Thrust Interactive - Blog

Mobile Development with Flash and Flex

Scott — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:44:59 +0000

I was tasked with researching mobile development using Flash and Flex the day before the 4.5.1 update for FB and the Flex SDK was released. Mobile development has been available since the 4.5 update (the release of CS 5.5), but that release had some limits with respect to the use of the Flex framework for mobile (Compatibility Matrix for Mobile). Exciting times to be had for Flash and Flex developers.

If developing with the Flex framework for mobile, there are some restrictions as to what components can/should be used (Restrictions on using Spark and MX components in a mobile application). You can see there are actually new components which were created specifically for mobile. Those components are on the first row of the component table. Also check out Optimize Skinning Basics.

If you are looking to build for iOS devices, then you may want to have a look at the first video on this page. At about 3 minutes in Serge talks about how to get the certificates from the iOS developer website. For more information on this check out Adobe’s site on iOS certificates. Also check out this blog entry on How to build your Flex app for iOS with AIR 2.6 which shows you step by step what you need to do.

When trying to connect and run my mobile app on some Android devices such as my Android phone and Galaxy Tab (Connect Google Android devices), I had the same problem described here. Unfortunately following Brent’s steps to fix the issue did not work for me. I had to download the device drivers for each specific device and install them on the computer which the device is connected to. Once I installed the device drivers I was able to run my app on all my Android devices.

Singleton Template

Scott — Tue, 24 May 2011 18:06:35 +0000

A simple design pattern I utilize often is the Singleton Design Pattern. There is a descent amount of code needed to generate a proper singleton class in ActionScript. I’ve created a nice template for FDT which will help to quickly create a Singleton class for AS 3.0.

singleton_template

Truncating Spark Labels

Scott — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:25:22 +0000

This was a little tricky to figure out. I needed to make a Spark Label truncate the text if it exceeded the given bounds of the Label. But on the documentation for the Label there is only a few mentions of the word truncate in the description of the class. It tells you:

See the inherited properties maxDisplayedLines and isTruncated.

That was part of the solution. The other part is the lineBreak style for Label. You can also see more about lineBreak here. You have to set this to LineBreak.TO_FIT. So after everything is done, I found that you need this in order to have truncated text in your Spark Label:

And if you have default settings, you should see the following text in the Label:

Here is a big bu…

FDT Templates for PureMVC, Spark, and ASDocs

Scott — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:33:46 +0000

FDT is an awesome development tool to code Flash and Flex projects. I love the ability to create custom templates. I’ve recently been updating some old templates which I created for PureMVC a while ago. Over time I have added new templates for classes which I now regularly use such as the AsyncCommand and AsynMacroCommand. I also added stuff for using the StateMachine within my Mediator template. One of the more recent changes is adding a lot of ASDoc style commenting to all the PureMVC related templates. Adding comments and plenty of links to the PureMVC documentation for all methods and properties utilized in the classes. This is good so that people new to using PureMVC will have an easier time by using the templates. Secondly it will make documenting the code using these templates easy to do by generating the ASDocs for the project. You can grab this template for PureMVC here:

puremvc_templates

I’ve also been creating some new templates for things new to Flex 4 such as creating skin classes and associated parts and bits that go along with that. Things like:

Skin Parts
Skin Classes
Skin States

I’ve also created some templates which help in better commenting code. It’s easy for developers to overlook commenting code. On top of that many times developers don’t know the proper way to comment the code so that it shows up properly in the ASDocs. I have added some templates specifically for creating comments for:

Event Constants
Event Metadata
Styles
Getters and Setters
Examples
Constructors

You can get the templates for Spark components and comments here:

spark_and_comment_templates

Hope they help you.

ASDoc Gotchas

Scott — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:37:15 +0000

I’ve recently been trying to create an Ant script to generate ASDoc style documentation for some shared common code libraries. I’ve run into a number of issues and it was hard to find any good documentation or blog posts to help me solve my problems. So I am going to cover some of the issues I had and provide some example code of the Ant script I ended up using to get my ASDoc generation to work.

Vector

One of the first issues I had was with the newer Vector class. I would see the following error when trying to generate the docs:

Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: Vector

The reason was by default the target player was set to 9. I am using the 3.5 version of the Flex SDK and 3.5 can export to Flash Player 9 or 10. The Vector class was introduced in version 10. So it is necessary to set the compiler option target-player to 10.0.0. I posted something about it here.

Cannot find swc classes

Some of my custom classes made use of classes from other frameworks. I ended up with errors saying it could not find those framework classes. I needed to let the asdoc.exe know where to find those source files. This was fixed by providing the external-library-path compiler option. I needed to point it to the libs folder where the swc files reside.

Cannot transcode

Some of the classes embedded assets using the Embed metadata tags. I got errors saying it couldn’t transcode those assets. This was because the asdoc.exe didn’t know where to look for the relative asset paths. I needed to add the source-path compiler option to point to the source directory.

I hope this will help anyone else that runs into the same issues I had. Check out this example build.xml file. (If viewing in Google Chrome, make sure to right click on the page and view source to see the xml)

Quote of the day

Scott — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:53:33 +0000

While looking through some blogs, I ran across one with what I feel is a good quote:

Experience comes after so many mistakes - not simply by making mistakes-but , by correcting them.

HariBabu Suraneni

These are definitely words to live by when trying to learn just about anything.

Molehill

Scott — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:31:45 +0000

All I can say is WOW!!!!

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/molehill/

RSLs on by default in Flex 4

Scott — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:20:05 +0000

I just wanted to post about this so I don’t forget. I noticed that every time I opened a swf created using the Flex4 SDK, I would get a bunch of errors:

Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: file:///C:/home/projects/blah/textLayout_1.1.0.604.swf
Failed to load RSL textLayout_1.1.0.604.swf
Failing over to RSL http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/swz/flex/4.1.0.16076/textLayout_1.1.0.604.swf
Warning: Ignoring ’secure’ attribute in policy file from http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/swz/crossdomain.xml. The ’secure’ attribute is only permitted in HTTPS and socket policy files. See http://www.adobe.com/go/strict_policy_files for details.
Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: file:///C:/home/projects/blah/osmf_flex.4.0.0.13495.swf
Failed to load RSL osmf_flex.4.0.0.13495.swf
Failing over to RSL http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/swz/flex/4.1.0.16076/osmf_flex.4.0.0.13495.swf
Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: file:///C:/home/projects/blah/framework_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failed to load RSL framework_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failing over to RSL http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/swz/flex/4.1.0.16076/framework_4.1.0.16076.swf
Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: file:///C:/home/projects/blah/spark_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failed to load RSL spark_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failing over to RSL http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/swz/flex/4.1.0.16076/spark_4.1.0.16076.swf
Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: file:///C:/home/projects/blah/sparkskins_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failed to load RSL sparkskins_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failing over to RSL http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/swz/flex/4.1.0.16076/sparkskins_4.1.0.16076.swf
Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: file:///C:/home/projects/blah/rpc_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failed to load RSL rpc_4.1.0.16076.swf
Failing over to RSL http://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/swz/flex/4.1.0.16076/rpc_4.1.0.16076.swf

After doing a quick search, I found this post on RSLs on by default in Flex 4. Basically framework RSL’s are by default loaded by the swf file that is created when using the Flex4 SDK. This greatly reduces the file size of the swf file. If you were to turn it off by setting the following compiler argument:

-static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true

Then the swf no longer tries to load those framework RSL’s and so you don’t see the errors. But the file size of the swf jumps up significantly. Just in a quick test I was working on, it jumped from about 86KB to about 593KB. That is very significant.

So if you are testing stuff out and don’t want to see those errors, then set the above argument to true. But if you are compiling a release version it’s probably best to have set to false to reduce file size.

SourceMate

Scott — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:37:13 +0000

I was checking out some of the features on the Flash Builder plug-in SourceMate. Many of the features already exist in FDT (no surprise). But SourceMate takes some of those features and does it a little better. And then there are some features in SourceMate which would be an awesome addition to FDT. I am curious if the release version of FDT 4 will have anything like some of the features in SourceMate.

I tried to see if it was compatible with FDT. But apparently you have to be using Flash Builder 4 The stuff which I think would be useful are:

Code Generation

* Improved Getter/Setter Generation
* Override/Implements Method Generation
* Generate Constructor From Fields
* Generate Constructor From Superclass
* Generate toString()
* Generate ASDoc Comments

Refactoring

* Extract Constant
* Extract Interface
* Extract Method
* Extract Variable
* Change Method Signature
* Convert Local Variable to Field

Metadata Features

* Metadata Content Assist
* Metadata Tag Validation
* Import/Export Tag Configuration

Code Templates (i.e. Code Snippets)

* Available via Content Assist and Templates View
* Works in Both MXML and AS Files
* Create Custom Templates
* Import, Export, and Share Templates

Miscellaneous

* Disable All trace() Statements
* ASDoc Generation Wizard
* Generate Ant build.xml from Project Settings
* TODO, FIXME, and XXX Task Markers
* Generate Event Handler in Actionscript

If the release version of FDT4 doesn’t get any of these new features, I may have to look into using Flash Builder with SourceMate to see which is the better IDE.

Making AIR

Scott — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:44:31 +0000

So I wanted to delve into the world of making an AIR application. From what I have heard, it’s almost as easy as making a Flex application. But getting things set up wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. I spent quite some time searching around the internets trying to find answers to many problems I had. Fortunately someone on the Powerflasher forum was kind enough to help me out through some of the rough parts. Check out my post if you are having trouble setting up FDT to create an AIR application. You will have to jump through some hoops. Note that I am using FDT 4 M2 at the time of this writing. I am also using the HelloWorld example from this blog post (at the bottom of the page).

My Run Configuration for the project are as follows:

Main tab

Project : HelloWorld

AIR release file name : publish/HelloWorld.air

Application Descriptor

Application descriptor file : debug/settings/HellowWorld-app.xml

Certificate

Choose Certificate

Path : debug/settings/exampleCert.pfx

Certificate Password : examplePW

Assets

Include Directory

assets/icons

Include Files as

File : C:\home\projects\testing\HelloWorld\debug/HelloWorld.swf