 in the soon to be “new kid on the block” I’ve decided to re-write it so it now focuses on the new “Spark” components that are present in the Flex 4 framework as opposed to the “Halo” components that Flex 3 uses.

That said, the original (Flex 3) chapters are now up in the Rough Cuts section on O’Reilly’s Safari digital book service. I’m not sure what will happen to these original Flex 3 chapters once I’ve finished the book – I don’t know whether I’ll be able to release them as PDFs or not – due to contracts and the like, but if I can I’ll add them to the site.

It can now be ordered from Amazon if you want to get in before the rush :p. As I mentioned if you have a Safari account you can buy or access (depending on your account type) the rough cut chapters as they are updated.

Pre-Order Developing Flex Components Book

Mike Jones — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:15:23 +0000

My new book Developing Flex Components is now available to pre-order on Amazon (and all good book retailers). Currently being updated to focus on the new Flex 4 Spark components as well as the older Halo components in Flex 3.

Flex Builder Is Renamed

Mike Jones — Sat, 16 May 2009 07:00:00 +0000

After many months of speculation and rumours of Flex Builder being renamed it has finally been confirmed by Lee Brimelow, Duane Nickull and Serge Jespers. Flex Builder will be re-branded to reflect the fact that it is capable of creating content for the Flash Platform regardless of whether that includes the use of the Flex framework or not.

For those who haven’t heard the various suggestion for Flex Builder’s probable name change I’m not going to list them all – a simple Google will fill that void. Suffice it to say the the commonest speculation was indeed the correct one.

Flex Builder will now be know as Flash Builder.

So what does this mean for Flex? Well nothing from the sounds of it. The name change is solely to Adobe’s development tool, not the framework. So the Flex SDK will remain the Flex SDK and if you refer to yourself as a Flex developer (like I do) I can’t see that needing to change. Overall I think the change is a good thing as the toolset now has some cohesion to it with those tools targeted at producing content for the Flash Platform as their primary process now all have Flash as part of their name – Flash CS4 Professional, Flash Catalyst and now Flash Builder; and I suspect more will join them in the future.

Flex Builder is dead. Long live Flash Builder!

Reconnecting Flex Builder Plug-in To Eclipse

Mike Jones — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:30:12 +0000

One thing that has always bugged me is that it isn’t particularly clear how you reconnect Flex Builder (the plugin) to a new fresh installation of eclipse, when eclipse “goes bad”.

Sure, you can uninstall Flex Builder and reinstall it after you’ve updated eclipse. To my mind that is just too time consuming; so with that in mind I set about having a hunt within my eclipse folder to try and work out what I need to add / change in a fresh eclipse install to re-link the Flex Builder plugin.

If you want to see how I got on read on…

Update

Thanks to Sean Corfield there is a quicker way to update a new installation. All you need to do is add the Flex Builder Plugin update site that is located in your Flex Builder plugin installation folder. For example mine is /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site.

I had seen this folder in the directory, but assumed it was used to update the plugin not the eclipse installation that was utilizing it. Doh! :p Thanks again Sean :)
Feel free to read on though if you want to know how to do it manually :p

The first thing you’ll have probably noticed is that when you install Flex Builder as a plugin of eclipse, is that a new .jar file (startup_fb.jar) is placed within the root of your eclipse folder. Personally I don’t really have much idea what this .jar does, but given the fact it’s called startup_fb it’s pretty likely it’s used to start the Flex Builder initialization first time or every time eclipse is run.

The next addition that Flex Builder makes to your eclipse install is that it places a file that links to the Flex Builder plugin installation folder in a folder called links. The file itself is called com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.osx.link on OS X and com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link on Windows, but it is just a plain text file – as it happens mine points to /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in (as I’m on a Mac).

Now here is where the digging comes in. If you just copy these two files in to your fresh eclipse install nothing will happen. Not a sausage, nada. So first call of action was to look through the various folders in the eclipse installation to see if there are any com.adobe.xxx packages within them. Surprisingly there aren’t.

So after a bit of logical thinking I started to hunt through the main configuration file for eclipse. It was here that I finally got a break-thru. It appears that there is a folder called org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator that contains a file called bundle.info and it is in here that I finally found what I was looking for. As you can see from the image below, this file holds the bundle references to amongst other things all of the Flex Builder files.

With this final pieces of the jigsaw in place I was finally able to reconnect Flex Builder to a fresh installation of eclipse, and if you want to be able to do it as well here are the actual steps.

Install a fresh copy of eclipse, but don’t delete the old version yet. (I called mine eclipse-new, you can rename it at the end)

Copy start_fb.jar to the root of your new eclipse installation

Copy the Flex Builder link file com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.osx.link if you’re on OS X, or com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link if you’re on Windows, to the ‘links’ folder in the root of your new eclipse installation (If you are using Ganymede – 3.4 or greater you’ll need to create this folder)

Open up the bundles.info file located in you old eclipse installation/configuration/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator in a text editor

Copy all of the Flex Builder related entries – use the file reference as a guide as not all of the packages have Flex in the name

Now open up the same file, but in your new installation and paste those entries at the top and save it

Start up your new clean eclipse install and bask in your 1337 s1
If all went to plan you can now close eclipse, delete the old version and rename the new one – job done.

That’s pretty much it. If this seems a bit overly complex, don’t worry – I’m putting the final touches to a screencast that you can use to walk you through this process should you ever need to do it :)

No Flex SDK 3.3 Auto Update For Flex Builder 3

Mike Jones — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Unlike a lot of people, fiddling with stuff until it breaks is something that is part of my genetic make-up. Therefore when the announcement was made that version 3.3 of the Flex SDK was released I immediately downloaded it and updated my version of Flex Builder. Nothing too taxing, but I wanted to make sure I was up to date.

However, for those that are not so “curious” about the inner workings of the tools they use or those who just want to “update and go” I’m surprised there still isn’t an update for Flex Builder 3 to install the version 3.3 Flex SDK. I appreciate that it’s mainly bug fixes and player updates, but it does include the AIR 1.5.1 updates as well.

So how about it Adobe, can the rest of the Flex Builder user base have a proper update for Flex SDK 3.3?