Assumptions / Background:
-you’re using Subversion (SVN) for version control
-you’re using Flash Builder (same applies for Flex Builder, but this tutorial is specific to Flash Builder) with the Subclipse plugin

Sometimes you want to tell svn not to update or commit certain files in your local project, such as .project, so you don’t have to remember not to check them in when you do a check-in at root level. You could try telling your team to just not check those files in, but not only is that a pain to remember to do, but most likely in the end they will wind up getting checked in, anyway. The common solution to this is to use svn:ignore, which tells svn to ignore those files and not check them in. To get to that option normally would be easy – just right-click on the file or directory in Flash Builder and choose Team->Add to svn:ignore. However, most likely if you are trying to ignore files or directories that start with a dot ‘.’ then you aren’t seeing them in Flash Builder at all, are you? The dot is the naming syntax for hidden files in unix/linux, and Flash Builder / Eclipse respects this. OK, so to see the files within Flash Builder, first of all, switch from the Package Explorer (new to Flash Builder) to the Navigator (more like what we were used to in Flex 3 and prior):
Navigate to Window->Other Views and then select the Navigator. Now you should see your project by the file structure rather than package structure. Next, select the drop down menu from within the Navigator and choose Filters, and uncheck whatever types of files you want to see.

OK, so now you see the file you want to ignore…but if the file was already added to svn, that option to svn:ignore it is grayed out.

When a file has been added to svn already, the option to ignore it is disabled

1. Delete the file from the repository (make a backup first!)
2. Recreate it in Eclipse
3. Set svn:ignore on it via Team->Add to svn:ignore

Hopefully now you’re good to go, and your Flex team is still alive and breathing!

Conference / Organization
What, no name tag?
I guess this is an area where stuff I had been taking for granted, from my experiences at MAX, and now 360 Flex, kind of stood out. We might tend to think of name tags as a bother, but part of the reason we attend conferences is to network. There seemed to have been no thought given to the networking aspect at all at Capital Flash Camp. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t need fancy lanyards and stuff – a simple sticker you write your own name on would have been sufficient. Then again, I guess that forces folks to try and open their mouths and actually ask each others names…not such a bad thing, eh? So, was this an oversight or actually a clever, well designed ploy to encourage folks to get out of the closet and actually develop social skills? Either way, it did get my attention.

There was also no swag…not at the registration desk, anyway…kind of a disappointment. I don’t count Adobe pens and stickers left over from 360 Flex as swag, sorry…aren’t conference shirts a defacto standard?

Attendance wise, I was actually pretty disappointed. The conference was held in a relatively small area, with all the talks being held in a single, small auditorium with a huge curved screen. However, the number of attendees might have made the place look vast. There were maybe only fifty attendees in the beginning, and for some reason as the conference progressed that number continuously dwindled. I left early myself, with two sessions and the giveaways still pending, but at that time there might have only been twenty or so folks left.

Speakers / Presentations

I walked into the conference in the middle of @jefftapper ‘s presentation Flex 4 for Flex 3 Developers. Jeff’s presentation was excellent, and I definitely plan to go download his lecture notes since we are at the beginnings of a flex 3 -> flex 4 migration, ourselves. Of particular interest is the list of mx components that were not ported to the spark space at all, such as DataGrid and ViewStack. One of the first questions I posed on twitter as we started migrating our code to the spark space was, ‘are we supposed to mix mx and spark components by design?’ I got a bunch of tweets in response referring either to custom components folks had built in the spark space or on how to mix mx and spark components. Jeff’s response was that he felt that Adobe hadn’t done this themselves yet due to time constraints. Ah…

Next up was @queencodemonkey on Greenthreading in Flex. I already saw her presentation at 360 Flex, but as I told her, it was one of the best presentations I had attended, with regards to stuff I was able to take back to my team and say, ‘hey, this is something we should look into with regards to what we’re currently doing’. So it was enjoyable to see it again, and a good review of the concepts and applications. I also made a note to go and read an article she referred to by @ jesterxl on loading massive amounts of data in the Flash player, and they both were kind enough to tweet the link to the article.

Next was The Art of Storytelling by @christiansaylor. It was a nice change of pace from the technical presentations, and indeed, he is a great story teller himself. I kept thinking that his presentation style was highly reminiscent of Steve Jobs, and when one of his slides was a huge photo of The Evil One (as one audience member called out, lol) it pretty much cinched it in my mind that was a source of influence for him. In a good way…

Christian also convinced me to take a closer look at Audi…

Towards the middle to end of the presentation, I kind of felt like it was tending towards a sales plug for Universal mind, but then again, they sponsored and organized the event, half the speakers were from their company – so what could you expect? In the least, at least this presentation was pertinent and well done, unlike the eBay sponsor presentation at 360 Flex, which had me wondering if anyone, really, ANYONE in the entire audience cared an iota about what the speaker had to say or if what he spoke on had anything at all to do with real business problems faced by anyone in the audience.

next was lunch…

The Food
What can I say, without getting too insulting? Meh. Not a highlight of the conference. At 360 Flex, they had good food, but it would run out before you could actually get any. For some reason, I found that more appealing than food you got but didn’t find appetizing.

More Great Speakers
@carlsmith spoke on the importance of listening to your audience in It’s a Matter of Trust. Frankly this was by far the most entertaining session, hands down. The volume and amount of laughter in the audience was a clear indication of that. He brought up twitter a lot in examples of customers complaining about the service of companies, and the successes and failures of companies leveraging twitter to satisfy customers. The bottom line of his presentation: treat your audience as people, not as statistics.

The last session I attended before ditching was Introduction to Flash Catalyst by @adnaanahmad. Adnaan’s presentation was great, especially considering it was his first conference presentation, ever. I think the audience was hungry for more on his demo side; the background info etc. is all good and well, but that’s stuff folks can read about later or have already done so, the demo is what really engaged us. He also made a pretty good case considering there was only one designer left in the audience at that point and the rest were developers.

You can find a small slideshow of the photos I took at the conference here.

By now Adobe has announced Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR for Android at the Mobile World Congress (funny, we just completed a web redesign for a client who is a sponsor of MWC, centered around the event, but I had no idea about Adobe’s role there). This demo of using Adobe Connect on the Droid by Kevin Hoyt says something totally contrary.

Here we have a real business case scenario that Mobile Safari can’t compete with. Sure, maybe they will make something comparable to the iChat capability of screen sharing available on iPhone one day, but here it is, Adobe Connect, running on a Droid, now.

Personally, I have always been of the opinion that Apple will allow Flash on their mobile devices when, and only when, it will make them more money. Currently they have pretty tight control (jail-breaking aside) over what can be run on their devices, and all money to be made from application development flows through Apple’s iTunes store. Would having AIR on the iPhone totally upset that? Of course. Until, and unless, Apple perceives they are losing economic ground due to competing platforms, they aren’t going to change their stance.

Overall, I think Apple’s stance is actually very healthy for the market. It has driven Adobe to work really hard to improve the full version of the Flash player (as opposed to Flash Lite), which is great for developers who don’t want to have to develop a separate code base just to support their applications in the mobile world (having to revert to ActionScript 2, which is pretty much a different language altogether, when you have been living in the AS3 world, is uninviting to say the least). By improving Flash, they have made it more viable for running on mobile devices as well as for application development. It has also given an opening to every other maker of mobile devices to step up to the plate and compete with Apple by offering what Apple doesn’t, on their devices.

I think Steve Job’s demo at the January unveiling of iPad said it all…throughout the demo, he kept hitting those blue lego boxes due to lack of Flash support, and you can hear the audience laughing out loud every time. I couldn’t resist putting together a few screen shots.

So here’s a list of some solutions for client-side PDF generation from AS3:

Some items of very specific interest to mobile developers:

-Flash Player 10.1 was announced, which has been greatly optimized for running on mobile devices – no more flash lite, we are talking about the full flash player on mobile phones, and quite a few of the leading mobile phone manufacturers have joined the Open Screen initiative as well as announced phones that are being released with Flash Player 10.1
-Flash CS5 was announced with compiling direct to iPhone native applications. Flash CS5 will be available for public beta later this year on Adobe Labs
-several games are already on iTunes store that were developed with Flash CS5, including these free ones:

-Shibuya try and buy service was announced, which, to me, seems like a big, big potential competitor to Apple’s iTunes store, and from all the complaining we’ve heard from the iPhone developer crowd, it seems a LOT more developer friendly than the iTunes model

-this talk goes into depth on using the newly announced Flex mobile framework to develop mobile applications with Flex (yes, for iPhone, too):

Whew…iPhone development with Adobe Flex…something we have been asking for, dreaming about, and eagerly wishing for (all the while thinking the only way to get native apps on the iPhone would be to code in Objective C)…now it looks like it is a reality. There is a ton more that could be said on this topic, and definitely on Adobe MAX ’09 in general, but you can dive into the above links for plenty of that first hand. One last thing…the Max ’09 Flickr group

Recently I started working on a project using Flex 4 Gumbo, the Adobe MAX preview version. One of the first things I noticed was that in Flex 4 there is now an option to create either a ‘new folder’ or a ‘new package’, whereas in Flex 3 the only option was to create a ‘new folder’. In both versions there is a little symbol consisting of a square with crosshairs through it. In Flex 3 that used to appear in the corner of some folders while in Flex 4 that is the symbol used to represent some packages and symbols (I’m still not clear on the usage of this symbol).

So what’s the difference between a package and a folder in Gumbo? Flex 3 never made such a distinction, although it seems the option was there in Eclipse. They seem like the same thing to me but there are distinct menu options for it now. No one I’ve asked so far really seems to know. I read in the Gumbo migration doc about the Flex File Browser being replaced with the Flex Package Explorer, and the new option for hierarchical display vs. logical flat view, but still don’t see the significance of a package vs. a folder besides terminology…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkqtklABgGQ

The demo is by Robert Cooper, creative director of some company (couldn’t quite make out the name from the video, guys that would have been a great plug for your company even though you had nothing to do with creating it) and the technology is the ‘GE Plugin for Smartgrid.com’ according to him. I wanted to play with this for myself so I went to SmartGrid.com but didn’t find anything about a 3D plugin or the demo, so after a bit of googling around I finally found it here.

(updated to force aggregation on MXNA)

You print out a piece of paper according to the instructions, hold it up to your web cam, and on your screen it becomes an impressive interactive 3D model you can manipulate with the paper in your hand. Very, very cool. Kudos to the team behind this, whoever you are. Apparently they created it with the FlarToolKit. FlarToolKit is an AS3 library based on ARToolKit / NyARToolKit I wish GE would have credited the agency who designed and implemented this, or even let us know if it was an internal team. I don’t think it takes away from their brand identity, rather it would strengthen it by showing they care about the team(s) behind their presence.

Update: the video above was removed, but here’s another one on YouTube demonstrating the GE AR demo: