Posted by: Luke Bayes Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:50:00 GMT
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time lately considering and pondering what it is that I really want from my tools.
In an unrelated, introductory message to a random netizen, I just found myself emitting the following statement:
“I want to write clean, elegant, code that results in simple, expressive user experiences. Nothing available today truly satisfies this desire for me.”
Posted by: Luke Bayes Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:02:00 GMT
The Flex 3 SDK was released by Adobe yesterday and this morning, I’m pleased to announce that Sprouts already supports it.
To take advantage of the new Flex 3 SDK, you’ll need to remove your existing sprout gems, clear your sprout cache and make a minor modification to any newly created rakefiles.
Here are the steps you should take to upgrade your sprout gems:
Posted by: Luke Bayes Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:24:00 GMT
I just got some enhancements into the Sprout packages that provide full support for asdoc and compc.
The AsDoc support is especially handy because it gives the full terminal interface, but also allows you to generate documentation against any already defined MXMLC task without duplicating all of your configuration!
A Rakefile might look something like this:
desc "Compile the main application"
mxmlc 'bin/SomeProject.swf' do |t|
t.input = 'src/SomeProject.as'
t.source_path = 'lib/yourlib'
t.source_path = 'lib/asunit'
t.source_path = 'test'
t.source_path = 'src'
end
desc "Generate documentation"
asdoc :doc => 'bin/SomeProject.swf'That’s it!
You just set an MXMLC task as a prerequisite for an asdoc task and the configuration options are inherited.
The latest as3 bundle gem automatically adds something similar to all of your new project rake files.
sprout -R
sudo gem update sproutBe sure to let us know if anything doesn’t work as expected!
Posted by: Luke Bayes Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:25:00 GMT
As Sprouts starts to pick up momentum, we’re starting to get questions about creating custom generators. So I thought I’d throw a quick post up to share the info more broadly.
I’m actively working on the ‘developer’ gem so that you will eventually be able to stub new sprout gems for tools, libraries, bundles, tasks and generators. Unfortunately that gem isn’t quite ready yet so for the time being, you’ll have to build your generators manually.
If you’re looking for code generators within the context of an existing project, here’s how to do it:
Posted by: Luke Bayes Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:56:00 GMT
Ever spend half a day getting your development environment all set up for a new project? How about longer? Ever multiply that cost by the number of team members involved? How about running Continuous Integration tools (Like CruiseControl.rb) with ActionScript?
Sprouts can get you up and running with a new ActionScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0 or Flex project in minutes regardless of whether you’re running DOS, Cygwin, OS X, Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora.
Sprouts also provides deep, versioned support for shared ActionScript libraries including AsUnit, Corelib, Cairngorm, PureMVC, and more!
We’ve finally reached public beta, and even have a shiny new website contributed by Todd Cullen!
We have complete documentation available, you can check out our Google Code project and even join our discussion group and let us know if anything doesn’t work as expected!
I’ll be presenting the latest and greatest tomorrow evening (Thursday February 21, 2008) at the 2nd meeting of the SanFlashcisco group.
Hope to see you there!
Posted by: Luke Bayes Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:38:00 GMT
Together, they can save and waste an amazing amount of time!
I finally broke down today and got an iPhone. Thanks to the fanboys and marketing hype, it is still embarrassing to break out in public, much less write about! But I just feel compelled to get this out there in case I need it again and in case it helps someone else.
Basically, I wanted to get the iPhone email client to pull down my Google Apps hosted email. It seemed like the best way to do this was to set up IMAP.
Posted by: Luke Bayes Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:57:00 GMT
An interesting conversation has emerged in the comments of a FlexOnRails post. Firstly, I’d like to thank those guys for mentioning us! Secondly, I’d like to apologize for writing such a ridiculously long post in their comments section, it’s kind of embarrassing, but anyone that knows me knows that I can run off at the mouth (or keyboard) like no one else!
For the sake of getting something productive done today, I’m just going to copy and paste the comments in here:
Posted by: Luke Bayes Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:07:00 GMT
I’ve been meaning to write up a huge tutorial on this subject for years now. Since I still haven’t gotten around to it, I’m just going to jam out some quick notes for those of you that might not have caught this stuff buried in the AsUnit 2.5 and AsUnit 3.0 sources.
There are a handful of features in AsUnit that help us develop visual entities. These features are:
TestRunner.start methodaddChild/removeChild TestCase helpersaddAsync helper methodFor the sake of getting this thing done, I’m not going to go into insane amounts of detail here, so here’s the quick and dirty.
Posted by: Luke Bayes Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:59:00 GMT
In the spirit of always running late to the party, I just discovered a blog today that other folks have probably been following since ‘06.
This guy articulates many of my gripes, moans and complaints in a way that is definitely helpful. If you’re building large applications with ActionScript 3 (or Flex for that matter), he can provide some insight into why things just aren’t working the way you may have expected them to.
Posted by: Luke Bayes Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:50:00 GMT
As per our earlier post, Ali and I presented on Flex Application Frameworks last week at SilVaFUG.
You can watch a recording of the preso here, check out our slides here and grab the source files here
