FlexLive.net

I’ve been quiet in the past few month, that’s because I’ve been busy working on this new product. This new product now has a name, and it’s Citrify.

What is Citrify? Citrify is a little photo editor that strives to be simple and fun. It’s simple because we have one-click tools for removing pimples, reducing wrinkles, and fix red-eyes. It’s fun because we pack in a number of cool effects, such as the “Obama Poster” effect or the “Incredible Hulk” effect. For a list of cool things that Citrify does, check out this feature page.

For a limited time, we are giving away 50 premium licenses on this blog, valued at $39.99 each. Please follow these steps to claim your license,

• Visit http://www.citrify.com/promo/
• Submit the form with this promo code in the message body: flexlive1209
• The license key and installation instructions would be emailed to you shortly

I was looking around for a HSL filter for Pixel Bender – found a few HSV implementations but none for HSL, so I went ahead and implemented it based on an algorithm on wikipedia.

Unfortunately, the base-line image looked slightly brighter than it should be. I suspect it could be a rounding error. So before I post the source to pixel bender exchange, please take a look and let me know it could be refined.

Download HSL kernel with source code

In a Flex application, the pre-loader is the first thing your users see. It’s important to have a eye-catching preloader to establish your branding. This tutorial shows you how to create an animated preloader in a few easy steps. It is intended for Flex developers with little experience in Flash and Illustrator.

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Every once in awhile, I come across AIR apps that sound really neat, but I always hesitate to install them. This can be a problem, because I get paid to do AIR development.

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At the beginning of a new year, I couldn’t help looking back to the past year and see what I have accomplished. I became a full-time freelance developer in 2008. It gives me the freedom to do what I love, but it also comes with the responsibilities of managing customers and projects. So here is a summary of what I have learned in the past year,

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Are you an ActionScript ninja? Well then Yahoo’s Flash platform team has a spot for you. Many prominent members of the Flex community came from Yahoo’s Flash platform team. This would be an ideal job if you live on the westcoast or willing to relocated. Check it out,

http://flexgigs.com/job/27/flash-engineer-yahoo-flash-platform-at-yahoo/

If you work in the Flex business, you have to check this one out, http://flexgigs.com. Jeff Graham just launched the website during the weekend.

As far as I can tell, this job site is completely dedicated to Flex, which is a sign of the community growth.

I was really impressed by how easy it was to post jobs. There’s no need to create a user account, similar to how CraigsList works. Good job, Jeff!

Update: there’s also a widget feature that let’s you embed latest job postings into your blog. Check out the side bar on this blog. Good stuff!

There are many Flex frameworks, but very few are designed with Flex developers in mind.

PureMVC, for example, has a very rigid design that only a J2EE developer would feel comfortable with. Another well known Flex framework, Cairngorm, is heavily rooted in the hardcore AS3 development background. The bottom line is, none of the frameworks is doing enough to leverage the declarative nature of MXML.

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Average consumers are bombarded with so much advertisements every day, they’ve learned to tune it out. So how do you capture people’s attentions over the white noise? Simple! Step 1, build a small piece of software that’s useful. Step 2, customize it to your brand. It’s called “branded utility”, and it’s fast becoming the most cost effective way to advertise.

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BlazeDS Message Service is a simple publisher-subscriber model. The service configuration could be boiled down to two parts: channels and destinations. In networking terms, destination is the message hub and channel is the transport protocol.

BlazeDS does not support RTMP and the default channel type is client-polling. This has created a lot of confusion over whether BlazeDS support real-time messaging. The short answer is “yes, it does”. In fact, BlazeDS has a full spectrum of channel types ranging from simple polling, to near-real-time polling, to real-time streaming. This article will explore the different channels types in BlazeDS. It should also be applicable to LiveCycle DS.
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