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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

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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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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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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Curious about BlazeDS but don’t know where to start? BlazeDS comes with good documentations to guide you through installation. This tutorial series picks up where the BlazeDS documentations left off. We will cover the three BlazeDS key services end-to-end,

• BlazeDS Proxy Service – Having trouble with Flash cross domain policy? Use the BlazeDS Proxy Service to tunnel Flex RPC calls through your own server
• BlazeDS Remote Object Service – This is the bread n’ butter of BlazeDS. It enables you to make RPC calls to your custom Java objects. It’s also a necessity if your application is heavy on data
• BlazeDS Messaging Service – The Message Service has to be the coolest and most under-used feature. I’ve seen a lot of Flex solutions out there that could benefit from the Messaging Service. Check out if it’s the right solution for you.

Confused about the BlazeDS and LiveCycle DS licensing terms? Greg Wilson has an excellent article that compares the product offerings.

This article is applicable to LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle DS Express, and BlazeDS.

Remote Object Service, one of the keys services in LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS, enables Flex applications make remote procedure calls to the Java server via the AMF3 protocol.

AMF3 is architected similar to SOAP, but magnitudes faster because it’s a pure binary protocol. If your Flex application loads large amounts of data, and speed/bandwidth is a priority, you should consider leveraging the Remote Object Service.

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This article is applicable to LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle DS Express, and BlazeDS.

Message Service is one of the key features in LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS. It enables Flex clients to communicate in your enterprise infrastructure with zero-coding on the server side.

Based on the publisher-subscriber model, the Message Service acts as a message router for both Flex and JMS-enabled clients. This article shows you how to leverage the Message Service in your Flex applications.

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This article is applicable to LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle DS Express, and BlazeDS.

Flash Player Cross Domain Policy

Flash player has cross domain security restriction that prevents Flex applications from retrieving data from remote servers. At runtime, when a network request is made from your Flex application, may it be HTTP or SOAP, the Flash player examines the cross domain policy file on the remote server before the data could be retrieved.

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