name: Tanya Gray age: 22 employer: Me! location: Auckland, New Zealand when did you start flash/flex/AIR/AS dev? Dabbled a little in timeline animation with Flash from 2005, got into some timeline-based AS3 in 2008, then started Flex Development in 2009 with Flex 3.5 are you practicing TDD? why/why not? Unfortunately my previous employer was not [...]
Taking a look at everyone’s “2009 In Review” blog posts is really great inspiration. Looking back over the last year is always worth taking a minute to do. It’s great to reflect on personal growth over the course of a year and take note of our accomplishments. I decided to recall the last year for [...]
For a good part of 2009 I had the extreme pleasure of working with Intridea on an open source AIR application for their Present.ly microblogging service. Present.ly provides a secure and private way to share updates among members of a company, without them being visible to the outside world. The service has a Twitter-compatible API [...]
Last August I began researching and exploring the new features and capabilities in the next version of Flex, Flex 4 Gumbo. Adobe has been posting nightly builds of Flex 4 since last summer. Gareth Edwards was nice enough to help me to get set up and compiling the SDK at the time. Juan Sanchez was [...]
When developing Flex and/or AIR applications there are a handful of tools that really make the difference between a good project and a great project. They are all very valuable and provide stability and clarity for the RIA development process; or at least they have for me. From Unit Testing to SVN utilities to frameworks [...]
The San Diego Flash Users Group invited me to give a presentation on Flex Best Practices last night. Thanks to everyone who took the time to join the meeting. Thanks to Kyle and Chris for inviting me to present. Also thanks a lot to everyone who provided all the great feedback and questions. Dan made [...]
Following best practices during the development process can help organize and structure an application. Standardized development provides clarity, stability, longevity and scalability. I worked with several members of the Flex community and the Adobe Flex Team to create this article outlining over 90 best practices for the Flex development process. Thank you to everyone who [...]
The Flex and AS3 ecosystem is exploding. The demand for individuals who know these technologies is at an all time high. I currently get about 5 people per day that are seeking developers who know this stuff. Over the past year the demand has only increased. More and more kats are jumping into Flex/AS3 dev [...]
2007 was an AWESOME year for Flex and AIR. 2008 should continue this trend. Here are several different technologies and other items I plan on monitoring going into 2008. Some of these are bleeding edge, others are fundamentals which we’ve been studying for years. “I’m sure that Flex skills will be one of the hottest [...]
If you are interested in generating UML and/or AS3 code you might want to take a look at the following tools. The price tags range from $0 to $239. Cairngen – Free http://www.ericfeminella.com/blog/cairngen This tool provides AS3 code generation for Cairngorm based Flex projects. You’ll need to have Ant installed and know how to run [...]
