machine501

The March 2009 issue Adobe’s NewsFlash is out.  This is the monthly newsletter for Flash Platform Developers that used to be called RIA Buzz.  I like the new name, as it points out that we’re talking about the entire Flash platform, including AIR, Flex, PDF, server side, Ajax, and more.

Check out the issue and sign up to receive an email announcement when the next newsletter comes out.

Also, I’m always looking for new content for my segment of the newsletter, so if you have any interesting leads send them to me: robert.cadena@gmail.com.

This is a component that mimics the text finding functionality in Safari. When you do a search it dims out the text field and highlights the currently found fragment of text. Other fragments in the text are currently set apart by a black rectangle, but I plan to change that.  This is kind of like the Highlighter component on FlexLib http://code.google.com/p/flexlib/wiki/ComponentList

The currently selected text indicator can be a IDataRenderer component that you can specify in code.

I couldn’t wait to show it to people before cleaning the code … so here it is. Without code. But I’ll release the source to the public once I clean it up and fix a few bugs.

Things I still need to do:

• Allow custom renderer for non-selected item
• Fix scrolling issues
• Looks like I’m missing the ability to highlight items towards the very end of the text
• Simplify so it can be used as a component. Currently needs a few lines of AS code to get working

Some notable features:

• You are passed the text formats of the text fragment match so that you can render the text in the selected indicator exactly as it looks on the original text.
• You can pass a custom selected text renderer. Notice it has animations as you click for the next find

There is another version that works on an HTML control in AIR. There’s a problem with that, however, when the text match wraps; I can’t figure out a way to find the coordinates of the start of text that’s been wrapped to the next line.

Just a quick note on SQLite in AIR and slow writes: using transactions will speed up multiple inserts/updates.

haven’t had a chance to do any performance tuning or testing when using SQLite in AIR.  But just today I finished writing some tests for writing some stuff into a SQL db and noticed that the writes were slow.  I created a little benchmark test project that wrote 55 records total over two tables with a  total of 4 columns of NUMERIC type for each table … nothing fancy.   This is obviously not a thorough analysis and just something quick and dirty, but just writing those 55 records took almost 30 seconds on average.  That’s way too slow.  Specially since I am not using any of the async methods, such a slow write speed will lock up your Flex interface.

Once I wrapped the saves in one transaction the speed went down to an average .4 seconds because the data is committed in one big chunk when you call commit.

There may be other ways to increase the speed. I’ll have to investigate this later. .4 seconds will probably still be too noticeable a hiccup on the interface so I’ll be changing my data store to use async methods.

Just thought I’d put it out there.

Also, if you have an table with an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT and you keep getting an error that says “Unable to convert Text value to Numeric value” or something to that effect make sure you’ve upgraded to the engineering drop of FB3 from January 14th, 2008.  Apparently that’s a bug in the version before that, but I didn’t find it on the Adobe bug db.

Those of you who were typing away on your Apples and C-64’s back in ‘84 might have spent countless hours programming a tiny robot on roller-skates to do your bidding in a fun game called ChipWits.

Well, Dough Sharp, creator of ChipWits has given written the next version of ChipWits using Flex and AIR.

ChipWits is a fun and addictive puzzle game in which you program a little robot to execute a series of moves and complete the level. Along the way you’ll pick up new commands, which you’ll use in later levels to instruct the robot to perform more and more complex tasks.

Download it and give it a try!

Hey everyone, Tom and I are demoing our SearchCoders/Dashboard app at max. We are one of five winners of the Adobe AIR derby and so we have a booth in the community pavillion where we’re showing the app. There are other derby winners, like Ed Finkler, demoing their apps here too.  So, come by and say hi.   We’ll be here tomorrow and we’ll be in the chat all day.

Thanks to João Fernandes who just popped into our online chatroom and showed me this picture:

An ASUS handheld running a beta of Adobe’s AIR with the SearchCoder’s Dashboard 

http://apcmag.com/7220/intels_iphone_clone_umpc

That’s not quite a phone; it’s a handheld. But it means we’re getting closer to having AIR on a mobile device. That’s our SearchCoder/Dashboard (which you can download from here http://labs.searchcoders.com/dashboard/), an Adobe AIR application that makes lightning fast searches through the FlexCoders mailing list. It was written by me and my friend Tom Bray.

He and I both have been looking forward to seeing our flex apps on mobile phones, so that picture is just incredible, and it’s a total surprise too!

Not just eye-candy, but useful too.

Saffron is an AIR-based UML app that looks phenomenal.

Check it out.

You’ll also find a good-looking showcase of Flex/AIR apps over at scalenine. I’m amazed at the creativity and concern for the user shown in Flex and AIR apps.

Design is important, just look at the iPod [i don't have an iPhone .. yet .. so ... :)]. AIR+Flex make it easy and enjoyable to tackle both design and functionality.

Send me links to other flex/air apps.