Somebody teach me how to swaddle please
June 28th, 2006
Well, our baby is now officially born. Flex 2 launched last night, as probably anyone who reads this blog already knows. Hope you like it.
Right now we’ve got a dazed, slightly catatonic team of engineers staring blankly at their keyboards, not sure what to do with themselves. But we’ve been polishing up the chrome on F2 for a long time now, and personally, I’ve got a big backlog of thoughts on new and improved features for the SDK.
But I’m not going to share them just yet. I’m betting all of you have some pretty good ideas too. What are they?
June 28th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Hey,
An update manager for people that still live in the stone age and only have 56k connections. Or point me to one I could use.
Sitting and watching a download for 6 hours to have the Adobe server boot me off sucks. :)
This is my problem, guess that is why so many people live in suburbs right?
Good job Ely and the rest of the gang, I would just like to get FlexBuilder2 let alone worry about future enhancments.
Anyway, will try again tonight, at least I have beta3 to keep working in!
Peace, Mike
June 28th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Congrats – looking very cool.
Can we have lots and lots of samples please. As crazy and diverse as possible so we can understand the edges of what’s possible. Get your engineers just writing samples and apps for a month so we can understand what’s possible and they can spend some time thinking about this from the other side of the API.
I know I can go to IFBIN, but I can’t afford it :( The derby was good but I’d like to be able to build on that work.
There’s some cool stuff on the labs showcase but very few have samples. The components you’ve posted here have been a great help, but it’s such a big scope that they only scratch the surface. I’d like to see a lot of wrappers for Yahoo maps, google maps, Virtual earth we can mash with.
also what about Flash Lite – can felx be used to develop stuff
June 28th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
D’oh – wasn’t clear… I’d like to see many samples with source – that’s what’s in short supply,
June 29th, 2006 at 5:52 am
This is a difficult question to answer from the perspective of just the SDK. I can think of a lot of things that are part of the whole system but not really part of the SDK.
But I’ll take you at your word and limit my answers to just the SDK:
1) More stuff at run-time that is currently limited to compile-time: mxml loading, style-sheet parsing, resource bundle management, etc. Hacks for this stuff exist already, which I guess testifies to how much people want or need it.
2) Better menu bar classes. I’m not sure how important this is — do RIA’s really need or want menu bars? — but right now the menu bar is almost usable but not quite fully baked. We still need better support for accelerator key decoration (i.e., right justified text in a menu label), graphics, etc. Or maybe this is there and I just haven’t found it?
3) Go further with collection classes and weak references. The Dictionary was a great first step, but we need more along those lines: arbitrary weak references, for example.
4) More RTTI. And I’m really thinking not just type information but also debugging information. It’s very useful to be able to look at the stack at runtime to create runtime diagnostics. We can do it now with an Error instance, but that’s kind of a hack and only available in the debug player.
5) Typed Arrays in ActionScript, not just MXML.
Actually, I think the SDK is pretty darn good. I’m a little surprised that I wasn’t able to generate a longer list. Ah well, I’ll come back and post more when I think of them.
June 29th, 2006 at 9:17 am
Great feedback, David. Feel free to post Builder suggestions as well, I’ll make sure they get to the team.
On your specific comments:
1) runtime mxml, styling, skinning, localizations. Good suggestion. Do other people think these are important? All, or some?
2) gotcha. No, I don’t think these are there right now.
3, 4, 5) All very good suggestions. Truth be told, those, these are requests for the player, not the SDK. I’ll forward them on.
Great ideas, keep ‘em coming.
June 29th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
1) A quick dot release to fix up some loose ends like flashtype alignment issues.
2) More extensive file I/O support.
- Can’t return data to flash client in response to a successful file upload.
- Long running requests throw script timeout exceptions
- Download workflow differs from browsers implementation, end users complaining. “Hey, why can’t I select ‘Open’ or ‘Save As’?”
Sorry Ely, not an extensive list but it’s what’s foremost on my mind at the moment! Great work on this release …
July 26th, 2006 at 4:03 am
Wish list:
August 8th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Rick has hit it right on the head with his requests:
– Selected item
August 8th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
On the same note with the selected item it would be nice to be able to select a Chart item, perform the formatting on that Item and then somehow be able to reuse that formatting info…
If not programmatic saving of the new format, at least something along the lines of the style explorer, but for charts…
February 19th, 2007 at 6:43 am
I’m developing a management aplication…The whole application is based on popups and I’ve noticed that when I open a popup a certain memory is being used..I close the popup and guess what…the memory is not given back… I quess that the solution would be to set a weak reference. I’ve tried, but i didn’t manage to do that…please help!!!!!!!!!!!!! the example could be found here: http://adidre.go.ro/popup/erw.swf