Resources for AS3

Awesome site to search for AS3 code:

http://flex-docs.com

Also here is a new printable reference doc from Adobe:

http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/03/17/actionscript-3-ria-reference-guide/

Photoshop express

This is awesome! Adobe has released an online version of Photoshop built in Flex:

Check it out>

You can post your photos directly to Facebook, Picassa and Photobucket, but not Flickr(yet). Although Picnik has more features, it is significant since it's a major developer of a standalone software product launching into the online app world -- and proving once again that Flash can do the job.

And at the same time they one-up Microsoft's Silverlight...

Speed optimization in Actionscript 3

I'm working right now on a project that displays 200 photos on screen and allows the user to select them to see more details. It's running pretty slow right now so the next step is to optimize it to improve the performance. The first step is to read Colin Moock's section on garbage collection in Essential Actionscript 3 and secondly I found this great site that also outlines some other performance improving tips:

http://osflash.org/as3_speed_optimizations

Another great article:

http://www.tricedesigns.com/tricedesigns_home/blog/2006/09/more-on-flex-framerate-and-performance.html

Good article on Flex memory management

This is a really good article on memory management in Flex: http://www.insideria.com/2008/03/flex-performance-memory-manage.html

Nice CSS dropdown menus

Given the choice between flash and css, I'd rather work with flash since you don't have to keep track of how browsers will display the same code differently -- but it is great to have the ability to do some things with css. So, in rebuilding www.hiddengifts.com I decided that I needed to get a good CSS dropdown menu working. I checked out a few -- including the Spry dropdown, but didn't like the way the secondary menu lined up with the first level and didn't want to dig into the code myself -- and would prefer to build it from scratch and see how the thing actually worked. Fortunately, htmldog.com has a great tutorial using suckerfish version 2 (son of suckerfish) dropdowns. Anyway, it took some playing around to get them to work but they look great in FireFox (but could use some layout tweaks in IE). Anyway, here is the current version:

http://hiddengifts.com/demo_dropdowns.html

Here is the tutorial on htmldog -- very nice step by step : http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

My current take on Flash and Silverlight

Like so many other Flash/Flex developers I have been keeping an eye on Microsoft Silverlight. My first experience with it was last year when them launched 1.0 with much fanfare -- and I was stunned how badly Microsoft screwed it up. They demoed apps that didn't work at all and crashed multiple browsers, showed some really lame video samples and even did a prototype of their homepage that worked so badly that a few weeks later they replaced the background with a .jpg and only put a tiny Silverlight widget on top to simulate the effect they originally tried to get. I was able to quickly break every single app they showed. It was a very sad beginning for a product some were saying would be Microsoft's "Flash killer".

Now that a year has passed and Silverlight 2.0 is about to be released, it seems to be maturing and I'm happy that it has added some excitement to the RIA space. But as far as "killing" Flash, it seems to be just too far behind the curve. No doubt it will allow Microsoft developers -- who could not grasp the admittedly difficult Flash development process and never tried Flex -- to build some cool apps primarily in the RIA world. But Silverlight will probably appeal more to developers who by and large are not the most visually-savvy people, whereas Flash appealed first to creative types who wanted to build stuff that looked cool.

Just spend a few minutes at www.thefwa.com. I can't imagine how Silverlight is ever going to break into the rich internet experience world(hmmm, RIE anyone?). This space is largely populated by incredibly creative people who have figured out how to push the boundaries of Flash -- and have been doing it for over 10 years. So while Silverlight developers will make inroads in some areas, Flash/Flex has a huge lead and will keep innovating forward as Silverlight tries to catch up.

Anyway, what got me thinking about all this was a blog post from Doug McCune about Silverlight apps entitled: Where are the dope Silverlight demos?> Check it out!

Coldfusion cfhttp Connection Failed error

OK, here is a very annoying problem that I have not found the answer for yet. Because of the JVM, Coldfusion caches DNS entries forever -- which means that if you move your server to another IP address -- even if you are setting up a new entry in your hosts file, you need to restart CF in order for the changes to be recognized by CF. I knew this already (after another annoying problem) but it still does not seem to explain the particular errorI'm dealing with. Here is the situation:

1. I am testing an app on a dev box that is set up to replicate the live server.
2. In the code CF needs to retrieve some xml that resides on the server and parse it.
3. Using cfhttp it tries to retreive the xml file, but keeps getting a Connection failed error -- but if I try to retrieve the data from the server directly, its there.
4. I checked the host file and sure enough the entry for the dev server is set properly -- I also restarted CF to handle the issue at the beginning of the post. Still no dice.

I'm out of options so at least in this particular case since I don't HAVE to get the file through http, I decided to just grab it directly using cffile and we're back in business.

The bad part is that in a day I'm going to have to test another part of the app that "requires" cfhttp, so the story is not over yet!