Just a quick reminder, that the Flex 2 Beta is available on Mac. Just grab the Flex 2 SDK , which contains the compiler and framework.

You can download the SDK from here.

Sorry for the repeat post, but I keep seeing people indicating that they don’t know that the SDK is avaliable on Mac.

I am sorry that I have not been as active online the past week and a half (including blogging and podcasts). I have been swamped at work playing around with some new stuff (more on that later).

Anyways, I wanted to post a couple of links that caught my eye over the past week or so:

Ryan Stewart at Digital Backcountry - Make sure to check out Ryan’s weblog. I think he has some of the best commentary anywhere on the RIA space. Apparently I am not the only one who has been noticing this, as ZDNET has asked him to do a blog on RIAs on their site.

Sho has posted a sneak peak of some of the changes in the upcoming Flex Builder 2 Beta 3 release. Some of the highlights includes tons of bug fixes new start page and new API doc styles (woot!).

You can view the entire sneak here.

Just a quick fyi, but we are doing some emergency maintenance on the ColdFusion server on weblogs. During this time, MXNA and some weblogs will not be accessible.

Sorry for the hassle…

Update : Server is back up. For some reason we all of a sudden started hitting a Java error, and had to update the JRE.

I just posted this week’s podcast

This weeks podcast discusses:

• FITC Overview
• FITC Keynote
• Creating Components in Flex 2
• Blaze
• Flash / Photoshop Integration in Blaze
• Flash Player 8.5 renamed to Flash Player 9
• SoundMixer.computerSpectrum API in Flash Player 9
• Discussion Panel : Flash as a Platform
• Is the Operating System becoming irrelevant to application developers?
• Weblog of the week
• Flex as an expressive framework

Here are the links mentioned in the podcast:

I am about to go through and update the ActionScript 3 FAQ on labs to bring it in line with recent changes in the ActionScript 3 and Flex 2 betas. Before I do though, what other questions / answers would you like added to the FAQ?

You can view the current FAQ here.

If you have any suggestions, or find something in the FAQ that is out of date, or needs more info, just post it here.

One of the cool new sound APIs in ActionScript 3, is the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum API. This allows you to get information about sounds currently playing within the player.

Andre Michelle put together a nice example that shows a visualization of the playing sound within the player. I tried to figure out the API from Andre Michelle’s example (some of it was over my head), but with some help from Grant Skinner at FITC, I finally figured it out and put together a simple example that shows how to use the API.

Just a quick fyi, but today is the four year anniversary of my weblog (at least according to my archives).

Here are some quick stats:

• Total Posts: 992
• Total (non-spam) Comments: 6507
• Comment to Post Ratio : 6.5

You can see the first post here (although it is pretty boring) and a complete list of all posts here.

I hope everyone has enjoyed the blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

Here is the link to all of the command line options for MXMLC (free command line compiler for Flex 2 and ActionScript 3).

MXMLC Command Line Options

Took me forever to find it, so I am posting in case anyone else needs it.

You can download the compiler from labs.

Just a quick tip, but if you need to clear the content of a Flex 2 Image component, just set the source to null:

Here is a simple example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns="*" layout="absolute">

	<mx:Image height="500" width="500"
		id="imageLoader"
		source="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0007NFMDK.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg"
		completeEffect="Fade"  horizontalCenter="0"/>

	<mx:Button label="Clear Image" horizontalCenter="0" top="508"
		click="imageLoader.source = null"/>

</mx:Application>

It is simple, but took me a while to figure out.