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Screencast: Building iPad Apps With Flex - 360Flex

Thanks to all the attendees, I had fun giving this talk. Please find the video of the talk here

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And here are the slides

This is the description of the talk:

Join us for a session on building incredible iPad apps with Flex. Too good to be true? Actually the Flex SDK has a whole set of components and classes suited to easily build iPad apps. I would even say it’s the fastest and easiest way to build iPad apps out there. Don’t believe me? Then come and see how I unravel the hidden gems of the Flex SDK and build 10 application in less than 60 minutes. You will learn how easy it is to build powerful view navigation with little code. You will explore all the different components that the Flex SDK provides you. Additionally you will learn in this code intense talk how to build effective custom item renders. Wait, there is even more, we’ll throw in tips and tricks how to use Swiz to complement the SDKs built in mechanism to pass data among views, how to integrate google maps and Mapquest, and how to communicate effectively with a server using XML and JSON. You will acquire all the secret to build kick-ass applications that can be deployed on Apple App Store.

All my talks are on my Github account. You can find the source of the example in the iPadAppsWithFlex/src folder You can also down the PDF from Github

Enjoy! Daniel

Running Your Flex Mobile App on the iOS Emulator

I just downloaded the latest AIR 3.3 and it supports running your Flex mobile apps in the iOS Emulator. If you look at Air Developer Tool help (adt -help) you get the syntax of all the commands that adt support…part of which is the following description:

adt -package -target ( ipa-test | ipa-debug | ipa-app-store | ipa-ad-hoc | ipa-test-interpreter | ipa-debug-interpreter | ipa-test-interpreter-simulator | ipa-debug-interpreter-simulator ) ( CONNECT_OPTIONS? | LISTEN_OPTIONS? ) ( -sampler )? SIGNING_OPTIONS ( PLATFORM-SDK-OPTION? FILE-AND-PATH-OPTIONS | PLATFORM-SDK-OPTION? )

For my app this translates into:

adt -package -target ipa-test-interpreter-simulator -storetype pkcs12 -keystore /Users/daniel/Desktop/certificates/daniel.p12 -storepass secret app01_ViewNavigatorApp app01_ViewNavigatorApp-app.xml app01_ViewNavigatorApp.swf

This generate the app01_ViewNavigatorApp.ipa iOS app ready to be launched in the Emulator.

Then you can install the app on the emulator as follows:

adt -installApp -platform ios -platformsdk /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator4.3.sdk -device ios-simulator -package app01_ViewNavigatorApp.ipa

Finally to run it:

adt -launchApp -platform ios -platformsdk /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator4.3.sdk -device ios-simulator -appid app01_ViewNavigatorApp

Hope this will help you out. To find more on iOS development with Flex come see my Building iPad apps with Flex next week.

Enjoy!
Daniel Wanja
Tour De Mobile Flex Now for the iPad

I’m exited to announce a version of Tour De Mobile for the iPad. Tour De Mobile Flex is a great showcase of the different components that the Flex SDK provides. You can download an (old) version for Android on Flex.org. Unfortunately this version was build with the preview release of Flash Builder (Hero) and doesn’t compile with the Flex SDK 4.6. I started to update it but realized that James Ward had a more fleshed out version on Github which I used as starting point. That version, even though more recent that the one on Flex.org, wasn’t updated since more that 11 months and didn’t have any of the new Flex 4.6 mobile features. I guess that my coincides with James move to Salesforce.

I really wanted to see how Tour De Flex works on the iPad, so I rolled up my sleeves and adapted it for the Flex SDK 4.6, added a split view and tab navigator, and added a couple of examples of the new Flex 4.6 mobile components like the DateSpinner and the ToggleSwitch. I intend to add a few more examples, like charting, some mapping examples and hopefully some of the new 2D and Stage3D features.

For now there are still few details to be fixed, like re-enabling source code view and fixing few bugs. You can follow the progress of this effort on my Github account.

Check out the following video of Tour De Mobile Flex on the iPad:



Come see my Building iPad apps with Flex talk at 360Flex to find out many of the technics that are used in Tour De Mobile Flex…and much more ;-)

Enjoy!
Daniel

UndoManager for ActionScript

UndoManager is A simple ActionScript library to add undo/redo functionality to your Flex/ActionScript projects.

I just extracted the UndoManager library from one of the project I’m working on. Check it out on Github.

This library provides three main class, the ManagedCollections, the ManagedObject and the UndoManager. The ManagedCollections and ManagedObject keep track of any underlying changes to themselves, i.e. adding and removing items from the collection and the changing attributes on an Object. The UndoManage keeps track of which object was changed. So in your application you can extend ManagedCollections and ManagedObject for any data structure you want be able to do undo changes.

Blogging…me? Cloud, Mobile, and Much More

Actually I did setup this whole website using Octopress because I want to blog more. The reality is that I’m currently working on many pretty awesome projects, a Rails project, an iPad project, a Flex project, and some consulting projects that when the evening comes…I code some more instead of blogging. But I’m learning so much cool stuff that I want to share. So here a few of the things I want to talk about:

Adobe’s Announcement on Flash: Visually!

I’ve received so much feedback from many of my friends on Flex projects being cancelled or scheduled to be rewritten in another technology than Flex. Great Job Adobe, you did it!

So what was really announced last week is the following:

The Future of Flex.

At first I thought “Wow, Adobe really messed up their communication”. They could have focused on what they are adding, strong support for HTML5 and CSS4, Adobe AIR for Mobile, and not on what they are removing, the Flash Player in the Browser. But then they also announced that they opened sourced Flex via the Apache Foundation. And the main stream media, the blogosphere, and many developers I know went crazy and said Flex is dead, it’s over, time to convert all your projects to HTML5.

Writing Tests Is Not Fun. Anyone Who Tells You Otherwise Is a Liar….

At least so says my good friend Sean Voisen in his latest blog entry Thoughts on test-driven development.

What, you are calling me a liar? :-) I must respectfully disagree with Sean. Not on the fact that he may think it’s not fun, that’s his opinion like many other Flex developers that don’t do testing. I disagree because I see many developers, in other communities, that actually really enjoy testing. If you look at the Ruby community you will see many developpers enjoying doing test driven development, enjoying writing tests, and even expanding the way you can write tests. Check out rspec, Cucumber, and the many of books and screencast on the subject. Checkout all the ruby libraries, they are all pretty well tested. There are many training classes on people that really want to improve doing testing. Many Rails projects are extremly well tested. Many Ruby developers cannot even code without writing tests first.