Good friend Johannes Nel has set up the a Flash Platform user group in Cape Town which will have it’s first meeting this evening.

There are 2 great sounding sessions, “Introduction to actionscript metadata tags” and “Using the Nintendo wii remote with Adobe Flash”.

You can find more info here.

On the subject of user groups, don’t forget that if your in and around the London area LFPUG is on tonight with a special FDT evening (and considering the probs I’m having with FB, I can’t wait until they add MXML support).

UPDATE: This has something to do with a source path I was adding to my FB. Something in the source path was buggering it up, so I’m now up and running and over the next few days will add the stuff back to the source path bit by bit to try and find the culprit. Thanks for everyones help!

Last week FB began to act up for me and day by day its got continually worse.

It started by removing imports that were in the flash package and not offering any code completion for these classes. Now and then when i would save a file it would remove the imports and leave the class full of errors. I tried running the updater but was told I had the newest version (3.0.2).

Since then things have got worse and worse. It now no longer doesn’t any code completion for Flex containers, when I add a source path to a project this isn’t shown in the navigator, it’s doesn’t have any code completion for custom classes, no code completion for methods and no of the shortcuts work anymore to go to a method or open a class. It also continues to remove required imports on classes in the flash package, and custom classes. Basically it is now useless!

I’ve tried un-installing and re-installing it but it didn’t changed anything.

If anyone has any ideas of how to resolve this I’d really appreciate it. Short of re-installing OS X, I’m not sure what else I can do.

I can now plug Tour de Flex, that has a couple of our components in it, and the Efflex library (should have a cube to add over the new few days).

Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more.

It’s an interesting app, and there’s also an Eclipse plugin. It would be a nice addition if you could also just access it via the browser. I’d rather just hit a bookmark that have the app downloaded on my HD.

Finally the CS4 trials are available.

I really could have done with these last week whilst I was waiting for my delivery of CS4, why Adobe would postpone the trials I really don’t understand. Id have thought they’d want people downloading it as soon as its released.

CS4 Trials

On the subject of Adobe’s service, I’ve had a Windows version of Flash that I’ve been trying to exchange for a Mac version for months now. I email em and they say I need to phone. I phone and they say they are really busy and I should email. I’ve hung around on that phone line 5+ times for over 30 mins, still no success. I still have a Windows version in it’s box, without Windows to run it on. Rubbish!

My experience with the store buying CS4 was pretty rubbish too. It felt slow and unresponsive, then after entering all my details, I was told they’d get back to me within 3 working days to state whether my purchase had been successful. I’ve never heard anything like that. Generally I pay for stuff on the web and thats, that. Not we’ll check into this and get back to you. Rant over

When adding the examples to the blog for Efflex I totally forgot why I usually only provide a link here instead of adding the movie to the post itself. Once this movie is running in a post, depending on whether you are viewing the front page, a category, the post itself etc, the URL to the source changes.

This is due to you only being able to specify a relative path to the source files using the export settings, you can try and specify the full path, but Flex Builder will strip out double forward slashes leaving a single forward slash. You could define it in AS but this would muddy the source.

ForceAbsoluteViewSourceURL.swc is a monkey patch of the Application class for Flex 3.0 which gets the URL of the SWF and appends this onto the relative path that was specified as the path to the source. This means it always has the same path, and therefore isn’t affected by the location of the HTML page its embedded in.

More Flex with the source enabled in blog posts! Hooray!

The ‘Copy Fill as AS3′ command adds the ActionScript required to create the current fill in the toolbar to the systems clipboard. This can then be pasted into you favorite code editor.

The command is especially useful when re-creating complex gradient fills in code that were created in the Flash IDE.

This command is accessed through;

Commands > Copy Fill as AS3

Copy Fill as AS3.mxp