flex

The first of many great ideas for Flash player apps on Android:

http://newteevee.com/2010/03/10/the-ultimate-music-video-jukebox-via-fla...

... and I can't wait!

With the advent of Flash Player 10 at the end of 2008, Adobe opened up a new generation of image processing techniques using the Pixel Bender system. In its simplest form, Pixel Bender allows the Flash or Flex developer to run mathematical algorithms used for image processing (and in fact other tasks) at a greatly increased rate. Flash Player does this by offloading those calculations to the computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) which is often faster than the main CPU.

This tutorial demonstrates the use of the Pixel Bender system in Flex Builder 3.

Adobe have signficantly changed the skinning system in Flash Builder 4 to give the developer greater abilities to create custom skins for existing and custom components without having to dive into Flash or any other graphics application.

This tutorial takes you through the basics of skinning a Flex 4 component.

Just wanted to let readers know about a newish magazine that I've been keeping an eye on. Flash & Flex Developer's Magazine is a bimonthly mag containing reviews, tips and interviews about all things Flash & Flex.
If you're looking for something dedicated to development, take a look: http://www.ffdmag.com.

In my continued work with Flex and Mate I've come to understand the model Injectors system pretty well. Initially I struggled trying to understand a few things.
Click "read more" for my simplistic explanation of IOC in Mate.

As promised, here's an example of the business/presentation abstraction in Mate.

It's fairly easy to setup data binding with setters/getters, but quite often you don't want to give the developer write-access to your properties. Flex Builder will throw a warning if you don't have both a setter and a getter and you're specifying the property to be bindable.
The solution is to manually fire an event when the property changes. This event then causes Flex to fire the binding event that causes a property update.
private var _myProperty:String = "";
 
[Bindable (event="myPropertyChange")]
public function get myProperty():String {
return _myProperty;
}
 
public function doSomething() {
_myProperty = "New string";
dispatchEvent(new Event("myPropertyChange"));
}
Generally, doSomething() will get called from somewhere else in your code, and your view (or whatever) will bind to the read-only getter.

Simply put, they don't work!!
If you've ever developed a Java application in Eclipse, you'll be well aware that if you set a project reference of Project B in Project A, the code in Project A will be able to "see" the code in Project B.
However, Flex Builder (which we all know is based on Eclipse) does not work this way. You have to manually add Project B's source directory to Project A via the Flex Build Path project settings. The most frustrating part of this is that Flex Builder stores the actual directory of the other project, so if you have multiple developers working off a single codebase, it's highly likely that each developer will have to change the source path to match their environment.
Shame, eh?

When I first wrote about Mate vs Cairngorm, the main concern I stated with both was that in any MVC architecture there's little consideration given to splitting out the data/business code from the presentation code.
Here is my solution.