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Flex 2 Essential Training (CD-ROM)
by David Gassner (Author)
• CD-ROM
• Publisher: lynda.com, Inc (July 19, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1596712619
• ISBN-13: 978-1596712614

ActionScript 3.0 Essential Training (CD-ROM)
by Joey Lott (Author)
• CD-ROM
• Publisher: lynda.com, Inc (July 19, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1596712627
• ISBN-13: 978-1596712621

ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)
by Joey Lott (Author), Darron Schall (Author), Keith Peters (Author)
• Paperback: 556 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596526954
• ISBN-13: 978-0596526955

Flex 2 Beyond the Basics (CD-ROM)
by David Gassner (Author)
• CD-ROM
• Publisher: lynda.com, Inc. (October 10, 2006)
• ISBN-10: 1596712848
• ISBN-13: 978-1596712843

Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source (Paperback)
by Jeff Tapper (Author), Matt Boles (Author), James Talbot (Author), Ben Elmore (Author), Mike Labriola (Author)
• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press; Pap/Cdr edition (October 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 032142316X
• ISBN-13: 978-0321423160

Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns (Paperback)
by Joey Lott (Author), Danny Patterson (Author)
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press; 1st edition (November 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321426568
• ISBN-13: 978-0321426567

The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 (Paperback)
by Charles E Brown (Author)
• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: friends of ED (February 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597338
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597330

Programming Flex 2.0: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rich Media Applications with Adobe Flex (Paperback)
by Chafic Kazoun (Author), Joey Lott (Author)
• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (March 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059652689X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596526894
Free Chapters on Adobe.com

Professional Flex 2 (Paperback)
by Rich Tretola (Author), Simon Barber (Author), Renaun Erickson (Author)
• Paperback: 700 pages
• Publisher: Wrox (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470102675
• ISBN-13: 978-0470102671

Foundation Actionscript 3.0 with Flash and Flex 2 (Paperback)
by Steve Webster (Author)
• Paperback: 450 pages
• Publisher: Apress (June 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590598156
• ISBN-13: 978-1590598153

Flex 2.0 Cookbook: The Adobe Developer Library Guide for Rich Internet Application Developers (Paperback)
by Joey Lott (Author), Chafic Kazoun (Author)
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596529856
• ISBN-13: 978-0596529857

Programming Flex 2
by Chafic Kazoun (Author), Joey Lott (Author)
• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (April, 2007)
Rough Cuts Release: October 2006
Print Book Release: April 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0-596-52850-7
• ISBN-13: 9780596528508

Essential ActionScript 3.0: Rough Cuts Version
By Colin Moock
• Paperback: 760 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (June, 2007)
Rough Cuts Release: October 2006
Print Book Release: June 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0-596-52993-7
• ISBN-13: 9780596529932

Flex 2.0 User Interface Design & Development: Creating User-Friendly Rich Internet Applications (Paperback)
by Matt Voerman (Author), Simon Reid (Author)
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596528450
• ISBN-13: 978-0596528454

Total Training for Adobe® Flex 2 Rich Internet Applications
Hosted by James Talbot
Format: DVD (ROM)
Platform: Windows & MAC OS

Total Training for Adobe® Flex 2 Advanced Visual Programming
Hosted by Leo M. Schuman
Format: DVD (ROM)
Platform: Windows & MAC OS

Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java: Secrets of the Masters
Yakov Fain, Dr. Victor Rasputnis, Anatole Tartakovsky
http://www.riabook.com/
ISBN 0-9777622-2-X
Shipping Date: Fall 2006

Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide
A Developer’s Reference for Apollo’s Alpha Release
By Mike Chambers, Rob Dixon, Jeff Swartz
First Edition March 2007
Pages: 121

ActionScript 3.0 Programming: Overview, Getting Started, and Examples of New Concepts
By Bill Sanders
January 2007
Pages: 74

Flexible Rails
by Peter Armstrong
Flexible Rails is an in-progress, PDF-only book about using Ruby on Rails 1.1 or 1.2 and Flex 2 to build rich Internet applications (RIAs).
currently 399 pages

Adobe Flex 2.0 Documentation Set

Old List: http://renaun.com/blog/2006/06/27/49/

Note: Yes, I am an author of one of these books. I’ll talk more about it in the coming months.

I was reading the “Interview with Mike Downey, Sr. Product Manager for Apollo” over on Ryan Stewart’s blog and came across something. When asked about hardware acceleration Mike said,

We’ve already made some good progress starting with Flash Player 8 where we added DirectX and OpenGL optimizations to boost graphics performance.

Does any one know more of the specifics of this statement? Are there tests to show the performance differences (now that we have Flash Player 9 for Linux)?

Ted Patrick recently posted about a Flex jobs yahoo list, located at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexjobs/. In the 24 hours of being up it has over 20 job postings. That is great for the Flex community.

Other resources for job postings can be found at:
The “Flex Jobs” google group page.
Tariq over at CFlex.net keeps a list.

As a Flex developer my self and a manager seeking Flex developers its exciting to see the growth in of Flex jobs in the last 6 months since release.

This is a very interesting announcement and addition to the Labs site. When Flash 8 came out they introduced a new Flash video codec called VP6 by the company on2. This codec has many benefits compared to the previous Spark codec. But the slight problem with live encoding is that the live encoder for VP6 codec FLV is not part of the Flash Player. Until on2 released their on2 Flix Live product last year there was no product that did “live” VP6 streaming.

With the release of Adobe’s Flash Media Encoder we have an another live encoder, DigitalRapids also has VP6 support through software for their video cards.

The Adobe Flash Media Encoder software it self seems to have promise. I downloaded the software and installed it. At first look it does not look like a typical Windows application but more like a Flash/Flex app wrapped in a exe (I have no real knowledge of what it really is written in).

The Audio options are limited to the NellyMoser codec and up to 32kbps 22Hz Mono. The options for video settings out does on2’s Flix Live software. Also noteworthy is that the FME can save live recordings to file as well as provide a nice log and real time stats of the stream’s bitrate and time.

I couldn’t get it to connect to a FMS but did not have time to test throughly, I was getting some errors on the FMS side that I am not sure if its the FME or the FMS application instance. I’ll try and post more when I have time to play with the application more.

Get FME and the FMS Authentication Plugin-In off the labs now - http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/fme.html

To promote the newly released Flex Cookbook I am posting here with the title of my lastest Flex Cookbook post. You can find the solution to below question by clicking on the text itself:

How do you create a instance of a component at runtime with only the class name? what about when the class name is dynamic it self?

Go and post samples, rate posts, or add comments and help make the Flex Cookbook a very good hub of information.

I have updated the Cairngorm Store multiple backend example. Along with the updated source code I have deploy a live running example. The 4 backends it supports now is ColdFusion Remoting AMF3, AMFPHP AMF0 using the RemoteObjectAMF0 class, AMFPHP 1.9 AMF3, and ColdFusion WebServices.

See it live here!

Get the source here!

To change the backend of the Cairngorm Store example just select the backend you want from ComboBox and then click on the Refresh Data button. I had to do write some exception code to convert the returned XML data into the ArrayCollection to conform all the backend but besides that it was really easy to integrate all of them into the Services.mxml.

PS: I just installed a new license on the ColdFusion server with a new Apache web server configuration so let me know if there are any issues.

I have created a very basic Flex 2 RolloverImage component that allows you to define the up, over, and down images through CSS.

Here is the guts of how to use the class:

PLAIN TEXT

XML:

1. <mx:Style>

2.   .firstRollover {

3.     upSkin: Embed(source=”/assets/arrowGreenUp.png”);

4.     overSkin: Embed(source=”/assets/arrowBlueUp.png”);

5.     downSkin: Embed(source=”/assets/arrowBlueDown.png”);

6.   }

7. </mx:Style>

8. <renaun:RolloverImage

9.     styleName=“firstRollover”

10.     click=“mx.controls.Alert.show( ‘click’ );” />

11. <renaun:RolloverImage

12.     upSkin=“@Embed(source=’/assets/arrowBlueUp.png’)”

13.     overSkin=“@Embed(source=’/assets/arrowBlueDown.png’)”

14.     downSkin=“@Embed(source=’/assets/arrowGreenUp.png’)”

15.     mouseDown=“mx.controls.Alert.show( ‘mouseDown’ );” />

For a live example click here
, the source is available by right clicking on the component or you can find it here.

UPDATE: see comments, the skin class works with any UIComponent and checks for many exceptions of different backgroundImage style values. Note backgroundImage values of embedded images only work, embedded SWF’s with symbol names throws an error.

I created a RepeatingImage component last month that works nicely for applying repeating images any where in your Flex application. But most repeating image usages are typical implemented as repeating background image for the whole Application. There is no easy way to apply the background image as a style and have it repeat.

You could use the RepeatingImage component to apply a image class on the Canvas of an Application component, but that might not work for non absolute layout apps. The basic code to repeat a bitmap over an graphic area requires BitmapFill. Stefan Richter modified Jemery Lu’s code to apply a bitmap image to the Application component through AS code in the Script block. This looks a lot like the RepeatingImage in its approach.

Then in Stefan’s comments Maikel Sibbald applied the BitmapFill approach to a borderSkin. This approach makes more sense when you are thinking of just applying a background image on the Application that repeats. The one done side to the code was that it you have to hard code the image source into the custom borderSkin class.

I decided to take that code and modify it so you set the borderSkin and backgroundImage styles on the Application component class to make it work. The trick is the modifications in the custom borderSkin called RepeatedBackground, they RepeatedBackground class locates the backgroundImage style from the parent (which is Application or any other component with borderSkin set to RepeatedBackground) and uses that as the class for the image. It then clears the backgroundImage style on the parent to make sure that that doesn’t get drawn.

See for your self, here is the live example and the source code through context help.

I downloaded the latest SDK of Flex to try out coding Flex in Ubuntu (6.06).

Here are the basic steps to try it out:
Download Flex 2 SDK for linux
Extract package to a directory (/home/renaun/Desktop/flexsdk/)
Create simple mxml file called helloworld.mxml
Run the following command:
>/home/renaun/Desktop/flexsdk/bin/mxmlc -o helloworld.swf helloworld.mxml

At this point I got a segmentation fault. Looking at the java version that comes with Ubuntu you see its a gij 1.4.2 JRE.

>java -version
java version “1.4.2″
gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.1.0 (Ubuntu 4.1.0-1ubuntu8)

To fix the segmentation fault I had to download a different JRE from Sun. I downloaded both the 1.5.0_10 and 1.4.2_13 self-extracting JREs. I extracted both in the Desktop folder. To change which java executable the mxmlc will run you need to modify the mxmlc shell script it self. On my install it was located at “/home/renaun/Desktop/flexsdk/bin/mxmlc”.

I edited the last line in the mxmlc shell script from:
java $VMARGS -jar “$FLEX_HOME/lib/mxmlc.jar” +flexlib=”$FLEX_HOME/frameworks” $*
to
/home/renaun/Desktop/jre1.5.0_10/bin/java $VMARGS -jar “$FLEX_HOME/lib/mxmlc.jar” +flexlib=”$FLEX_HOME/frameworks” $*

And that fixed the problem (both 1.5.0_10 and 1.4.2_13 work). Now onto some ant build scripts and eclipse integration….

There was a question on the FlashMedia mailing list about how to get id3 info from a NetStream with AS3 code. It is actually just like AS2 with some quirks to watch out for. The first is the supported ID3 tags:

About supported versions of ID3 tags

Flash Media Server supports playback of ID3 text tags in UTF-8, UTF-16, and ISO-8859-1 formats and supports ID3 versions 1.0, 2.3, and 2.4. Only tags that contain text data are supported, such as song title, artist name, comments, and year recorded.

I had a mp3 with ID3 v2.2 tags that did not work until I put in a v1.0 ID3 tag.

The next is the NetStream is not dynamic in AS3 and you use the client property to handle method calls from the server. There will be a onPlayerStatus and onId3 method call the server makes on the NetStream object.

Here is the running example and source code is available through the right click.