Sarah (my beautiful better half) bought me this shirt when she was shopping the other day. Considering my physique, and my line of work as an Adobe Flex developer, I think this is one of the funiest things I’ve ever seen!
I can’t wait to wear it to work on Monday 
The other day I was working on a project, and I needed to create a datagrid which would show the backgroud of the underlying container through. Much to my suprise, you can set the background alpha value of an Adobe Flex 2 DataGrid, but not the alpha value of the headers.
After much searching I found that the DataGrid class has method:
protected function drawHeaderBackground(headerBG:UIComponent):void
Once you know that, it’s a fairly simple matter to extend the DataGrid class and set the properties of the header as you wish. Below is a demo of the class I whipped up with source included incase anyone else comes up against the same problem.
Click on the image to view the application. Right click on the application to view source.
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Adobe Australia have anounced a series of eSeminars for developers happening every Friday from the 6th of June. The thing that makes this new so great is that their happening at times suited for us way down under in New Zealand and Australia (2pm in Sydney and 4pm in Auckland).
The first session is What’s new in Flex 3, and it’s happening on July 6th. The other seminars follow each Friday until August 31st.
There’s a wide range of topics, with something to apeal to everyone,
so head on over to the registration page and sign up.
Excuse the overly dramatic title on this post
The good news
I was very pleased to note yesterday that my blog now shows up as the first result in Google when searching for “Tony Fendall”. Granted, there is only one other Tony Fendall in the world, and he doesn’t have a website as far as I know, but it’s still cool for me. I don’t know where I show up for other queries, but it’s not in the first 50 or so results. If anyone knows of an app that will let you check where your site shows up for various Google queries then I’d love to hear about it.
The bad news
Three weeks ago I submitted my site’s RSS feed to the Macromedia News Aggregator (MXNA).
The site says that they review submissions as soon as possible, and that I will recieve
a conformation email once my site has been added. I know that the guys over at
Adobe have been busy lately with the new releases of Flex 3 and AIR, but I’m
still a bit dissapointed that I still haven’t been added.
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Since Adobe have just released the AIR platform, and since Adobe are keen to get lots of people using AIR as soon as possible, Adobe is running the Adobe AIR Developer Derby.
The competition is to build an application using AIR, and submit it before September 5th.
The prizes are pretty amazing, so I highly suggest you head over and check them out.
The top five entries all win “The Ultimate Development Environment” featuring, among other things, a Mac Pro with 8 processing cores, 4 gigs of RAM and 1.5 terrabytes of hard disk space.
Aswell as a cool computer, the top entry also wins a $100,000 travel voucher from Adobe
to be used for the travel of their choice.
I’m blown away by amount of money that Adobe is putting into this competition, and I think a lot of people are going to be learning AIR for this one. I’m build an app to enter into the contest which may slow down my rate of posting over the next little while. When I get the chance however I’ll blog about some of the new AIR features I’m learning.
Note: This news is a few weeks old now, but I only just discovered it.
Google recently invested $3.9 million in biotech company 23andMe. 23andMe was co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
To quote TechCrunch:
“The company is going to help people take DNA tests to get more information on their genetic health. The company will try to keep costs low and get information back to users as quickly as possible.”
Now with Google’s predisposition to indexing any and all data that they can get their hands on, aswell as their recent achievement of being ranked as the worst major internet destination for user privacy. That combines to make me just a little uncomfortable with the idea that Google could also keep a record of my DNA.
It makes sense for Google though I guess. It’s just part of their never ending
quest to know everything.
The wraps came off apollo today aswell, the official name is Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). The beta release is now available on
Adobe Labs, and can be downloaded here.
The new Flex Builder has built in support for building AIR applications, and there’s an amazing competition on Adobe Labs which I’ll blog about when I get a chance.
The public beta of Flex 3 was released 5 minutes ago on the Adobe Labs. From everything I’ve heard, this is going to be a fantastic next step for the flex platform, and I can’t wait to start playing.
You can get Flex Builder 3 Beta 1 here, and the Flex 3 SDK Beta 1 here.
One really interesting thing of note is that the Flex team will be posting nightly builds of Flex 3 to Adobe Labs. You can’t get more open and transparent than that, but you’d have to really want to, to bother downloading the framework every day 
Thanks heaps to the Adobe Flex team for the fantastic job they do!
Over the last few days I’ve been working on a little flex application to simulate/demonstrate genetic algorithms. This is what I came up with, and I think it works quite well. Personally, I find these “non-intuative” algorithms really interesting, so it was cool to build one and see the visualizations.
Click on the image below to view the application. Right click on the application to view source.
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Here’s my first flex related post. The drawable canvas is a really simple little component that I put together after my work mate Alex explained to me how easy it is to draw on things in flex.
Click on the image below to view the application. Right click on the application to view source.
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