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. <?xml version="1.

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.

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.

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.

Im a little late on this, but the Flex and Flex Builder teams just released updates to the Flex SDK and Flex Builder 3, which among other things, adds support for Adobe AIR 1.1. There are also a ton of bug fixes for the Flex SDK and Flex Builder, as well as preliminary support for working with Flash Player 10 content in Flex Builder (although it is not clear where to download the debug player from.

The FlexUnit ActionScript 3 unit testing library has moved to the Adobe Open Source website. Alistair Mcleod has all of the details on his blog, including screen shots and new info on some of the updates included in the new release (which includes a much improved test runner). You can find all of the new FlexUnit home here.

One of the new features in Flash Player 10 are new ActionScript FileReference APIs that allow Flash content to directly read and write data to the user’s system. Prior to Flash Player 10, in order to read or write a file to the user’s system, Flash content would first have to bounce it off of a server, and then load it back to the users system before it could be accessed.