Programming Jokes :))

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”

The man below says: “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field.”

“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.

“I do” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but It’s of no use to anyone.”

The man below replies, “You must work in management.”

“I do” replies the balloonist, “But how’d you know?”

“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

You know more?… let me know

Flex: Unable To Open locale en_US or fr_FR

Source: TiMeister.com

If you want to create a localized application you may find yourself in a strange situation when you did all the steps like in the book, but you continue to receive the “Unable to open locale xx_XX” error messages.

To simulate a fix on this issue we will take the example of adding French to your app.

Basic steps:
- The first step is to create a fr_FR folder under the /locale/ one exactly like in the Flex documentation and then add the translated bundle.properties file.
- The second step is to add the compiler options: -locale en_US,fr_FR

Extra steps you need to make in order to get rid of the ugly “unable to open locale” error message:

1. goto the following path :

<flex-install-folder>/sdks/<current-sdk-folder>/bin/

for windows it’s: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.2.0\bin\

2. Execute the following command:

> copylocale.exe en_US fr_FR

That’s all, hope we helped you!

Flex Array Performance: For vs. ForEach

Source: TiMeister.com

We made a little test to see the flex performance on parsing an large array.

Here is the experiment:

var size:Number = 10000000;
var arr:Array = [];
for (var i:int=0; i
var time:Number, o:Object;

// for()
time = getTimer();
for (i=0; i=0; i--) { arr[i]; }
trace("for reversed test: "+(getTimer()-time)+"ms");

// for..in
time = getTimer();
for each(o in arr) { o; }
trace("for each test: "+(getTimer()-time)+"ms");

And here are the results:

for test: 124ms
for reversed test: 110ms
for each test: 261ms

We wish you to use this results wisely !

iPhone: Show online image

Source: TiMeister.com

By default the UIImageView control from the iPhone sdk does not allow us to load images from a specific url. In this case we do a little tryck and use a UIWebView.

- (void)loadImage:(NSString*)url frame:(CGRect)frame {
NSString* textHTML = @"

body {
background-color: transparent;
color: white;
}


";

NSString* html = [NSString stringWithFormat:textHTML, url, frame.size.width, frame.size.height];

if(webView == nil) {
webView = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
[self.view addSubview:webView];
}

[webView loadHTMLString:html baseURL:nil];
}

Top Blogs on Flex

SOURCE :

http://blog.timeister.com/2009/07/05/top-flex-blogs/

NEWS and Cool Stuff:

* Mihai Corlan’s personal blog
http://corlan.org – Mihai is a flash platform evangelist at Adobe Inc. and one of the most interesting peoples we meet

* Doug McCune
http://dougmccune.com/blog/ – Doug is a pretty big name in the Flex community (he gives presentations all over the country at Flex events), most of the items you are going to find on his site are examples of cool applications built using Flex.

* CFLEX: Community Flex
http://www.cflex.net/

* Dzone
http://www.dzone.com/links/index.html – Dzone is a great community based site for sharing developer links. The site is setup in a similar fashion as popular sites such as Digg or Reddit.

* Flex.org
http://flex.org/ – Flex.org is the main community site for Flex developers, which includes a showcase and resources for everything from PHP to .Net.

Resources & Examples:

* Adobe Flex Developer Center
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/ – The Adobe Developer Center is great resource for complete tutorials and articles on how to get started with Flex or any of the other Adobe products. The other Adobe resource is the Cookbook which is built off of community code snippets that solve small programming tasks.

* Flex Examples
Peter deHaan currently works for Adobe on the Flex SDK QA team. He writes so many small tutorials that it’s hard to even keep up with this man on any level.

* Alex Harui
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/ -Alex writes short posts that are usually nice Flex examples solving common and uncommon problems people run across in Flex. He works with the Adobe Flex core team in San Francisco.

* ScaleNine
http://www.scalenine.com/ – Skins and Themes for Flex and AIR

* Flex SDK
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK

* Flex Showcase
http://flex.org/showcase/

* Flex Developer Center
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/

* Franto.com
http://www.franto.com/ – Flex, AIR, Flash, ActionScript Tutorials, Tips, Tricks.

* The Flex Show
http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/

* Marco Casario
http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/

Live Young

Create applications with Adobe Catalyst

We wanted to share with you a great video tutorial about how to use Adobe Flash Catalyst and create Flex Applications starting just with an image.
The tutorial explains in details how you can create a Flex button and a scrollbar using Catalyst.

Top 10 Online Multimedia Tools

1. Flickr: This online photo journal is searchable and lets you share your pictures.
2. Picasa: Google’s photo sharing and management tool lets you organize and share web albums.
3. Vimeo: If you like to express yourself through the videos you make, join this community to post, share and organize.
4. SmugMug: SmugMug is an oft-praised site that lets you safely store personalized galleries of high-quality photos.
5. Project Playlist: Here you can create playlists as a way of expressing yourself.
6. Gcast: Gcast is a site that can help you create your own podcast, an innovative way to journal and share your point of view.
7. Photobucket: With Photobucket, you can sync your photo journal to your accounts on MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and more.
8. Revver: Revver is another video sharing site that lets you create your own profile.
9. Purevolume: Purevolume lets you set up a profile, explore music, comment on what you like, and share your playlist.
10. Get Your Groove On: This site is for songwriters who want to organize their music, work on lyrics and get feedback from friends.

Transylvania Flex Group Contest

On 12.06 the Transylvania Flex Group has started a Tutorial posting contest. The post with the most views will be the winner. I have already posted 2 tutorials and thinking to add more …so wish me luck on winning the contest.

Check out my tutorials:

[Tutorial] Adobe Flex Button with Photoshop
[Tutorial] Custom Button Skin – Adobe Flex

Hope you like them and find them useful!

Flex Builder 4 Refactored to Flash Builder

The next version of our IDE, Flex Builder, will be called Flash Builder 4.

There is already available a public beta for Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst (check Adobe Labs for downloads).

Mihai Corlan (Platform Evangelist for Adobe):
“At the same time, we will not change the name of Flex Builder 3. This will stay as it is now. Furthermore, the names of the Flex framework, and the Flex SDK, remain unchanged. The same goes for Flash Professional, which remains unchanged.”
….
“This has happened to me more than once. When I ask people at conferences “Who’s a Flex developer?” many people are unsure how to answer. Why? Because some of you are using the Flex framework, to create Flex or AIR applications, and not our IDE (Flex Builder), some of you are using Flex Builder, but without using the Flex framework (you use ActionScript 3 to create Flash applications). Thus the uncertainty.

Of course, the correct answer is this: anyone who uses the Flex framework, is a Flex developer. It doesn’t matter what tools you use to create these applications. At the same time, any Flex application gets compiled into a SWF file, which is played by the Flash Player. The same happens with the applications written using ActionScript and not the Flex framework.

So looking at it from this perspective, I think it makes a lot of sense. Have the developer tool that is used for creating Flash/AIR applications with or without the Flex framework called Flash Builder 4.“