Wisebisoft - Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR.

Ever wondered where do all the cool guys get those cool icons for their applications ( ok, obviously some have a great team of designers around who can draw all that cool stuff, but besides that )? Well, here are two links that are definitely worth visiting:

Free web 2.0 icons at Pirvulescu ( “small” collection of free and cool web 2.0 icons )
Cool icons at FamFamFam ( a really nice website with some really sweet icons )

In case you know other cool sites where people can download cool free icons from then please leave a comment with a link directing to that website. Enjoy and happy coding.

In case the first thought that came into your mind after reading the title was “What? Are they removing Flex Builder and replacing it with a new IDE?”, then stay calm because they aren’t that crazy. All that the guys at Adobe are doing, is renaming Flex Builder to Flash Builder ( “to take confusion out of the game”? ).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working quite a lot with item renderers in the past weeks so I got to the conclusion that I wouldn’t hurt to add one more article to the many more that can be found on the internet.

I’ll be posting two examples here, one for Flex and one for AIR. The method is exactly the same in both examples just that the AIR example is essentially an enhancement of the example from my previous post, where I showed how to sort the local file system in a way that keep the directories always on top, by adding a custom item renderer for the rows so we can display a custom directory icon for our directories and a file icon for the files.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you ever want to reproduce the sorting mechanism that Total Commander uses when sorting the files of your local file system? Well, the solution is quite simple but I have to admit that I wasted quite a few hours with it because I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have ( and because of that, I blindly assumed that the method I was trying was not good ).

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a really simple and easy way to check if the code you write is good or bad:

“An internal error occurred during: “Launching New_configuration”. java.lang.NullPointerException”. Did you ever run across this error before? No? Well, one day, you will ( you can take my word on this one ). For me, that day was today.

Since I never ran across this problem before I took the most important step in finding out what it is by opening FireFox and googling for a possible solution. Sadly, I only ran over 4-5 links that were FDT related which is not a problem because FDT is running on Eclipse too so if they found a solution then it’s quite possible that the same thing should work for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think that many of you know but I live in Romania, more exactly in a city called Timisoara ( situated close to the Hungarian border, in the West part of the country ) in one of the amphitheaters of West University of Timisoara ( where I currently study Computer Science ). Not too many Adobe events take place in Romania and the ones that do take place are usually hosted in Bucharest ( the country’s capital ), meaning: “far away from many people that use Adobe technologies on a daily basis”.

Yeah, you are correct, I’m not a Bucharest fan, but Thank God the guys at Adobe Romania finally “woke up” and decided to move out of the “big city” to smaller cities. So, the first Flex event in a city other than Bucharest was born! Ok, we have to admit that finding sponsors ( support ) in other major cities is not easy and Timisoara was selected mainly because it turned out to be the only Romanian city that could provide the desired support for such an event ( Hurray Timisoara! ). Thanks to it’s geographical position, I think it is the best place where such events should take place, because, in the future, we could even try to “go international” and invite people from neighbor countries too ( this event was dedicated for the Romanian public only ).

So, as I was saying, three Adobe Evangelists ( Mihai Corlan, Cornel Creanga and Mihai Pricope ) came to Timisoara this Saturday ( on March the 14th, 2009 ) to “spread the word of Adobe”. All that I can say is that: it was a total success and I can only hope to see them around again as soon as possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you didn’t encounter this error before, be assured that one day, you will. Most likely, the reason you have been thrown this error is because you accidentally mistyped the URL you want your URLLoader object to connect to ( or HTTPService and so on ). Here’s a fast example:

private function loadData():void
{
    var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest();
    // Bad version; accidentally wrote "sendr" instead of "sender"
    // this will throw a Stream Error.
    request.url = "http://www.wisebisoft.com/sendr.php";
    var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
    loader.load(request);
}

Good version ( will not throw any errors ):

private function loadData():void
{
    var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest();
    request.url = "http://www.wisebisoft.com/sender.php";
    var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
    loader.load(request);
}

So, make sure that the path to your external file is correct if you get a Stream Error. Cheers.

I’m quite sure that everyone reading this post has encountered this problem at least once. Well, the solution is quite simple and the reason you are getting this error is because the version listed in the YourAppName-app.xml is not the same as the version of your installed AIR Player.

The line ( better said “namespace” ) you need to edit looks something like this:

<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0">

As I have already mentioned, the above line can be found usually in the application’s source folder in an XML file that is named as your application + “-app.xml” ( in essence, that file contains different settings that will be applied to the application at installation ), in my case, the correct version would be ( because I have the 1.5 version of Adobe AIR Player installed ):

<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5">

Yeah, that simple… Good luck and don’t forget the “golden rule”: first use Google and start hitting the PC only after you are 100% sure that you have looked in all the places for a possible solution ( never go the other way around ).

PS: Pay much attention when you edit the namespace because you actually have it in two places, but the second place is inside a comment block so that does not need to be edited in order to have a working AIR application ( if you accidentally edit the one inside the comment block, without touching the actual namespace, then you essentially did nothing and your application will still throw the error, so pay attention and be sure that you edit the correct line and not the one inside a comment block ).

I recently started using Eclipse instead of Flex Builder ( because at my new job the majority of guys come from a Java background or they still do Java development combined with Flex ). Since Flex Builder was build on Eclipse anyway there really aren’t differences and if you’ve been using Flex Builder until now, Eclipse will be exactly the same.

You can download Eclipse from here: Download Eclipse. I downloaded the “Eclipse IDE for Java developers” because I don’t need the features the other platforms offer since I’m a Flex and not a hardcore Java developer ( but feel free to download the version that suits your needs the best way ). Once you unpack the Eclipse archive ( there is not install required for Eclipse ) you might be asked for JRE ( Java SE Runtime Environment ) but only if you don’t already have a version installed. In case you don’t have it installed, you can download it from here: Download JRE ( or, if you prefer JDK more than you can download and use it instead of JRE ).

Read the rest of this entry »