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Tom and John put on a great 360 | iDev Conference. It was a pretty relaxing conference where we were all well fed (breakfast, lunch, dinner) with sessions that were just the right length. There were also pre-hands-on sessions to bring people like me up to speed that have never worked on iPhone development before. Since I’m a flash developer, James Eberhardt’s hands-on session that relates flash development to the iPhone SDK was especially very helpful. He actually teaches a 2-Day course on it with the Rich Media Institute.

Overall, the conference was well worth it and more than I expected. It was inexpensive and a great introduction to the iPhone development world. It was also nice to learn that part of the fees goes towards a charity. Awesome job Tom and John!

Slides from the conference: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/360idev

Here are a couple links/blogs I collected from the session speakers:
http://www.craftymind.com/
http://iphonedeveloperjournal.com/
http://www.byteclub.com/
http://jonathansaggau.com/blog/
http://gamesfromwithin.com/
http://alanmusselman.com/blog/
http://www.mobclix.com/
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/
http://www.luisdelarosa.com/
http://iphone.timefold.com/training/myschool/resources.html
http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/

I remember this previous problem with a ComboBox not showing up properly when a swf is loaded into a parent swf and the problem came up again as I was updating a project to AS3.

Main reason for problem (according to yarcub):
“The component uses system fonts and masks only work on embedded fonts.
Finally the FP10 new text engine will fix a lot of those issues.”

Here’s more info on the problem and possible solutions:
http://www.gotoandlearnforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=19118

I just bought my ticket for 360|iDev! The show will be going down March 2 to 4, 2009. You can find more details at the conference website: http://360iDev.com It’s being organized by the folks who put on the 360|Flex shows, which is a crowd favorite. Tickets are cheaper on a first come, first serve basis! So buy your tickets asap at http://360idev.eventbrite.com to get the best possible price. I did! See you there. ( I copied this from the receipt, doing my part to spread the word. )

I know everyone is trying to save money so here is a 10% off coupon from Brightkite : “brightkiterocks“. It came out to $315.

Now its time to find a good flight and hotel deal.

UPDATE: Booked a pretty good flight-hotel deal on Hotwire using Discover Card which gives 5% cash back as well. Total came out to be $421 for flight AA roundtrip from LAX and 3 Nights Holiday Inn.

I’m working on converting a AS2 project to AS3 and this error showed up. “WARNING: Text field variable names are not supported in ActionScript 3.0.” I had trouble finding the problem, but it turned out I just had to change the publish settings back to AS2 first then I could delete the text field variable being used for the text field. You can’t change or even see that there is a text field variable when the publish settings are AS3.

Just found out about this AS3 AIR/Flex/Flash Debugger called De MonsterDebugger from Tiago’s Weblog. I’ll definitely have to try it out for my next project. Editing properties during runtime will definitely come in handy when trying to satisfy the positioning of elements for designers.

De MonsterDebugger

I had this problem in Flash, which entailed disabling some dynamic buttons that had mouseover,mouseout and click events when they were moved under a certain area. This was easily solved by creating an invisible button and setting the property useHandCursor = false. So if you want to disable anything that moves under some area, you can just create a button and set its useHandCursor = false and anything below it will not work. I’m pretty sure I came across this problem before because it seems so familiar. Hopefully this post will help me remember how to solve it and others if they come across this problem as well

I’m working on a flash project that I used AMFPHP with before, but it was an older version.  I thought this might be a good time to try out AMFPHP 1.9 Beta.   So I thought I would add the resources and tutorials that I find here.  Its been pretty simple to setup so far following the docs. I used AMFPHP 1.2 before and one thing I’m glad that is gone is the Method Table.  Essentially you had to list the functions that were available for the service, which was annoying because if you made a change to the function params, you’d have to update the Method Table.

Here’s the list of related AMFPHP sites, if you have any other good links please share and I can update the list.

AMFPHP docs
AMFPHP 1.9 beta2 from SourceForge
Video Tutorial - Intro to AMFPHP 1 (gotoandlearn.com) - Set up and simple email service
Video Tutorial - Intro to AMFPHP 2 (gotoandlearn.com) - use mysql to return data
AMFPHP Security Basics based on this blog post by Wade Arnold

Integration with Drupal
Internal: Combining Drupal, AMFPHP, SWFAddress and Flash
Retrieving Drupal nodes with Flex 2
Groups.Drupal Adobe Technologies

UPDATE:
AS3 AMFPHP Tutorial List by Carlos Pinho - Great list, wish I found it earlier.

AS3 AMFPHP Class and Wrapper by Kyle Brekke - Easy to use class for AMFPHP

I just found out there is a Flex Camp event near me and its only $25 on Jan. 31, Saturday.  Now that its here, I’m still debating whether to go or not.  There just aren’t that many sessions that I’m really interested in or probably already saw something similar to at Adobe Max.  I haven’t even caught up with the video sessions I missed from Adobe Max.  For $25 though, its cheap.  If I have nothing else to do, I’ll probably check it out anyways.

Flex Camp OC