Presentation: Introduction to TDD & FlexUnit

This is a summary of what I studied and practiced with TDD & FlexUnit. This presentation is not for persuading developers applying unit testing but it will highlight benefits & vulnerabilities of TDD objectively.

[Vietnamese tag: Bài thuyết trình về FlexUnit và mô hình phát triển phần mềm dựa trên kiểm thử / kiểm tra]

Using Flash Builder 4 on Ubuntu

So, Adobe has discontinued its Linux version of Flex Builder. That’s sad news for us. Anyway, it doesn’t change much since Linux users already have alternatives long before, e.g. FDT, IDEA. Besides, I have been able to run Flash Builder 4 on my Ubuntu (via Wine) for a while to take advantage of its mxml coding hinting and the unique design view. Let me share some of my experiences of using Flash Builer on Ubuntu so far.

Quick AS3 Language Reference Search with Google Chrome’s custom search engine

ActionScript 3 language reference document is any Flash developer’s bible. Whenever you implement something with Flash, you’ll find yourself checking this document regularly. There are plenty of ways to access this document:

1. Open Flash CS* and press F1 to open it’s internal help panel. (Some of my friends do this even when they don’t have any fla to edit).
2. In FlashDevelop, place the caret on a Flash built-in class name and press F1. FD will open the default browser with Google search results within AS3 language reference’s site. (This requires you to open FlashDevelop anyway).
3. Bookmark this site: http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/actionscriptlangrefv3/ (Flash Player 9 AS3 & Flash CS3 components) or this: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/ (Flash Player 10 AS3 & Flash CS4 components) and open it with your favorite browser. Then you’ll need to browse through the classes list.
4. Download this offline FlashCS4 help document and open the index.html file locally with your favorite browser. You’ll also need to browse through the classes list.
   You can also bookmark this local document for quick access.

Now, if you’re using Google Chrome, let me propose another way not only help access the online document quickly but also allow to search for a specific term or class with lightning speed!

Announcing as3-karaoke-player, my first open library

Today I’m very excited to announce my first open source library: as3-karaoke-player. It comes from a request to make a small karaoke website. The idea is that karaoke is a popular kind of entertainment in Vietnam so I thought I would make the core rendering engine open source so that everyone especially my fellow developers can make and/or enjoy karaoke online. (About the said karaoke site, of course I only charged the GUI customization and the Red5 recorder)

You can check out or download the source at Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/as3-karaoke-player/. This library is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Here's the sample player:

(The background photo is taken by me :P )

How to run Flash CS5 on Ubuntu (with Wine)

Updated on 2011-05-24

After a couple of days testing and examining, finally, I have managed to run Adobe Flash CS5 on my Ubuntu machine. As I say "run", I mean that I did not succeed installing the application but I had to copy the installed files from Windows. However, it is worth noting that this is the first Adobe Flash version that runs with workable quality since Macromedia Flash 8. The last 2 versions (CS3 & CS4) is known to be useless when trying to run with Wine.

No more wandering, let's me show you the how to first and then comments later.