Mrinal Wadhwa is a Software Architect form Bangalore, India. He is interested in User Interfaces, Databases, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Networking, Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Software Design, Architecture, Scalability etc. and is working with a small team trying to bootstrap a software as a service product startup.
I just came to know via the Flex Team blog that Adobe has decided to make Flex Builder free for qualified students and faculty.
The details are still in the works but the target date for this is early November. This is great news as it will help Flex adoption a lot especially in developing countries like India. Thank you Adobe.
So if you are a student or a faculty, keep an eye on the Flex Developer Center. read more
I’ve been on a coding marathon for the past couple of weeks and today I was working with the AIR HTML control.
I found that if you put in an HTML link with target=”_blank” the HTML control fails to launch a new browser window. Is this a bug or am I missing something?
e.g:
<a href="http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com" target="_blank">Mrinal's Blog</a>
UPDATE:
The fact that a navigateToURL call with target set to _blank works fine and launches a new browser window makes me think that the HTML control should support this inherently
The HTML control continues to disappoint me …. If I take the htmlText property of a mx:RichTextEditor and bind it to the htmlText of the mx:HTML …. the input in the rich text editor and the output in HTML dont quite look the same … have to dig into this more
I’ve been playing with Papervision3D in my spare time these past few days and its been a lot of fun… I’ve been going through the documentation and some of the tutorials on the wiki and I have started to build an app that will help me learn.
My intention is to see how can I create some extraordinary user experiences with Papervision3d, Flex and AIR. The new set of Interactive classes introduced in Papervision present some very interesting opportunities to that respect. The first 3D application that I am going to build is a 3D Art Gallery, this will be like a room that you can walk through to see Art on the walls. The panorama example that comes with Papervision helped me create a Room which you can see here. This is an empty room that will make my Art Gallery, move around your mouse to take a look around the room, you can view the source by right clicking on the app. I have modified the panorama example to make it a UIComponent as my main intention is to operate within the Flex Framework. This is a very un-refined example and I will refine it as I go along building the app.
I have also downloaded Blender and at first look it was quite intimidating, but after I went through the video tutorials on their site things have started to make some sense, although its obvious that this tool will take quite some amount of time for me to learn still is seems to have awesome possibilities.
After Ben Forta’s session on Coldfusion and AIR, the taps were let loose and we had a half hour socializing break and I took the opportunity to talk to a few people … I talked to Ryan Stewart, Mike Chambers, Christian Cantrell, Chafic Kazoun and many others … Ryan and I talked about the Adobe SAP relationship and how thats going… I also told him about how the Flex community in India has been growing in recent times and he thought that was pretty cool. I discussed a NativeWindow problem that I had been running into with Chafic and he thought that I might be seeing a bug (Later, I’ll post a sample to discuss it here and then if other people agree that it is infact a bug, I’ll log it).
After the break, we had a long session where people demoed different AIR apps … here are the one’s I remember off the top of my head:
The guys also announced that the videos of all the onAIR sessions from everywhere the bus has been will be available here.
This wraps up my day of live blogging. read more
I won a Big Bag of books from O’Rielly for answering “What are three datatypes added by Adobe to SQLLite for AIR’s embedded database” …. the answer … Date, Boolean, ByteArray … Thank you Adobe and O’Rielly … Now, I need to figure how to get this to India, my bags are already full 
Chafic Kazoun just finished presenting about NativeWindow API in AIR and I loved the session … it was very informative covering exhaustively what the API can do … very cool … I hope they recorded this session.
Ben Forta is now talking about Coldfusion … I have never explored Coldfusion, the technology seems very quick and hence interesting, so I’m listening.
read more
