Articles by Jeff Tapper

A Great Big Pile of Public Beta's From Adobe

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:45:00 EDT

Today, Adobe has released 3 new public beta's on Adobe Labs: The Adobe Integrated Runtime (formerly known as Apollo) beta, the Flex 3 Beta, and the Flash Player Updater were all publicly released on Labs today. I've been recovering from a failed hard drive all day (remind me to post a blog about the wonders of SpinRite 6.0 when I get a minute), but I'll post more about all 3 of these, as well as the ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) beta released 2 weeks ago, when I get a few minutes.

Internationalizing Adobe Flex Apps

Sun, 13 May 2007 10:00:00 EDT

One of the many features available in Flex 2.0 is a ResourceBundle class, which allows for a standardized approach for internationalizing applications. Many recent projects of mine have required that applications be built that can easily be ported to other languages. Traditionally, I've used a series of XML files for this, one for each of the various languages that need to be supported. This strategy is still viable, and I still use it on some of my projects. However, I've recently discovered a different approach, which is available natively in Flex.

Converting Back and Forth Between Hexidecimal Strings and Numbers

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:00:00 EST

It's really convenient for anyone coming from an HTML background that we can now provide colors to Flex using html standard syntax for hexidecimal number (#000000 = black, #ffffff= white, etc). I've recently been building some tools to convert drawings in the flash player to and from SVG format. SVG, like HTML, likes to specify hexidecimal numbers with a '#' prefix, but the flash player drawing API needs hexidecimal numbers to be prefixed with '0x' To help migrate back and forth between hexStrings and AS numbers, I wrote a few static methods, which are working well for me:

Speaking at AJAXWorld

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:30:00 EDT

As a Boston Red Sox fan in New York City, I'm no stranger to being outnumbered, or in the minority opinion. Following this theme, I'll be presenting about Adobe Flex 2.0 at the upcoming AJAXWorld conference October 2nd-4th in Santa Clara. It seems I'll be 1 of only a few speakers giving a session on Flex related topics. The annoucment from AJAXWorld magazine can be found here. I'll post more details as they become available.

MXML vs ActionScript 3

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 16:00:00 EDT

I've been building a bunch of custom AS3 components for clients lately, and have run across the need to use view states within an AS3 component.