Extending AIR for Android

Currently, Flex 4.5 / AIR 2.6 for Android provides a consistent platform for desktop and mobile apps. While consistency is very important there are times when developers need to extend beyond the common APIs.

This article, posted by James Ward on his blog, will walk you through how to integrate AIR for Android applications with other native APIs and functionality in the Android SDK. It covers three common use cases for native extensibility: System Notifications, Widgets, and Application Licensing.

This is a great post that alleviates my biggest concern regarding the usability of Flex as a development platform for mobile applications. I intend to use this information on Tikal‘s next FuseDay, in the session for developing a mobile application over Flex that needs some native APIs.

 

Migrating Flex 3.x application to Flex 4.5 – Tip No. 4

The next tip refers to fonts embedded either with CSS or style tag.

The format we know and used in Flex 3.x was:

    @font-face {
        font-family: myFont;
        src:url("../assets/fonts/arial.ttf");
        advancedAntiAliasing: true;
    }

That worked with Flex 3.5, but with Flex 4.x there are a few problems with this format.

Migrating Flex 3.x application to Flex 4.5 – Tip No. 3

In previous posts in this series here and here, I talked about making the project compile and run before the migration process actually begins.

The next few posts will be dedicated to common errors that arise from moving to Flex 4.5 SDK and Spark Theme.
First, let me explain why those errors arise. When changing the compiler SDK to Flex 4.5 some errors arise and are easily fixed.

Migrating Flex 3.x application to Flex 4.5 – Tip No. 2

As described in a previous post, I am currently doing some migration work for a client, migrating their Flex 3.5 application to Flex 4.5.

I needed to pass a set of variables to the main application using flashvars.
In Flex 3, it was pretty straight forward – you’d use the html-template file and modify it’s object tag to include those variables.

Migrating Flex 3.x application to Flex 4.5 – Tip No. 1

I am currently doing some migration work for a client, migrating their Flex 3.5 application to Flex 4.5.

Occasionally, I will undoubtedly encounter bumpers…
This will be an account of those bumpers, and how I came to resolve them. This is not guaranteed to be the best solution, just the one that worked for me, usual caveats apply.

Spark DataGrid component with Drag & Drop

Many of you might know this, but SDK 4.5 also includes the long awaited Spark DataGrid component. These are great news.