Looks like truth is stranger than fiction...

Microsoft announces that it will support Flash in Internet Explorer 10 on Windows RT and Windows 8 Metro, but not it's own Silverlight....

http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsoft-shuns-its-own-silverlight-while-embracing-flash-214335

Just a kick in the teeth for the Silverlight developers.

OpenPlug, we hardly knew you...

It's a tool I was looking at for a while that allowed you to develop in Flex and then cross compile for a number of mobile platforms, including iOS and Android.  The company that makes it just announced that they are suspending work on it and reassigning all their employees involved in project to other products.  The ability of Flex itself to compile for Air on those platforms (beginning with 4.5.1) probably didn't help the long term prospects for the product.  The timing though, coming almost exactly a month after Adobe's announcement that they were turning Flex over to open source. leads me to believe that it was that announcement that finally sealed the coffin on it.

San Diego Flex User Group November Meeting

New in 4.6 for mobile device support

SplitViewNavigator
SpinnerList
DateSpinner
Callout/CalloutButton
ToggleButton
NativeTextInput (StageText) - primary for Android and Playbook

Dynamic Splash screen
Scroller improvements - item snapping, list paging

Flex on the iPhone

What do the following 3 images have in common (beside being butt-ugly, which is a result of my meager design skills)?



If you said they're from the same "Hello World" application, you'd be largely correct.  The first is a Flash application generated from Flex Builder running in a web browser.  The second is a somewhat modified version of the same application running as a native application on a Windows Mobile 6.1 device.  The third is that same modified version running as a native application on an iPhone.

Flash Builder 4 released

Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder) launched as of yesterday.  It also looks like Creative Studio 5 (the one that supposedly allows you to deploy Flash to the iPhone and other portable devices) will be launched on April 12.

AMFParser

One of the problems with trying to debug a Flex application is that the data being communicated in requests and responses between the client and the service is transmitted in Action Message Format (AMF), so it isn't directly visible in most web debugging proxies.  What most people do to overcome this is use Charles, a web debugging proxy that supports parsing of AMF.  I've used Charles previously with Java web applications, but I didn't particularly care for it and have been using Fiddler instead for some time.