I had some difficulties with my blog host and lost everything I had. Not too mention I didn’t even know it was down for several days. Because of the service disruption I have switched over to BlogEngine.net on my own hosting account. Ill be restoring previous posts when I get some time to do so. 

My wife and I carved pumpkins with the kids tonight.

 

 

T-Mobile started taking pre orders today on the first mobile phone to run Google’s Android OS.  If you haven’t checked it out you should. The device hasn’t even shipped yet and the lineup of available applications looks awesome.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these primarily because it’s not powered by Microsoft. I have had my share of windows mobile devices and I am ready to move on.

As far as I know there is no flash support at this time but this may be time for me to dive into Java.

I LOVE Flex! It’s awesome! The debugger works great and there the support is awesome! Well that’s how I felt until yesterday! How come I cant launch an executable from a desktop application written in AIR?  Why!?!?!?!?

 

I can do it with a flash projector and have been able to do so for years!

Merapi? Merapi is cool but  what if you don’t know Java? Yes I can learn Java but why should I have to use a third party application for such a simple task and what happened to Rapid Development?

 

I’m sure I can figure out a way to do this in .net however I don’t have time for this right now so it seems my only option is to write a flash projector to do my bidding.

 

I’m done ranting now .

A few months ago I was playing with Doug McCune's Coverflow component and made a simple photo carosel to display some photos. I was going through some of my projects yesterday and when I came across the Photo Carosel I thought it would be cool to use it as My Desktop Wallpaper. I have never used a swf for wallpaper before so I googled the topic and found this cool free(for personal use) swf wallpaper tool called Flash Wallpaper from Tenmiles. Im sure I could figure out how to do it myself but this was quick and painless and took less than 5 minutes to set up and install my first Flex Wallpaper.

Below is a screenshot of it on my laptop, I also installed it on my Asus eee and it works great on both machines.

 It's nothing too fancy but I like it and so do my kids!

 

Now i'm wondering if there is a better way to do this with Air. If anyone has done this or can point me to some online resources that I may have missed I would greatly Appreciate it

I have been too busy coding to post a thorough review of the presentations that I watched but I will post it soon...

I'm at the airport waiting for the plane home from Flex|360 so this will be a quick post. I have been to other conferences before but this was my first time at a 360 Conference. Overall I'd say theres something for everyone no matter what level you are at in your career as a Flex Developer. This particular conference had a whole day of free online training sponsored by the folks at Lynda.com. Although I did not attend the training sessions from Lynda a few of my friends did and had nothing but great things to say about it.

Should you go to 360|Flex?......YES! Every day there were four classes going on at  the same time during the entire course of the day and they are all arranged by skill level. Not too mention everyone there is a Flex Developer so it's a great opportunity to meet wit h other developers and exchange ideas! I had a great time and learned a lot and will be posting the details in the next day or so once I catch up with my projects.

I almost forgot! Here are a couple of pictures of the ebay center which was just an awesome place to be!

 

A fellow developer that I know asked me for a list of Flex/AS3 books to get him started with Flex so I figured I'd post them here for others as well.


2 books that I like are
Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0
ActionScript 3 Design Patterns


There are also a lot of very good online resources and a lot of them are FREE! Here's a list of a few off the top of my head. I know there are many more than this so if anyone knows of any that are especially good please let me know by leaving a comment.

• The Flex Show has a great video series called 15 Minutes with Flex that is geared towards beginning Flex Developers.
• Adobe also has a series of videos that aim to teach you Flex in one week!
• Adobe's Flex 3 Developer's Guide 

Tip! - for those of you that are still parsing xml the old fashion way with all that firstChild.nextChild.yadaYadaYada you should check out e4x! The team at Adobe has really done a great job at making short work of parsing xml.
e4x makes it much easier to parse xml and thus reducing development time!

e4x is great and all but it's not the only way. My preferred method is to load the xml results into an array collection although both ways allow you to reference each xml node by it's name. Here's a sample...

var ws_resultHandler:WebServiceHandler = new WebServiceHandler(this, _WSDL, "handleResults", "ws_faultHandler");    ws_resultHandler.CallMethod("getStuff", null);      public function handleResults(event:ResultEvent):void   {        _resultArray = ArrayCollection(event.result);        var i:uint;        for (i=0; i < _resultArray.length; i++)        {             trace(_resultArray[i].itemName);             trace(_resultArray[i].itemDescription);             //etc,etc,etc        }   }