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

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

Pownce is a neat little app. It let’s you share note, files, etc. with friends. It’s an early adopter of AIR and a great example of web/desktop integration (webtop?). Pownce comes with a REST API, but the documentation left out a big chuck of the API, mostly related to user login and retrieving private data. After sniff its HTTP traffic, here is what I found,

Continue Reading »

AMF0, AMF3, SOAP, REST, and JSON are just a few of the many ways to transfer data in RIA. Ever wonder which one is best suited for your requirements? Check out James Ward’s cool RIA data loading benchmark tool.

Oddcast has a virtual character demo that’s so realistic, it’s border lining creepy. The character’s super realistic text-to-speech engine combined with different language settings is guaranteed to keep you amused for a while. And of course, the demo front end is built using Flash. Follow the link below to see it for yourself,

Oddcast TTS Demo

I have heard the same story over and over, people get into Flex for the eye-candy, but they stay in Flex because of the productivity gain from the framework and the IDE. Based on the rock solid Eclipse platform, is the ultimate IDE for developing Rich Internet Applications. If you are used to working with Flash or AJAX, you will be pleasantly surprised how much Flex Builder could improve your web development productivity. Below is a quick list,

• Two way sync between the code mark-up mode and WYSIWYG mode
• Code refactoring tools built right into the IDE
• Debug environment that lets you break and step through ActionScript, just like working on a desktop application
• Profiling web applications without leaving the IDE
• Web service introspector that builds SOAP wrapper classes with just two clicks
• Switch between multiple Flex SDKs seamlessly

Best of all, because Flex Builder sits on top of Eclipse, you could install third-party Eclipse plugins such as a Subversion client plugin or an UML diagram tool.

If you are a student or faculty member, you can get Flex Builder 3 for free!

The Mars Project has just made its first pre-release on Adobe Labs in the past week. For those who are unfamiliar with the project, it’s “an XML-friendly implementation of PDF syntax… incorporates industry standards such as SVG, PNG, JPG, JPG2000, OpenType, Xpath and XML into ZIP-based document container”. I took the liberty of making the following walk-through clip,

I just noticed there was new project on Adobe labs code named “Mars“. It’s a new document format based on SVG. Just like a PDF doc, you can have all the embedded images, objects, annotations etc. all crunched into one document. According to the labs page, there is going to be an Acrobat plug-in that renders the Mars format natively. This new format is very exciting because it’s based on open standards and it’s very easy to work with. Although it’s too early to tell, it does sound like a logical direction for the PDF standard.