I Was A Registered Alien!

Third article in Sitepoint series: Build Flex app that Uploads Video & Twitters

The final part of my "Share Media on Twitter Using Flex" series for Sitepoint has gone live.  This is an interesting one, I show you how to upload video for your tweet to Flickr, pull that video back from Flickr and play it in the Flex app and do "frame grabs" of the video and once more upload those images to Flickr - using bit.ly in the background to shorten the URLs for the video and images and once all that's done post to Twitter (phew, now that's a mouthful).

It's been a good application to build and write about, I hope that there's something in there that Flex developers will find useful.  A shout out to Danny Patterson whose uploadBytes addition to the Flickr ActionScript library was a great help in building this application (Upload ByteArray to Flickr http://blog.dannypatterson.com/?p=250).

Read the article and get the source code here: Share Media on Twitter Using Flex Part III, Video - http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/share-media-flex-twitter-video 

New Sitepoint Flash Builder/Flex 4, Flickr, Bit.ly, Twitter How To

Sitepoint have just published another article that I recently wrote for them, it's a "how to" using Flex to upload images to an online service, Flickr, shorten the URLs with Bit.ly and post the whole thing to Twitter - services, services, services!!

Uploading from Flash is straight forward, that and using Flickr and mixing it all together as a post to Twitter can be found here: Share Media on Twitter Using Flex, Part II: Images - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/share-media-flex-twitter-images/

Oh, and there will be a part III, watch this space...

New Sitepoint Flash Builder/Flex 4, Catalyst, PHP, Twitter How To

Yep, I've been burning the candle at both ends again writing another article for Sitepoint.  It's a how to for building a Twitter/Flex 4 app, with a bit of Photoshop/Flash Catalyst design stuff first.  The app utilises a PHP Proxy to connect to Twitter so that it can operate in the browser without the need of a cross-domain policy.

A big thanks to Sitepoint's Raena Jackson Armitage and her mighty PHP skills and help for the article which can be found here: Social Media on Twitter Using Flex, Part 1: The Basics - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/share-media-flex-twitter/

SitePoint Flash Catalyst / Flash Builder Article Part II

Just realised that the second part of an article that I wrote on the process of building an RIA from Illustrator mockup to Flash Catalyst interaction to Flash Builder application for SitePoint is also live.

This part continues with adding interactions to an Illustrator design in Flash Catalyst and concludes with using Flash Builder to include data from external services to populate the application.

You can find the second part of the article, "Flash Catalyst: Mockup to Masterpiece, Part II" here: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/flash-catalyst-flash-builder-2/ 

New Flash Catalyst / Flash Builder Article for SitePoint

The first part of an article that I wrote for SitePoint on building an RIA with Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder has gone live.  The article is about how you can mock up an interface in Illustrator, convert that file into an interactive interface in Flash Catalyst then use Flash Builder to add application logic to call an external service - in this case using Yahoo's YQL to retrieve data to populate the application.

You can find part one of this article, titled "Flash Catalyst: Mockup to Masterpiece, Part 1" here  http://www.sitepoint.com/article/flash-catalyst-flash-builder/