Monday, June 1, 2009

Effects in Flex 4 SDK Beta: Part 1

As part of the beta launch, I wrote an article about the new effects that are part of Flex 4.

They asked for a single article of about 2500 words, and I churned out a monster weighing in at over 10,000 words. Apparently, I have a way with words: way too much.

After much gnashing of teeth and painful whittling down, we compromised on 2 articles. Part one, which covers the Animate superclass of the new effects and a handful of the more basic effects, is now live. Look for Part 2 soon. (Update: Part 2 is now live)

Check out the other articles while you're there - my articles focus specifically on effects and ignore a lot of the other great changes in the release (because I knew other articles would cover them and because I was having a hard enough time getting the article down to a reasonable size without trying to explain more). For example, Matt Chotin (Flex Product Manager) wrote an overview of the new features in What's New in Flex 4 SDK beta and Joan Lafferty (on the Flex SDK QA team) covers differences in this release and the last one in Differences between Flex 3 SDK and Flex 4 SDK beta.

Lots of stuff to read. Should keep you busy while we keep working on finishing the release.

4 comments:

Glenn Williams - tinylion said...

Hi

just dropped by after seeing the presentation at flash camp. Great stuff by the way.

Cheers for the article. looking forward to part two.

Been working with sdk4 since first nighlty build and have to say it's just a huge step forward (and fun to program which never hurts)

I've no idea why you were asked to cut down your article length, I for one would love to get hold of the full version. There's just no such thing as too many words.

Anyway, thanks again

glenn
tinylion development uk

Chet Haase said...

Hi Glenn,

I figure that too many words are better than too few, but that's probably just petty rationalization for an unwillingness to edit out words that I spent effort jotting down.

Anyway, I think the 2 articles ended up covering the territory pretty well, so hopefully they will be useful.

As you might have seen already, Part 2 is now available, so have at it...

Chet.

a user said...

Hi Chet,
Thanks for those articles, great stuff. I didn't want to sound picky but the link to part 2 (in the article next to update) is broken I think you forgot a colon
Cheers

Chet Haase said...

Julien - thanks for catching that. URL fixed.

Chet.