Rough Draft Notes Christophe Coenraets is giving the Keynote Talking about Flex 3 Improvements Advanced DataGrid: hierarchical data, flexible grouping, custom formatting Charting Enhancements: data-oriented graphical APIs, per-item labels and fills, region selection New List and Data Effects: choreograph data Showing iLog charting example 3D bar and data charts Organizational chart example with grab and pan Showing code example with the AdvancedDataGrid<mx:AdvancedDataGrid> <mx:Groupi

I added a couple more introductory FlexUnit recipes to the Flex Cookbook. They are titled Understanding FlexUnit Output and Run code before and/or after every test. Next up will be some intermediate recipes.

I've posted round one of some Flex Cookbook entries that focus on FlexUnit. I welcome any feedback on have about them.

Allurent the company I'm working for has been doing well lately and as such we are starting another major hiring push. We've recently signed a strategic deal with GSI Commerce to provide our full product suite to their customers and have closed a $7.5M Series B. Our details, inline cart, and checkout are live at Anthropologie. To see details you need to visit a product category page and then click on the hotspot marked by a magnifying glass icon below any product image.

The growing Flex Cookbook is great for finding answers for a wide range of problems. The problem is the site doesn't make it clear what license everything is under. For a developer creating a product that uses some of the cookbook code what might it mean? Your guess is as good as mine. For an entry I posted I cited the license the code fell under. While other examples are not as clear. What does that "@author" mean?

There has been some recent conversation about the impact of styles and fonts on compilation time in Flex Builder 3. I figured I'd take the project I'm currently working on and see what the numbers came out as. Some more details about the test: About 700KB of raw .as and .mxml code. 2 separate CSS files are imported. 120KB of TTF fonts. 650KB of SWF fonts. Compiling using Flex 2.0.1 Hotfix 3 SDK. Each tests was run 3 times with the average time reported.

I'm pleased to announce Antennae release 1.0001 has now been posted. The full release notes are available online. Please leave me any feedback if you run into issues or have feature requests. Below is a summary of the key updates: Flex based AIR application support New targets and tasks have been added to support the building, running, and packaging of Flex based AIR applications. A sample project has been put together that demonstrates the use of these new targets.

Adobe announced today that beginning in November qualified education end-users will be able to get Adobe Flex Builder 2 for free. I think this is another good move on Adobe's part to help open up and promote the platform. Full details here.

I spent most of today putting the finishing touches on a utility AIR application. The application is geared towards making it easy to explore what kind of custom Flex Window and Native Window objects you can create and how they look. It includes some debugging features and the ability to generate AS3 and MXML (Window only) code that matches the selected options. I played around with the latest SWFObject and the badge install so that grabbing the application should be painless.

I've posted a version of my slides (0.5MB PDF) that were used for my Flashforward talk and MAX talk under the titles "Automation of Flex Building and Unit Testing" and "Continuous Integration with Flex, FlexUnit, and Ant" respectively. The demonstration files used in the talk are mostly equivalent to the tutorial and template directories that are included in Antennae. The resources mentioned in the talk are listed below: Ant http://ant.apache.org/ FlexUnit http://code.google.