Code Collaborator solves this by a providing a highly functional web-based workflow tool that hooks into your source-code repository (Perforce, , and provides a very quick and easy way to check out changes, comment on them, gather feedback, mark defects, and approve code reviews. This is a great way to increase code quality and consistency, and provides a method for developers to keep up to date with each other, and even learn from each other. It does actually make code review fun!

An aside about defect tracking. On the current project, it sounds like code collaborator defects track at about 20% or so of bugs filed by QE. This is a substantial percentage of bugs that are caught early!

From my experience, Code Collaborator from SmartBear is a good, functional tool despite the ugly UI. I’d be interested in hearing of other useful peer code review tools that people are using.

Mac:
/private/var/log/system.log (or the console app)

Linux:
/home/<username>/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/Logs/Install.log

I know I’m saving somebody a headache.

Recently, a coworker asked me – ‘What’s Robotlegs all About?’. I waved my hands around a bit, rambled about dependency injection, Spring, Swiz, until his eyes glazed over. Talking about frameworks only goes so far.

Enter Richard Lord’s fantastic AS3 framework comparison using Flexcaster, an example podcast application. Its a pretty simple example, but it compares the syntax and structure of a variety of frameworks including Robotlegs, PureMVC, Swiz, Cairngorm, as well as pure Flex 3 – all using a simple, uniform example.

Comparing the level of complexity, simply from a class-count, is a pretty interesting exercise. Check out these numbers!

• Flex 3 – 13 Classes
• PureMVC – 28 classes
• Robotlegs – 30 classes (!)
• Cairngorm – 20 classes
• Swiz – 18 classes

To the framework’s defense, they are designed to scale to much larger projects, and its not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Robotlegs, for example, demonstrates two different feed implementations, and has a slightly different UI class model than the Flex 3 example. The Swiz example, eschews the Command pattern, and instead uses singletons. Its definitely an eye-opener to compare how they differ.

• Advanced navigation
• Indentation Correction
• MXML and Actionscript file Templates
• Conditional Breakpoints (!)

I would definitely recommend checking out his slides, or his talk on Adobe TV. You’ll be more productive in no time!

Speaking along with Jeremy Clark and Justin Van Slembrouck, we’ll be covering the project from both a design and development perspective. I’ll be digging into some of the new text technology in AIR 1.5 and FP10 that made this project possible. I hope to see you there!

Session details:
Creating a Next-Generation Desktop News Reader
Wednesday, November 19
Moscone West 2018, 2:00-3:00 p.m.

While Flash video in the browser is great, the AIR application leverages a number of desktop API’s to improve the viewing experience, while providing DRM support that makes this type of application viable to media companies like DirecTV.

I think this project also proves there is commercial viability for AIR applications. Its probably the first AIR app that you can’t install, which is too bad because its one of the best. Definitely check it out if you have NFL Sunday ticket.

While I got to get my coding mitts in early on the project, the lion’s share of the application was built out by two talented consulting groups – Blitz Agency and gskinner.com. Congrats!

In recent months I’ve been collecting a number of design-related sites, and I think its time to start sharing them with the masses (or, the few who stumble upon this site).

First off the list is grain edit, one of my daily reads for discovering beautiful mid-century and mid-century-inspired print work. Above is an image of a vintage Donald Brun poster from a recent post. There’s definitely a lot of great finds in the archives – its worth a look!

Sigh, if only the above print was available for purchase …

AIR provides some great API’s for integrating with other applications. Via the NativeDragManager and Clipboard classes, you can easily export your data in a multitude of formats, including PNG and CSV. Recently I had an project that utilized these features, and I figured it would be good to share the techniques with the community.

In particular this example, framed as a basic stock chart application, demonstrates the following features:

• Native drag-and-drop with PNG images and custom image proxies.

• Copy to Clipboard / Export with both PNG and CSV data formats – Right-click on the chart to get your options

• Example code for customizing the HLOCChart class look-and-feel

These features were factored into ‘behavior’ classes so that they can (fairly) easily be applied to your own AIR apps.

Source is available by right-clicking and selecting ‘view-source’ in the application from anywhere but the chart.