It’s big news for those of use that make our living creating rich internet applications targeting the Flash Platform. I’ve already started my first Flex 2 client project and I know it will only snowball from here. Many thanks to the excellent people at Adobe that worked so hard on Flash Player 9 and Flex 2. Both are milestone products that will drastically change the way I do my job. And that’s a good thing. ;)

Once again Adobe has surprised me with their pricing model for Flex Builder. At a VERY affordable $499 US, Flex Builder should be a part of every Flash developers software library. Flex Charting is only $299 US and the two bundled together are only $749 US. This pricing is great news for those of us hoping for a rapid Flex 2 adoption.

Flex 2

For those of you that want to use AS3 but not Flex or Flex Builder…

more info

I finally got my MacBook hooked up to my 45″ Sharp Aquos LCD TV. It looks beautiful! but I still need to figure out how to play 16:9 movies through “Front Row” on the Mac. No matter what I do it always plays 4:3; and I know the source is 16:9. Any suggestions would be great.

Well, its been live for a couple months now, but I haven’t had a chance to blog about it yet. Working with a team of Flash developers from Schematic, we successfully launched the NBC video player. This player is used across all the NBC Universal networks. It is re-skinned at runtime based on the network you’re watching. The video player also uses a sophisticated data schema with cached Remoting calls. It was a lot of work and a very short deadline, but I the code is solid and the client is happy…what more can you ask. ;)

The following are a few of the networks that have implemented the video player into their sites: (Click on the “play video” links to launch the video player.)

NBC
USA
Bravo
Sci Fi

It’s even used on an NBC site called Brilliant But Cancelled.

Here is an example of using the ArrayElementType with templates in Flex 2:

more…

In Mark Anders workshop at FlashBelt on Friday he introduced a new concept that I hadn’t used yet in ActionScript 3.0. Typed Arrays. In other languages you can specify that the elements of an array must be of a single type. In ActionScript you can’t do this. However, the Flex MXML compiler has a new metadata tag you can use to perform type checking on array elements. To use it you simply put the metadata tag right before your property definition:

[as][ArrayElementType("Number")]
public var numlist:Array;[/as]

Ezra Freedman, Paul Newman, Jeremy Thorp and myself were attacked by a hail storm following the FlashBelt conference. We just wanted a nice quite meal. ;) All of them were taking video with their phones as I tried to save my car. Jeremy just posted his video on youtube.com. (Warning: There is some explicit language.)

Yes, I’m a slacker and hadn’t posted my FITC presentation until just now. But to try and make up for it I’m posting my FlashBelt presentation the same day the conference got over. ;) They are up on my presentations page now.

FlashBelt was a great conference again this year. There were a ton of great presentations including two on Flex 2 by Mark Anders; and Dave Mendels gave an incredible keynote. (I have video, I’ll try and post it soon.) If you didn’t make it to FlashBelt this year you really missed out. Mark your calendars for June 2007!

My wife and I are expecting our first child in July, so I thought I should finally invest in a video camera to capture all those priceless moments. And of course I had to get an HD camera. Anything less would have been sad. ;)

After a little research I finally decided on the Sony HC3. This camera is compact and can shoot 1080i. I was thinking about getting the Sanyo HD1, but I heard too many negative things about the video quality and I wanted to shoot more than 20 minutes of video. ;)

I haven’t shot much with it yet, but so far it seems really nice. I just need to get Adobe Premiere Pro 2 for editing!

After 6 years of separation, I finally caved and bought a Macbook. I really needed one for testing purposes. I got my start in computers with Apple and stayed with them up until I graduated college and needed a job; ever since I’ve been a Windows guy. So far I really like the Macbook. I don’t think I’ll be switching to Mac as my primary development platform any time soon, but it’s cool to finally see how the other half lived.