BugQuash - Don't just complain, do something about it

The line "Dont just complain, do something about it" nailed it for me.

From the pre-event kit:

All of us have run into bugs with all types of software. Every now and then we even run into some that are a part of the Flex SDK. These bugs can be aggravating due to their elusive nature - you think the bug is something that you are doing wrong while all the time it is a bug in the Flex SDK that was likely missed during various testing - this is not uncommon! Now that the Flex SDK is open source, our community has the exciting opportunity to help eliminate bugs in the SDK. Adobe has designated numerous bugs as Community Bug Fix Candidates which they believe are the best candidates for the community to tackle. However, you're not limited to fixing the Community Bug Fix Candidates. Do you have a bug that's been deferred or not yet resolved? If you're passionate (or rather irritated) by other bugs, we encourage you to quash those too! Our goal at the Flex BugQuash is to eliminate these bugs and contribute software patches to Adobe for their approval. We want to quash as many bugs as possible within the time allotted! Wouldn't you love to be part of it?

Want this for your site?

Visit http://bugquash.com/ for details. If you are in Seattle WA, you can physically attend the event, and if u are away, online option is available as well.

Singapore Flex UserGroup - February meet

With Flex 3.0 ( and AIR1.0 and BlazeDS source, and flex source and, and...) being released this morning, this month's FUG meetup is time to celebrate! We have a couple of sessions this time around. The agenda as per Shunjie's UG invite mail is as below:

What:
7.00pm - 8.05pm : Session 1 - Test Driven Development by Thye Yeow Bok
BREAK
8.25pm - 9.30pm : Session 2 - Flex 3 / AIR 1.0 Live! by Hu Shunjie

When and Where:

27th February 2008, Wednesday, between 7.00pm to 9.30pm

at

Adobe Singapore,
PageMaker Room,
8 Temasek Boulevard,
#06-02, Suntec Tower Three,
Singapore 038988

You can register for the event by responding to the thread here:
Registering will help us make sure we have enough seats available in the meeting Room at adobe ;)

If anyone's willing to go for a beer after the sessions, I'd be game. See you all there!

Singapore FUG meet - 14th nov 2007

This post has been overdue for a longtime now, blame it on my laziness.

We had the first FUG meet in Singapore on Wednesday evening. It was a great start, I should say. We had more attendees than we expected. Finally looks like the UG meetings here are starting to become more interactive! And to top it up, we had a good bunch of adobe folks joining in!!

Unlike last year (and before) this year Adobe decided not to 'MAX' in Singapore.

Marianne Young, our contact point for the UG activities in Singapore had attended the MAX conference at Europe. And for this UG meet she agreed to do a presentation about things she saw and liked at MAX. Sorta like a highlight. To be honest, I was expecting just a simple presentation with pics she probably snapped during live presentations. Boy! She went ahead and collected real demo material that was used in the actual MAX presentations. A whole bunch of them!! And did a great session to kick start the meeting.

Her session included demos for Flash player 10 - hydra, text improvements etc, thermo, etc. Thanks Marianne, you are awesome!

And during the presentation we had a surprise guest peeking in. Prayank Swaroop, the Flex Evangelist for Asia Pacific is in Singapore for some internal projects and he dropped by at the meet as well. And so did Jack Lim, the BD manager for Enterprise BU from adobe. Suddenly our small little user group meet looked so filled up with celebs ;o)

The second session was from our own homeboy, Lionel/Flashmech. He presented about the PV3D based Effects classes that Tink has put through. Like his session before in the FSUG meet, he did a very impressive job here too!





We also had Stefano Virgilli of AdobeSoftwares.com join us in the meet! Its great to have you Stefano in Singapore!.
He did a brief intro about the upcoming Flex camp and other events. Check out the event pages here:

http://flexcamp-singapore.eventbrite.com/
http://cs3-mobile-workflow.eventbrite.com/
http://flash-lite-integration.eventbrite.com/

I'll be attending the FlexCamp for sure. Haven't decided about the rest yet.


And ArulKumaran mentioned that he will be in India for the next couple months. You'll be missed in the upcoming UG events!

I got a few more pics of the event on my picasaweb album

Thanks everyone for coming. And thanks to Shunjie for putting things together to make the event happen :)

See you all at the next month's event! Go ahead and post your thoughts about what sessions you'd like to see next month here

Singapore Flex User Group meeting

After a couple of months of silence, the Singapore Flex User Group is back again. Its got its own home now - and we have a forum set up as well for discussions.

The first meetup of singapore FUG is gonna happen on the 14th of November. Check out the details here. If you are in singapore, and are excited about Flash platform development and Flex in particular, do join us for the meet!

Adobe will be sponsoring some food and drinks, and Shunjie has promised to give away some free eclipse as well ;o)

Thermo - a new member in the Flex product line?

Since last week blogs are busy speculating what Thermo would be. Sam Robbins blogged about discovering a job description for an Engineering Manager Position on Thermo. And Ted posted a note about it. Mark Anders was sad that he wasn't the one to expose thermo first, like he had planned ;-P

Well, as of yesterday Ted has a new post where he mentions that he will be blogging abt new features in Flex 3 Beta 2. He also has a little mention about "the expansion of the Flex Family." being a part of the announcements on Oct 1st. That confirms a few speculations that said Thermo had something to do with Flex and the Flash platform.

My guess is that Thermo would be something that would bridge the gap between Flex builder and graphical asset editing tools like Flash / Photoshop? Would it create visual effects - like transitions, and save it into an MXML? ( like what the 'Copy motion as Actionscript3.0' feature in does Flash CS3? )

Its kinda fun to play the guessing game isn't it ? ;o)

Flexplorer - an easy and neat tool to explore Flex SWCs

Over the past few months, Arul Kumaran, has been silently developing a set of ActionScript developer tools. Those who attended MAX 2006 at Singapore had a chance to have a sneak preview at his AS code editing tool, written completely in AS.

I've been lucky to know him in person, and hence have more previews of his work in progress. The last time we met, he showed me a bunch of other related apps. Being built to target the Flash/ AIR runtime, these tools will definitely open up an unexplored approach to Flash platform development. Among those was this application that can parse .swc files and display the components/ classes inside the swc. Its a pretty nifty tool if you wanna explore the APIs inside a swc file. It also keeps track of recently opened SWC files, so it can function as a repository explorer for all your SWC files! And adding a new SWC file to the app is as easy as dragging and dropping the SWC to the app!
I'm sure this tool will be a great addition to any Flex developer's toolkit.

He has now packaged a 'limited' version of the tool - christened as Flexplorer and released a public preview version. This tool is also his entry into the adobe AIRDerby contest. ( I say limited because I've seen more features in the app, which he is holding back probably for refinement ;o) )

You can try Flexplorer by downloading the .air installer file here. This app installs itself over the AIR public beta 1 runtime. If you don't have the runtime, get it here.

Did I mention, flexplorer has a real slick look?

AIR based Instant Messenger - airTalkr - check out!

Hu Shunjie, a colleague and friend, has created an AIR based Instant messaging application, named airTalkr. Besides the native IM service, users can also connect their existing Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, ICQ accounts, thanks to JiveSoft's OpenFire server he uses in the backend. airTalkr also has a video module, which lets users view videos from YouTube, and a photo module, which lets users browse photographs from Flickr.

Its his personal AIR project based on Flex2. AFAIK, he developed the entire application, in a remarkable time period of around two months thanks to his amazing speed at churning out code. And thats besides his day job in our client team for velvetpuffin, (and not to mention, his newly married wife at home!). airTalkr is also a demonstration of Flex's (and AIR's ) rapid application development capabilities.

He is currently calling out for alpha testers for his application. Check out his post!

Singapore Flash Usergroup meet - MoM

I'm just back from the Singapore Flash Usergroup meeting, for the month of July. It was a day of information overload! We started off at 10 AM, and ended the sessions at adobe (the venue for the meet) at around 1:45 PM, and a few of us then continued to discuss about the future sessions etc., over lunch. In short, it was a saturday, well spent!

Ryan started off with a overview of what today's sessions were gonna be. He also talked about the FSUG site, and his Flex (and AIR) experiments on the site, using the RSS feeds for his forum. Am still amazed about how this guy single handedly handles a site that heavy; not to mention, He has a busy day job as well!

Then followed 3 full length sessions - Hu Shunjie started off with a session on AIR. He showed how the AIR commandline utilities ADT and ADL coupled with flashDevelop can be used to create AIR applications. He also demonstrated a few sample applications he had been developing using AIR. Everyone seemed to enjoy his icicle application ;o)

And then Lionel aka Flashmech started off his session where he showcased a few interesting flash extensions that he found around the web. Boy, this guy had a huge collection of extensions installed! I assume He must be hosting a detailed writeup about the extensions he demo-ed today, in his blog. Watch out his space!

And then there was this lousy presentation by yours truly. I had a tiny presentation that I aimed at 'demystifying Flex' to newbies. I spoke a little about the history of Flash based RIAs and then continued to talk about how flex came into being what it is now. But to be honest, though I've been following the developments in the flex world, I haven't really written any flex application that really does anything interesting. So I made this presentation a perfect reason to attempt something worthwhile. I wrote up a complete newbie style Flex application using the beta of FlexBuilder 3, which takes a tag as an input from the user and searched Flickr for pictures associated with the tag, and displayed them in a TileList component.

In total I spent about 1 hour building the application on stage - in the process also explaining the flickr REST API. I could've used the AS3 API for Flickr, but I did also want to demonstrate how easy it was to consume a REST response and parse it up using E4X. Luck was my side, and without any major glitches, the app was up and running! ( I've uploaded the files here)

We had Arul Kumaran attending the sessions today as well, and being an early Flex adopter, I could see him all irked by the lousy coding I was doing ;o) But like I said there, it was a demo of how a novice Flex developer could write some working flex application, in about an hour's time :D

Aftermath:
After the sessions, we walked over a bit to a food court, for lunch, and discussed on a wide range of subjects, ranging from future usergroup sessions to general tech stuff to velvetpuffin to movies. There was a whole lot of enthusiasm in everyone, which was great to see!

We finally parted around 4:30, after a whole load of geektalk. Expect to see a lot of improvements in the FSUG activities soon!

Thanks to all attendees, and thanks Adobe ( and Marian specially) for helping us with the venue and those donuts!