Well, another 360Flex has come and gone. I must say that this one exceeded my expectations. Going into it, I had the fear that the European event wouldn’t have the same feel or “cool” factor that the US events had going for them. The SLI party was killer. They waaay overbought on the food and alcohol, but Michael Labriola, the crazy Brit guy with the red hair (sorry, I forgot names) and their posse didn’t let it go to waste.

The sessions were good and there was a lot of quality there. Tom and John were cool as always when they put on a 360Flex conference. I’m definitely looking forward to San Jose.

I was sitting here at 360Flex|Milan and I had a conversation with Michael Labriola about DragManagers in AIR. We both lamented that in Flexbuilder 3 beta 2, we were able to use both the NativeDragManager and the DragManager at the same time (albeit it was a bit hacky). In an earlier post, I demonstrated a MonkeyPatch that allowed you to use the Flex DragManager inside a WindowedApplication in AIR. This was great, but you lose the ability to use Native Dragging/Dropping in your AIR app. This evening, I was finally pissed off enough to rewrite the DragManager how I think Adobe SHOULD have done it in the first place. You use the DragManager class for both Native and Flex-based drag/drop and it’ll pretty much figure out which one you wanted to use. If you’re doing manual Native dragging OUT of your app, the doDrag() method has an additional boolean value at the end to specify that it’s supposed to begin a native drag operation. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail on how it was done, but the code is posted below with view-source enabled. DragManager and SystemManager have been MonkeyPatched.  It’s been liberally commented, so hopefully you can figure it out. Post a comment if you have trouble with it or it screws up because I missed catching a bug here or there.

DualDragManagers.air

Well, my flight has been booked. I’m officially going to 360 Flex in Italy. It was really cool of the 360 Flex conference guys making the first of 3 days free and open to the public. Hopefully it’ll get those people who were on the fence about it to make the trip.

I haven’t worked much on this blog lately because I’m finishing up 3 articles for InsideRIA.com on Encrypting Flex Applications. I’ll post links to them here once they go live.

Since attending 360Flex in Atlanta, I wanted to learn a bit about skinning with Degrafa. For one of my own personal projects, I needed to create some nice scrollbars that would go with my black and purple color scheme. Now keep in mind that I am NOT a designer. Most of my coding experience before learning Flex/AIR centered around backend Java Servlets and other hidden technology. View-Source is enabled if you wanted to see how it’s done. I still don’t know how to get rid of the stupid white box between the two scrollbars. If someone would like to comment and let me know, that’d be great.

Well, I’m here at 360 Flex in Atlanta that’s about to kick off this morning. It officially kicked off last night at the party, but the meat and potatoes starts today. After talking to quite a few of the other presenters, it looks like I have to start a blog. I couldn’t sleep, so here I am at 5:50am writing my first blog entry.

I own my own company called Swift Mako Software. Don’t bother clicking the link. I haven’t had time to set up a real website. It’s just a logo draft. I primarily consult for Simplified Logic, Inc., but also write some of my own code in my spare time.

My presentation is on Wednesday right after lunch on a software licensing product called Nitro-LM. It’s a first of its kind licensing tool that I developed a Flex/AIR client for. It’s been around for about 3 years in the Java/.NET/Eclipse circles, but this is the release of the interface for Flex. It’s got some really neat features and stuff, but I’ll save that for a future post.

The Omni hotel pretty much rocks. Here is a shot of the view of olympic park from my room.