OpenPlug Elips - Sounds great but...

Don't you hate when you get all excited about how easy something is and then try it out and it just doesn't work the way you expect it to?

Well, OpenPlug Elips Studio sounds pretty great (except for the price) so I decided to give it a quick try while I await Flex Hero. So I created a very simple app with some text on it and tested in FlashBuilder and saw the Android emulator (I think... it kind of looks like an emulator comes up and then the air app comes up and is positioned over top of the emulator) come up and show me my application. So far so good. Then I decided I wanted to try creating the APK file and install it on the emulator myself and eventually on my Evo (Froyo is coming tomorrow so I hear).

This is where things started to go wrong. First off, I had an Actionscript error where I had a creationComplete handler specified on the application but didn't have a matching method in my code. The error message shown in the console was pretty big considering the error. So it took me a few to find my problem.

Then I compiled again and got a different error regarding the keystore being in the wrong format. I thought the issue was that in the configuration I hadn't correctly specified the necessary parameters to generate a key. So I specified all the values that were required and tried again. No joy though. The new error... "Incorrect AVA format". I don't really know what that means. A search of the support forum, returns exactly 1 result that mentions "rebuilding the keystore". Not exactly sure what that means either so I am dead in the water at this point.

Hey Adobe... help me out here. A beta of Hero would really help right about now.

Handy IPhone app for... Flex/ActionScript developers?

Mike Chambers released a cool little reference guide for Actionscript for the IPhone. Now, to me, there seems to be something wrong with using an IPhone app to create RIAs that won't run on the IPhone. Plus, if I am in Flexbuilder working on a Flex app, the Actionscript reference is only a key (ok... two keys Shift + F2) away.

But, since I have a new found love for my IPhone, I will probably install this to check it out anyway.

For more info, visit Mike Chambers' blog or you can find it on the App Store.

Flex/Actionscript XML gotcha

I spent way too long troubleshooting this issue today. I was trying to initialize an XML object with some data from my actionscript object. Here is what I was doing:

private function someFunction(myObject:Identifiable) : void {
   var myXML:XML = <objectreference objectid="{myObject.id}">;
   myRoot.appendChild(myXML);
}

Then later on in my code I was doing an XPath query like so:

var list:XMLList = myRoot.objectReference.(@objectId=='foo');

Can you spot the problem? It took me way to long to notice the problem, which was obvious once I admitted to myself that I needed to actually use the debugger.

The problem was that I had double quotes around the expression {myObject.id}. The code should have been:

private function someFunction(myObject:Identifiable) : void {
   var myXML:XML = <objectreference objectId={myObject.id}/>;
   myRoot.appendChild(myXML);
}

Since having it incorrect with the quotes doesn't cause an error, I was really baffled on this.

Flex Developer Challenge - Are you up to it?

Unfortunately, I don't have anything to reward you with if you decide to take on this challenge except my respect and a free license of Klok (of course that is free anyway but still). So here is the challenge.

As you all know, smooth scrolling didn't make it into Flex 3. You can find some info and a head start at Alex's Flex Closet. If you are currently working on implementing this for datagrids (horizontal and vertical scrolling) and lists with variableRowHeight="true" that would be awesome. If you aren't already working on it but like a good challenge, I'm sure the rest of the Flex developers of the world would appreciate it.

If anyone has something more tangible to offer in reward feel free to comment here.