http://blog.alastairdawson.com Flex, Ruby, etc. etc. Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:28:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en OpenPlug just released the latest beta version of their ELIPS Studio, which adds Android support. Currently ELIPS Studio is Windows only but in a month they will add OS X support, yay! The latest version of ELIPS Studio has just been released. It brings the ability for developers to create native ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2010/02/11/flexflash-builder-will-soon-be-the-easiest-way-to-develop-mobile-apps/ Lee Brimelow caught some major heat this week from the Apple f-boys and the open source zealots over his post on the iPad's lack of Flash. The biggest complaints against flash seem to be CPU usage spikes and/or annoying animation. Not to worry HTML5 has both those covered :P Try it ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2010/02/05/html5-vs-flash/ I came up with this solution when I had to compile over 100 fonts into SWF files for a recent project. Doing this by hand would have been madness so I wrote a ruby script and a shell script to automate the process. Step 1: Setup The directory ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2009/06/30/automate-font-compiling-for-flex-with-ruby/ I won't be dropping my beloved Flex anytime soon but it's nice to know if you must do JavaScript (and let's be honest Flex isn't always the best tool) you can at least use a familiar framework. Check out PureMVC for JavaScript. http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2008/11/25/puremvc-for-javascript-released/ It's my first post in months*, so it must be worth it right? Rails Inside has the details on Paperclip as an alternative file upload/association plugin, I've tried them all and paperclip covers all your file upload bases. *I've been busy with Fatherhood 101 and my new job as a Flex Dev ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2008/11/25/paperclip-for-easy-rails-file-uploads/ Skinning a flex button can often take multiple graphics and/or MXML files for each state. Here's how to skin a button using MXML and Degrafa to handle three button states with just one file (plus a bonus 'glow' filter as an alternate way to get a drop shadow). The secret is ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2008/08/05/skinning-a-flex-button-with-one-mxml-file-and-degrafa/ Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and CakePHP make it easy to set up model associations with belongs_to, has_many, and the ever popular has_and_belongs_to_many. However, getting those associations to show up in a Flex DataGridColumn's dataField isn't immediately obvious, you'd assume you could just do parent.child or child.parent but that just ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2008/06/29/display-rails-associations-in-a-flex-datagridcolumn/ After three years of consulting I'm heading back to a 'real' job as a Flash/Flex (mostly the latter) developer at OpenSoft (aka Farheap Solutions). It was a tough call but doing full time Flex work a mere 15 minute commute away was too good to pass up. The blog, which was ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2008/04/16/new-job-im-now-an-actionscript-developer-at-opensoft/ Aral Balkan on Building Flash applications with Google App Engine. PureMVC Python / Google App Engine Demo http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2008/04/15/some-app-engine-links/ Google releases App Engine. It's Python only for now, but there are rumors more languages (Ruby!) will soon be available. Here's a video intro. And Django runs out of the box (in the box?) - well some parts are missing like no relational db - still you can't beat the one ... http://blog.alastairdawson.com/2008/04/07/run-your-web-applications-on-googles-infrastructure/