Matt Chotin has posted a FAQ on the Flex Team blog with information on Flex Builder for the MAC. Basically, we are working on it, and plan to have something on labs this year.

You can read the entire FAQ as well as leave feedback here.

If you need to get a reference to a class in ActionScript 3, but only know the class name, then you can use the flash.utils.getDefinitionByName to create an instance of the class.

For example:

package
{
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;

	public class DynamicCall extends Sprite
	{
		public function DynamicCall()
		{
            var ClassReference:Class = getDefinitionByName("String") as Class;
            var s:String = (new ClassReference("foo=") as String);
            trace(s);
		}
	}
}

This basically creates an instance of the String class, from the class name “String”. getDefinitionByName takes the entire class path, so if you wanted to create an instance of MovieClip, you would provide the entire path:

Grant Skinner has posted the first in a series of articles on understanding the garbage collector in the Flash Player’s virtual machine. From the first article:

Over the next few weeks (or even months), I will be writing a series of articles on this topic. I will look at the underlying mechanics of the Garbage Collector, discuss the problems you are likely to face, examine the new tools available to you for handling resource management in AS3, and offer solutions/code to help you circumvent many of the common problems you will face.

Ryan Stewart has posted some screen shots of early Apollo applications that he took during today’s Adobe Developer’s Week session on Rich Internet Applications.

You can view the screenshots here.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Adobe had been in talks with Microsoft and had expressed concerns about Microsoft’s inclusion of PDF (and other document export features) in the next version of Office. This triggered quite a bit of discussion online, and I wanted to make a quick post and hopefully help to clear up some of the resulting confusion as well as help correct some misperceptions.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that we had been talking to Microsoft around concerns we may have with Windows and Office. We are one of the largest (if not the largest) companies that target Windows, so I would imagine that we are in touch with Microsoft quite often. What surprised me though, was that Microsoft went so public with this in such an obviously coordinated (too coordinated?) press and blogging campaign, in order to spread a bunch of FUD and confusion about what was going on.

We just posted a new QE / QA job position for the Apollo team. From the job description:

You will join a small, highly motivated team developing a new cross-platform, cross-device application deployment and runtime environment. This new application platform will allow desktop and mobile applications to be built and deployed via familiar web technologies including Flash, HTML, and PDF. As a member of this high profile team, you will be responsible for ensuring the quality of the platform, with a primary focus on the design and implementation of automated testing frameworks and automated tests.

Emmy Huang, Flash Player Product Manager, has posted some updated info on her weblog about Flash Player 9 for Linux.

In short, we are actively working on Flash Player 9 for Linux, and plan to have a pre-release version up on labs before the end of the year, with final bits targeted at early 2007.

Emmy also points out that one of the Flash Player engineers working on Linux has set up a weblog titled Penguin.SWF, where he will be discussing Flash Player on Linux.

I often have to manually parse through web logs to quickly get the number of times something has been downloaded.

This is pretty simple on unix based OS’s (Linux, OS-X, etc…), except that I always forget the exact command (and always have to bug Christian to remind me how to do it).

So, I figured I would post the here in case anyone might find it useful (and so I can easily find them in the future):

Stuart Eccles of liverail.net has posted a series of articles / tutorials showing how to get started with Flex 2 and Ruby on Rails.

You can view the articles here:

• RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 1
• RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 2

You can grab Flex 2 beta 3 from labs.

Following up on my previous post on how to use compc to compile SWCs, here is an ANT build file that calls compc to compile a SWC:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<project default="main">
	<property name="base" value="../" />
	<property name="componentName" value="MyWindow" />
	<property name="swcFile" value="${componentName}.swc" />
	<property name="manifest" value="${base}manifest.xml" />
	<property name="namespace" value="http://www.adobe.com/2006/foo" />

	<available property="swc.exists" file="${swcFile}"/>

	<target name="main" depends="init, compile">
	</target>

	<target name="init" if="swc.exists">
		<delete file="${swcFile}" />
	</target>

	<target name="compile" description="Compile SWC.">
		<echo>Building ${swcFile}</echo>
		<exec dir="." executable="cmd" failonerror="true">
		    <arg line="/c compc -namespace ${namespace} ${manifest}
		        -source-path ${base}
		    	-include-namespaces ${namespace} -include-classes mx.containers.MyWindow
		    	-include-file MyWindow.png ${base}mx/containers/MyWindow.png
				-output='${swcFile}'"/>
		</exec>
	</target>

</project>

Put this in a file called build.xml, and run ant in the same directory.