One of the first Adobe Labs releases coming out of Adobe MAX 2008 is Cocomo "a Platform as a Service that allows Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA (Rich Internet Applications)." This reminds me a lot of Macromedia's Flash Communication Server, which was subsequently broken out into Flash Media Server, Flash Data Services (LiveCycle/BlazeDS) and Flash Remoting. Read More »

One of the big announcements at Adobe MAX this year was the release name of Adobe Thermo, which is now called Adobe Catalyst. Since seeing the many demos of Catalyst on various blogs I've been anticipating its release for a long time. This is a tool that I think has been missing from the designer-to-developer work flow for far too long. It appears Adobe has a pulse on the pain points of designers, as well as developers, in regards to the communication gap between designers and developers. Adobe has listened and Adobe has delivered. Welcome Catalyst, welcome! Read More »

**Update**: Adding the Class Path to the fl package in Flash fixed this issue and cut my original file size of 64KB down to only 32KB, an additional 16KB savings from the below solution. Not sure why I didn't think of this before. I attribute it to lack of sleep. **

I've been using the DataProvider class in Actionscript 3.0 (AS3) quite a bit lately but it wasn't until recently that I tried using it without using the built-in Flash Components such as TileList, ComboBox etc. I needed some custom functionality for a TileList and built my own from scratch and decided to utilize the DataProvider class as my means of managing data. Everything was working as expected until I became satisfied with my newly developed XaTileList and decided to delete the TileList Component from my library to save on file size. In doing so, I started receiving the following errors: 1046: Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: DataProvider.

Going back into my source code I was importing fl.data.DataProvider, I checked all my variable typing to make sure I didn't misspell something, pulled my hair out and invented some new four letter words in the process before it dawned on me that by deleting the TileList Component I have deleted the source for the "fl" package. So I added the TileList Component back into my .fla library and compiled it at 64K. I was pretty impressed with the size of it but something just wasn't sitting right with me. It bothered me that I had all this overhead for the TileList Component that I wasn't even using. Why include all that fat? Read More »