Good Times & Happy Days

Here’s a nice collection of Flex Builder shortcuts to speed up your development that extra little bit.

I must admit, I hadn’t heard of FlexMonkey before today, but it sounds awesome. It allows you to record keyboard/mouse input and then re-run it in your QA testing.

A list of 30 very useful (some essential) AS libraries to use in your Flash & Flex projects.

Here’s an interesting article about Adobe new tools for UI development.

At its AdobeMax conference in San Francisco on Monday, Adobe will hand out a technical preview of Flash Catalyst, a new tool that aims to be a workflow system for designers and software developers creating user interfaces. Announced earlier this year under the code name Thermo, Catalyst will be released in beta early in 2009, Adobe said on Monday. It still isn’t saying when the final product will ship, however.

Adobe have announced a really exciting new labs project called Alchemy.

“Welcome the preview release of codename “Alchemy.” Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®.”

I’ve yet to try CS4 and it’s all new Illustrator -> Flex tools, but here’s a great tutorial/article on using Illustrator CS3 to get scalable skins into Flex.

Ensemble Tofino allows you develop Flex applications from within Visual Studio. For me this is going to be a major plus – the majority of my projects are Flex with a C# backend.

Here’s some features:

• Create new projects in a solution using the Visual Studio wizard approach.
• Run Flex applications from within Microsoft Visual Studio.
  • Set breakpoints at code locations in “.as” or “.mxml” files.
  • Step into code while in break mode.
  • Inspect local variables while in break mode.
• Build errors are reported in the Visual Studio error list, and are linked to the source location.
• Browse ActionScript types from referenced components (SWCs) in the Visual Studio object browser.
• Navigate types and members in ActionScript files via drop-downs in the ActionScript code window.
• Simple installation; Tofino includes the Adobe Flex SDK.
• Adds links to relevant Adobe LiveDocs and PDFs for Flex to Visual Studio Help.

BendPixels is a Flex library that allows you to use PixelBender filters as Flex effects.

An introduction to performing generic (non-graphical) number crunching using Pixel Bender.

A nice introduction to Flex game programming. There aren’t a great deal of resources covering this topic around, but this certainly serves as a great introduction.