Al Manning has an excellent new Flex blog. Some of you may remember Al from his days working on Spectra at Allaire. I've gotten to know him as a lead Flex developer at Brightcove. He already has some long posts on unit testing and assertions. I know he'll have a lot more posts about Flex, so go check it out.

I've been looking at ways to improve some Ant Flex builds, and in the process I've added "arg" support to the Flex Ant tasks. I'll show how this can be done below, and I'll also share a bit about my investigation into speeding up Flex builds. I wanted to convert some Ant builds to use the Flex Ant tasks, but it's painful to convert Ant targets that use "java". The problem is that all existing "java" calls will use command-line arguments, aka the "arg" element.

We have to learn to manage information and its flow. If we don't, it will all end up in turbulence. -Grace Hopper in Prioritizing Information About a year ago, I stopped reading flexcoders. The mailing list had become turbulence for me, something I couldn't keep up with and which I decided to stop trying to. I thought the blogs I was reading were better for learning the latest on Flex, and so I prioritized flexcoders so low on my technology reading list that it fell off.

Here's tools that I use for Flex and AS3 development: 1. Flash Switcher for switching between Flash players. Actually, I don't use this tool yet, but I plan to start using it soon. I just installed it after reading Oliver Merk's post on it. 2. Charles for looking at HTTP traffic. If you aren't using Charles, Service Capture, or something similar, you should download one of them now. It's extremely useful for daily debugging.

The iframe solution to HTML in Flex has become a popular, unsupported way to embed HTML inside of a Flex application. I've written a lot about this, but I've never been very comfortable with the solution. I feel it's time to gather up all the information I've learned and start steering people away. I'll provide some potential alternatives to iframes at the end of the post.

Scott Petersen gave a talk at Mozilla where he showed off "C-compiled versions of Lua, Ruby, Perl, and Python all running on the web in secure Flash sandboxes". There's other goodies, including a Zelda mention, in the link above. Or see this previous post for more links on C and C++ via ActionScript 3. I wonder what the chances are for this all to get released, given the "native byte array that maps directly to RAM" and anything else that needed to be added the player to get this to work?

This wins for the most creative job posting I've ever seen, certainly better than my Brightcove top ten list a year ago. (Although Brightcove is where you should apply of course.) If you view a blip.tv player, you'll see this: Showplayer initializing...

I've converted the iframe demo found in the HTML in Flex post into an AIR demo. In this post is a badge to install the application, a link to the source, and a list of the differences between the two versions. A badge to install and run the application is on this separate page until I can figure out how to get Movable Type to stop entitizing scripts. You can also view the source of the demo here. The AIR HTML demo shows how easy it is to switch from using an iframe to mx:HTML.

The Flex Compiler Design Document has generated some more interest in learning about the Flex compiler. Here's some resources to learn more: I've written a little bit about the compiler myself in two posts (here and here). You can always ignore all the documents and just go straight to the source to investigate more. It's helpful to watch the commits which will show you what's going on with the Flex compiler and framework.

So I haven't played around with the design of this site in a long time, and while it's a pain to do in Movable Type, I figured it was time to do some damage. Apparently I did a little too much damage while watching the Celtics game tonight, as I managed to completely mess up my setup. I had a backup, but Movable Type's odd linking structure has left me with a few missing files. So now I'm stuck with an odd-looking blog until I find the time to fix things.