I have been playing around with the jQuery Autocomplete plugin to get it working with the ActionScript 3 documentation API that I posted about earlier today.

The Autocomplete API is really nice, and pretty flexible, but one issue I ran into is that the query argument containing the user input that is passed to the server is hard coded to “q”. For my api, I needed this argument to be “api”.

The fix is actually pretty simple, although it does require a slight modification to the jquery.autocomplete.js file.

I have just uploaded a new ActionScript 3 reference / online documentation API to Google App Engine. Basically, the service takes an ActionScript 3 class name (or a fragment of a class name) and returns the URL for the online documentation for the specified class.

For example:

http://as3reference.appspot.com/getapi?version=flex3&api=String

returns:

{
    "items": [
        { "path": "String.html", "name": "String" },
        { "path": "mx/utils/StringUtil.html", "name": "StringUtil" },
        {
            "path": "mx/validators/StringValidator.html",
            "name": "StringValidator"
        }
    ],
    "version": "flex3",
    "base_path": "http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/"
}

All responses are returned as JSON encoded data.

I have just created a new Firefox Ubiquity plugin command named “fyi”. The command makes it super simple to email info about a web page to anyone.

I wrote the command because I am often finding myself forwarding URLs to friends and co-workers. This is normally much more tedious than it needs to be, involving the following steps:

1. Copy the URL from the browser
2. Switch to mail client
3. Create new Email
4. Paste URL into the email body
5. Switch back to the browser
6. Copy the post title
7. Switch back to email
8. Paste the title as the subject
9. Switch back to the browser
10. Copy a snippet from the page
11. Switch back to the email
12. Paste in the snippet
13. Enter the TO email address
14. Finally send the email

Phew…

One of the cool things about FXG is that it works with Flex data-binding just as your would expect it to.

Below is a simple example (which requires Flash Player 10 RC), followed the code, that shows data-binding with FXG and Flex 4

As you can see, there are still some bugs in the rendering, but that is to be expected as these are very early Flex 4 builds.

If you have done Flash development using the Flash Authoring tool, or have done any low level work with the SWF format, then you should be familiar with the concept of symbols. Basically a symbol is a reusable object (graphics, buttons, MovieClip) that can be included in the SWF once, but referenced and used many times.

Flex 4 FXG has a similar concept of symbol, although the actual underlying implimentation is different. Using the Library and Definition elements, you can define a graphic symbol, which can then be reused multiple times within the FXG or MXML document.

As I mentioned the other day, the Flex team has released a ton of information on Flex 4. One of the new features which I am most excited about is the FXG graphic format being developed.

What is FXG? From the spec:

FXG 1.0 describes an XML-based graphics interchange format for the Flash Platform. FXG contains high-level graphical and text primitives that can be used to create, group, transform and visually modify basic vector and bitmap shapes. The FXG rendering model follows very closely the Flash Player 10 rendering model and exposes all graphics capabilities of the Flash platform as well as offering expandable support to accommodate future capabilities of the Flash Player. The specification below dives into the technical details governing every element of FXG 1.0.

Just a quick update on the tostring.org site which hosts the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide and the Adobe AIR for Flex Developers Pocketguide. We have been receiving a lot of translation contributions from the community, and posting them on the site.

New language translations include:

Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide

• German
• Swedish

Adobe AIR for Flex Developers Pocketguide

• Spanish
• Romanian
• Brazilian Portuguese

If you are interesting in help out the community by translating a chapter, check out the info on the translation page.

About a month ago, the Flex team announced that nightly builds of the next version of Flex (code named Gumbo) were now available on the opensource Flex site. Along with early versions of the SDK, the team also posted a ton of other information, including specs and API docs.

Below is a listing of links and resources about Gumbo / Flex 4. Going through these will quickly get your up to speed on what is being worked on in Flex 4, and get your ready for playing around with the new builds.

If you run into an error with Adobe AIR, and get some cryptic error codes, you can find info on what those error codes mean in the following documents:

• List of Runtime Errors in the docs
• AIR Developer Tool (ADT) Error Codes

One of the new ActionScript APIs include in Flash Player 10 is the addition of z based properties (joining the existing x and y). The DisplayObject.z and DisplayObject.rotationZ properties allow you to manipulate your display object on the z axis (relative to the 3D parent container).

Below is a simple example that shows how changing the rotationX, rotationY and rotationZ properties affect a DisplayObject instance.

The UI is in Flex, but of course, the APIs also work in Flash Authoring. The example requires the Flash Player 10 RC release from labs.