Just over a year ago, I posted on this blog that I was becoming a full time Flex freelancer. I had a few clients from different parts of the world at hand, some interesting projects and good confidence in my skills, which I believed were enough to succeed. But then came the recession. My major client called off his project after 80% of the first phase was completed(I don’t blame him – It was a real estate, local & small business project and even if completed, there couldn’t be a worse time to launch something such). Soon, I found myself working on small MP3 players, maintaining and enhancing applications written by bad, unimaginative programmers with even worse coding styles instead of working on cool and creative applications like I had hoped to.

But luckily for me, I got engaged very soon when a friend and old colleague of mine received a large and really interesting Coldfusion project and invited me to join him. Working on the project, and also a couple of it’s spin-offs, spin-offs, I found myself moving from only Flex development to user interface development, AJAX, XHTML, CSS and later on, PHP and mobile development as well. And I loved it all. We began to get more projects that required different technologies and soon found ourselves in need of persons with better or equal grasp of these technologies. But, most importantly, we wanted persons who shared our passion and love for all technology. Persons who, like the both of us, love and live the technologies of tomorrow so much they can deliver it today.

Soon we had our team. And Toobler was born. I am proud to say that in just over a year, the Toobler team has already successfully developed and delivered more than a few web, desktop and mobile applications using a variety of technologies such as Coldfusion, Flex, AIR, PHP, Android etc. In between, we also launched a company website and even revamped it completely once (www.toobler.com) to reflect our growth.

But still, there’s nothing like first love. Being the hard core fan of the Adobe Flash platform that I am, Flex projects are what excite me the most. And It’s always me who works and manages all the Flex projects. And no matter what, I’m always hungry for some good and creative Flex projects.

The user group aims to bring together people working or aspiring to work on Adobe technologies and provide them with a platform to share knowledge and increase contacts within the industry. Interested people can easily join the community by logging on to http://godsowndevelopers.com/.

• Office file interoperability to easily read, write and update spreadsheets
• Server Manager to centrally manage multiple ColdFusion servers, simplifying administration of your environment across clusters
• ColdFusion as a Service to access ColdFusion services through AMF and SOAP without writing CFCs
• Built in Adobe AIR Local/Remote Database Synchronization
• Object Relational Mapping to build database independent applications without writing SQL
• New AJAX controls including multimedia, mapping and more
• Enhanced Caching to improve performance of your ColdFusion applications

My technical knowledge:
Flex, AIR, Actionscript 3.0, Cairngorm, Remoting, Livecycle DS, Blaze DS, Skinning, Custom component development, Flash, Silverlight, UI design, Usability, Web 2.0, SOA, Webservice, XML, Coldfusion, PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, Fireworks, Photoshop etc

private function convertToXML():void
{
var product:ProductVO = new ProductVO();
product.id = 12;
product.name = ‘test product’;
product.description = ‘test desc’;
product.price = 100;
product.thumbnail = ‘image1.jpg’;
var xmlProduct:XML = voToXml(product, ‘product’);
}

private static function voToXml(vo:Object, qName:String):XML
{
var qn:QName = new QName(qName);
var xmlDocument:XMLDocument = new XMLDocument();
var simpleXMLEncoder:SimpleXMLEncoder = new SimpleXMLEncoder(xmlDocument);
var xmlNode:XMLNode = simpleXMLEncoder.encodeValue(vo, qn, xmlDocument);
var xml:XML = new XML(xmlDocument.toString());
return xml;
}

Download

UPDATE : You can download the flash source file from this link

This is a copy paste from adobe flashplayer features page

3D effects New

Create more intuitive, engaging interfaces using built-in support for 3D effects. Get started quickly without being a 3D master by designing in 2D and easily transforming and animating in 3D. Fast, extremely lightweight, and simple-to-use APIs, along with 3D tools in Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional software, make motion that was previously accessible only to expert users via ActionScript® language or custom third-party libraries available to everyone.

Custom filters and effects New

Create high-performance, real-time effects for cinematic experiences that quickly engage users. With new Adobe Pixel Bender™, the same technology behind many filters and effects in Adobe After Effects® software, these dynamic and interactive effects can be used both in production with After Effects CS4 and live with Flash Player 10. The Pixel Bender just-in- time (JIT) compiler can also be used to process other types of data, such as sound or mathematical functions, asynchronously in a separate thread.

Advanced text support New

Take advantage of a new, flexible text layout engine that brings print-quality publishing to the web, building on more than 25 years of Adobe expertise in typography. Gain more control over text layout using an extensible library of ActionScript 3.0 text components to flow text and sophisticated typographic elements such as ligatures across multiple columns, around inline images, bidirectionally, vertically, or chained together. Create multilingual rich Internet applications (RIAs) using device fonts that can now be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled, or build your own unique text components.

Dynamic sound generation New

Use enhanced sound APIs to dynamically generate audio and create new types of audio applications such as music mixers and sequencers, real-time audio for games, and even audio visualizers. Work with loaded MP3 audio at a lower level by extracting audio data and supplying it to the sound buffer. Process, filter, and mix audio in real time through the Pixel Bender JIT compiler to extend creative freedom beyond the visual experience.

Drawing API Enhanced

Perform runtime drawing more easily with restyleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line. Developers can tweak parts of curves, change styling, replace parts, and use custom filters and effects, delivering improved throughput, creative control, and greater productivity. Enhancements to the Drawing API add the z dimension, real perspective, textured meshes in 3D space, a retained graphics model, read/write rendering, and triangle drawing with UV coordinates, while adding memory and improving performance.

Hardware acceleration Enhanced

Use the hardware processing power of the graphics card to paint SWF files into the browser and accelerate compositing calculations of bitmaps, filters, blend modes, and video overlays faster than would be performed in software.

Vector data type New

Use the new typed array class for better performance, efficiency, and error checking of data.

Dynamic Streaming New

Show exceptional video with streams that automatically adjust to changing network conditions. Leverage new quality-of-service metrics to provide a better streaming experience.

Speex audio codec New

Take advantage of the new, high-fidelity and open source Speex voice codec, which offers a low-latency alternative for voice encoding. Flash Player also supports ADPCM, HE-AAC, MP3, and Nellymoser audio.

File upload and download APIs Enhanced

Bring users into the experience by letting them load and save files from your web application. New file reference runtime access allows local processing of data without roundtripping to the server.

This is a custom color picker component to show and select multiple colors. You can use the ’selectedColors’ property to set and get color values. When you select a color it will be added to the selectedColors property. There is a ‘-’ button on roll over to remove a color.

Try a demo here: Multiselect ColorPicker Sample

View the source
Download the source

Jerry