Three new components for Flash and seven for Flex. The AutoCompleteManager and ColorPlaneAndSliderPicker for Flex look particularly useful.

There are other color pickers out there, but a lot of the others sit inside a Panel or have some other extra visual elements and functionality you might not need. A good component should do one thing very well and let you add the rest (or at least let you turn things on and off).

I’m sure if you live in San Francisco you trip over famous Flexerati on your way to work, but Doug McCune speaking at the OC Flex user group on the 7th is the biggest Orange County Flex news since Lee Brimelow mentioned Costa Mesa in his blog a couple of weeks ago.

What he’s got planned sounds pretty cool:

I’ll be covering how to find, download, compile, and use open source as3 libraries, and I’ll be showing off some examples of things you can make without much work by taking advantage of the code that’s already out there. Basically I’ll be talking about how to be lazy and still make cool stuff.

If, like me, you keep missing the OC Flex meetings this is a great reason to get out of your rapidly depreciating house and talk about Flex Orange County stylee.

SproutBuilder is probably the coolest Flex app I’ve seen yet. Picnik is great but Sprout blows my little mind.

They’re still in beta so you’ll get some errors if you have the debugger version of the Flash player.

YAML, Blueprint, Tripoli, YahooUI - not the latest competition to Rails, Django, CakePHP, or Wicket but a set of CSS frameworks to jumpstart page layout.

I had been using YahooUI (and sometimes the DreamBeaver templates) but YAML’s Builder and Blueprint’s Generator look like good ways to get started.

Or you can always pay someone else to do it.

A plethora of choices.

Aaron has a series of posts on developing a system for stress testing AMF.

The setup: AMF Stress Testing - Flex, Ruby, JMeter.
The screen cast: Stress Testing AMF Gateway Screen Capture
The results: 37 Million (requests in), 9 hours.

That’s pretty amazing.

The next morning, we had the Live Search team from M$ asking us how the hell we did that. Pretty friggin cool. Also note that JMeter bursts requests, it’s not constantly sending requests. So we probably could have done 90 million in 9 hours no problem. Crazy.

Another successful AMF project. Go AMF!

I’ve been using a lot of XML Services recently, not necessarily by choice, as it was all consulting work and it wasn’t really my place to dive in and say “you should be using AMF!”. Even then if my clients asked me “why AMF?” the answer would of been because it’s easier for me when I should be telling them how AMF can be easier, better, faster for them too (and their servers). Hopefully tests like this will help spread the adoption of AMF, they definitely help the cause more than me whining about parsing XML ;)

And because I don’t think he sleeps Aaron also released a new version of Super Simple Remoting.

I’m surprised I haven’t tried this before but you can’t load an external style sheet into Flex. The Adobe documentation mentions loading external CSS files, but they always mean loading a style sheet before you compile your SWF which isn’t what I’d call a true external style sheet.

Thankfully Ruben has written a class that will do just that.

Flex’s implementation of style sheets is really wacky, every time I set paddingTop, paddingLeft, paddingBottom, paddingRight all to say 10px I go mildly insane because a) why can’t I just write it once ‘padding: 10px’? and b) why deviate from the CSS the rest of the world is used to, ‘padding-top’ etc.?

Moock says no (no harder than 2.0 or 1.0)

As a developer who’s been using Flash since it was known as FutureSplash, I simply can’t find any good reason to avoid ActionScript 3.0. I can still use it on the timeline for simple scripts, I still find the basics pretty easy to learn, and I don’t find it demonstrably more verbose than ActionScript 2.0 or ActionScript 1.0.

On the contrary, once I started learning ActionScript 3.0, I found programs faster to create and easier to maintain because of the cleanliness of the API and the coding assistance available in Flex Builder.

I’ll add that as an AS2 project grows and grows it gets harder and harder to handle mainly because of scope issues which are solved in AS3 (RIP Delegate.create). I also never want to throw my computer out the window when adding children in AS3 as I often did when attaching movieClips in AS2.

I’ve seen some disorganized FLA’s before but this project I just took over takes the cake. I present it to you now with it’s 1000+ frames and 100+ layers of flashacktackory glory,…

women will cry, children will scream, grown men will wet themselves,…

the worst FLA EVAH!!!

Click the image to experience it in full.

It’s actually quite beautiful in a perverse kind of way. I’m particularly fond of how the ActionScript is strewn about willy nilly as if the author hadn’t a care in the world.

You know the scene in American History X where Ed Norton puts the dude’s teeth on the curb then stomps on his head? That punishment would be too kind for whomever made this steaming pile’o'flash.

I’ll spare you the Library as your eyes would melt out of your head.

The blog gets a refresh. This is a preview of the new vixiom.com which has been under redesign for about a year now :P

The blog has almost become my main site, I get all my new leads through it (or word of mouth). In my not too distant youth I used to think you needed your website to be teh awesomest to generate work. Now my sphere of influence doesn’t even include any of the site of the day sites.

I’m moving closer (or back) to minimalism anyways, Peter Saville (he of Joy Division, New Order fame) has always been my favorite designer.

I like the way a lot of sites have been going, now that 980px wide is the new normal there’s a lot of minimal maximalism going on (simple and clean but with a lot of content) see the latimes.com redesign, Pownce, and Google’s wikipedia clone. Hopefully the pastel web 2.0 days are behind us.

Beige is the new lime green.

A site to dull the pain Rubular. Via Ruby Inside.