Albertx blog

Hello people.
I just want to tell you about a conference and lab I will be giving in a few weeks.
The first one is a Lab I will be giving at an event called Workshop camp in Mexico City.
I will show how to create an application and make it available as a web application, desktop application and as a mobile application.Also I will talk about some Flash Platform features that are coming in AIR, Flash Collaboration Services and Flash Player.There will be many other labs about other technologies and platforms: iPhone development, Silverlight, Flex, Ruby, CSS and more.
Date: Sunday, October 25th, 2009.Time: 1st set => 10:00 – 13:00, 2nd set => 14:00 – 17:00 (I’ll be in this one)Place: Ked, Mexico CityMore info & website: http://barcamp.org/WorkshopCampMexico

The second event is named Campus Party Mexico and I’ll be giving a conference about development options in Flash Platform.
I will talk about the programming languages related to flash platform products. The available SDKs, programming IDEs, runtimes and much more.The conference I will give is part of a great event where many technology enthusiast will share experiences and knowledge for 5 days. Tim Berners will give the opening and the main conference. I strongly recommend to attend to this event.
Date: November 12th – 16th, 2009.Place: Expo Bancomer, Mexico City.More Info & Website: http://www.campus-party.com.mx/

Well, this is all for now. See you soon.

In Adobe MAX I could attend many many conferences and I’d like to share the info.
In this first post I will tell you about the new features that are coming with AIR 2.0

New webkit features: Now the engine has a module that supports CSS3 , custom styles can be applied to scrollbars, we can break up text across columns, and more.

As you may know there were discovered some critical vulnerabilities in Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Adobe Reader and Acrobat. These were important and forced Adobe to update the products as soon as possible.
If you want to know the details of these vulnerabilities, you can read the next article http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-10.html

A new version of Flash Player was released the last week. Actually there were two versions: Flash Player 10.0.32.18 and 9.0.246. Both of them can be downloaded directly from the Flash Player Downloads page. There, you can get debug and projector versions of the Flash Players. As you can see, Adobe also updated Flash Player 9 instead of just updating Flash Player 10, this was because if you can not have Flash Player 10 installed in you machine for any reason, you will also be protected if you install the new Flash Player 9.
Adobe also released a new version of Adobe AIR, the 1.5.2.8870 version. You can download this version directly from Adobe web site. Besides the fixed vulnerabilities in this new version, there were released more features like the isPerUser property in LocalConnection instances and, for Flash Player 10.0.32.18 and 9.0.246, the modification made to FileReference.save when running Internet Explorer in protected mode. You can see the details in this page http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/497/cpsid_49735.html.
Talking about AIR 1.5.2 if you want to use the new features and code hinting you should download the new SDK also released (1.5.2) and change it in Adobe Flex/Flash Builder and Adobe Flash installations. You can get the SDK here http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=airsdk. Also don’t forget to change the AIR version in the XML descriptor file of you new AIR application.
That’s all for now.Regards.

Yesterday, one of my students asked me about recovering the original data of an ArrayCollection if this ArrayCollection has a filter applied.In Adobe Flex, the ArrayCollection class has a property called filterFunction. We can assign a function reference directly to this property and then apply a refresh() to the ArrayCollection instance.This is an example.

// Defining the ArrayCollection instanceprivate var ac:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection([{label:"Adobe Flex", data:"Fx"},{label:"Adobe Flash", data:"Fl"},{label:"Adobe After Effects", data:"Ae"},{label:"Adobe Flash Player", data:"fp"}]);//Defining the filter functionprivate function flashFilter(obj:Object):Boolean{return obj.label.toLowerCase().indexOf("flash") != -1;}//Applying the filterac.filterFunction = flashFilter;ac.refresh();

Once the filter is applied, the ArrayCollection hides all the objects that don’t pass the validation in the function and shows the objects that do.
An ArrayCollection stores internally an instance of the Array class. You can see that in the previous example where I place an array inside the constructor of the ArrayCollection.
An ArrayCollection acts as a “wrapper” for the array instance enabling functionality that belongs to collections and lists. This functionality can be, filtering, sorting, add/remove/modify data and more.
After you filter an ArrayCollection instance the “wrapper” only shows the unhidden objects and it seems like it only has 2 elements (in my example), I mean if you test the “length” property after the filter you will see that it shows the value 2. But we know the truth, the ArrayCollection actually has 4 elements. If you want to get back this 4 elements without clearing the filter you have to deep into the ArrayCollection and find the source. This source, as I said previously, is an Array.
You will find the source using, in fact, the “source” property of the ArrayCollection. The array that will give you this property is the complete set of data that the ArrayCollection is storing without any filter. Just don’t forget that “source” is giving you an instance of an Array and not an instance of an ArrayCollection.

//continuing the previous example...//Applying the filterac.filterFunction = flashFilter;ac.refresh();//Test the length property of the ArrayCollectiontrace(ac.length); // 2//Test the source property of the ArrayCollectiontrace(ac.source) // [object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]//Test the length property of the source propertytrace(ac.source.length) // 4

Well, good news for everyone who was waiting for the new certification in Flex 3 or AIR.
Few days ago Adobe released the ACE certification exam for Flex 3 and AIR (just one exam for both of them) and you can get all the information in certified community at Adobe.com.
The price of the exam is US$ 150 as usual and right now is only available as Certification exam and just in Pearson VUE not re-certification exam.
I don’t really know if there will be re-certification for Flex 3 because it’s an enterprise Technology and because the AIR certification is included in the exam, not just Adobe Flex.
Good luck everybody.
Versión en español de este por la pueden encontrar en -> http://riactive.com/2008/11/01/flex-3-y-air-certification-nuevo-examen-de-certificacion/.