You can download the Internet Explorer 8 Beta from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx. Overall, it’s quite an interesting update – and most noticeably it shows a distinct push on the innovation front. Since I’m talking about it, I’ll go over a few of the noticeable new features, and then get onto the specifics of the “accelerator” and “web slices” features.
If anyone out there is using Marks’ ImageSizer AIR application, you may have noticed a new update has appeared – imaginatively called ‘Version 0.3.9′.
Functionality wise, the primary changes are that the restrictions on the number of images that can be processed have been removed – the original ImageSizer would only let you process 10 images at a time – a sensible restriction, because the application is pretty memory intensive when it gets going, as the component loads each of the images into memory at once. Instead of actually fixing this issue however (that’s in the pipeline) I’ve just removed the images limit, so don’t go processing lots of images in one go.
For all of its wonderful components, Flex doesn’t seem to have anything that can easily play an flv. Even the examples in the Tour De Flex application all use basic Flex buttons, rather than the more interactive FLVPlayback component, which leaves you with either a lot of work to do, recreating the existing flash component, or sucking it up and cutting down the interactivity. One of the main reasons we use Flex is because everything is so easy to put together, and it just strikes me as odd that there’s no built in FLVPlayback component.
However! All is not lost, thanks to this timely post from Flex Examples: http://blog.flexexamples.com/2008/12/11/using-the-flash-flvplayback-control-in-flex/
It’s not really groundbreaking stuff, but it’s a good place to start – and you can learn the basics that would show you how to use more Flash components in Flex. All it really needs is an enhanced display – something with those magic attributes that make things work so well in the Flex design view…
FlexMonkey is a way of performing Unit testing on Flex projects. It looks interesting, and is something we’ll have a look at when we get a few more Flex Projects through production…
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