Flash Builder 4 and the Flex 4 SDK have just been both released! You can read more about the new features on the official release blog post:

Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4 final releases are here...

And here come the download pages:

• Flex SDK download page
• Flash Builder 4 60-days trial download page

Like any other AIR application, rSoul is cross-platform and works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You can install it and get the sources from the rSoul website:

http://rsoul.promethe.net

Here are a few screenshots:

Features

This first release includes the following features:

• Online/Away/Busy status
• Location configuration
• "Remember Password" option
• Auto-connect option
• Contacts list
• Add/Remove contacts
• Tabbed chat
• Auto-update
• Connection errors handling

Known issues

• Some special characters are not handled correctly
• The application does not (yet) minimize itself to the system tray
• Contacts status is not updated

If you found any bug or have any suggestion please feel free to add a comment...

You can also look at Michael Chaize's event photo album on Flickr!

Volumes monitoring

AIR will provide new APIs to monitor volumes such as USB sticks or Firewire hard drives. Those APIs will enable the user to listen for specific events dispatched when a volume is mounted/unmounted.

Native-processes handling

A new API will enable access to native processes. It will now be possible to launch any "classic" third-party application using ActionScript 3 only. The only drawback being that such AIR applications loses their cross-platform ability and can not be deployed using standards *.air files.

Another API makes it possible to open a file using the default application. A *.txt file would them open itself in notepad, a *.psd file inside Photoshop, a path will open the explorer, etc... and this feature will be available inside any AIR application!

Direct microphone data access

And this is the feature a lot of people have been waiting for! Microphone data will now be directly available through dedicated events and a ByteArray object. It will work pretty much the same way sockets/loaders do: each time sound data is received by the microphone, an event will be fired with the embed sound data as a ByteArray object. It is then very easy to manipulate this sound data or even save it to a *.wav file.

Click the photo to view the full video on Lee Brimelow's "The Flash Blog"

Thank you very much Mike and Lee for all those great news! I bet MAX will be even bigger.

Flex developers can use the "Design" view of Flash Builder to design their UI. But this method requires to already have the components you want to work with and make sure they are full MXML. Because the WYSIWYG editor of Flash Builder does not interpret ActionScript components, it is more of a "What You See Is ore Or Less What You Get". If you need more than the Flash Builder WYSIMOLWYG editor -- and I certainly hope you do -- here are two awesome tools to create and export UI mockups.

More details right after the jump...

The first one is called Balsamiq Mockups and enables you to create the rich UI mockups per say.

The second one is called Napkee, and import Balsamiq mockups to export them targeting an HTML/AJAX web application or a Flex  project :

Those two applications use Adobe AIR. It is actually very neat to design AIR/Flex applications using an AIR Application. In my mind, this is quite a good proof that Flex and AIR are both relevant and efficient technologies.

The Problem

The main problem is that even if you select a Flash 10 Flex SDK, Flex Builder configure the compiler to use Flash 9 only. In my first article, I explained that a simple solution was the following :

1. Open the Properties of your Flex Project (right click on the project in the Flex Navigator tab then “Properties”)
2. Go to “Flex Compiler”
3. Check “Use a specific SDK” and select the SDK you just installed
4. Check “Require Flash Player version” and set the value to 10.0.0

But the thing is you can not specify a "Required Flash Player version" for a Flex Library Project. When you will try to compile, any reference to a Flash 10 class will cause an error even if you have selected the right Flex SDK (steps 1, 2 and 3 above).

The Solution

The solution is rather simple :

1. Close Flex Builder
2. Go to the root folder of your Flex Library project
3. Open the file named ".actionScriptProperties" with your favorite text editor
4. Search for  htmlPlayerVersion="9.0.28" and change it to  htmlPlayerVersion="10.0.0"
5. Launch Flex Builder 3
6. Try to compile your Flex Library Project

Your project should compile normaly and Flash 10 classes wont cause any error anymore.

Nevertheless, it is quite weird to have to change the "htmlPlayerVersion" to "10.0.0" in order to compile properly. It seems the "htmlPlayerVersion" is actualy used to do more than just setting the HTML wrapper...

Flash 10 Beta is a good occasion to test some of the new features that the next version of this incredible piece of software will provide. This short step-by-step "how to" tutorial will teach you how to install the new Flex SDK and configure Flex Builder 3 in order to use it.

1. Install Flex Builder 3

As we start, only Flex Builder 3 (and eventually the Flash 9 Player) is installed.

2. Download the last nightly build of the Flex SDK

Here are the download pages :

• Flex 3 SDK download page
  
• Flex 4 codename "Gumbo" SDK download page

I'm currently working with the Flex 4.0.0.2862 SDK myself, but any Thursday May 15, 2008 or later release will do the trick.

3. Install the new Flex SDK

Extract the SDK wherever you want. FLEX_SDK is used hereafter to refer to the directory where you unzipped the SDK. I recommend to extract the SDK in your FLEX_BUILDER\sdks\SDK_VERSION directory, where FLEX_BUILDER refers to your Flex Builder 3 installation directory ("C:\Adobe\Flex Buider 3\sdks" by default) and SDK_VERSION refers to the version number of the nightly build SDK you downloaded (4.0.0.2862 for me). Here is how it should look :

4. Install the Flash 10 Debug Player Plugin

ATTENTION : before installing the Flash 10 Player Plugin for your browser, make sure to uninstall any previous version. You might want to follow Adobe's instructions in order to do that well. Refer to those instructions if you encounter any Flash 10 Player Plugin installation issue.A good thing would be to have two different web browsers : one to actually daily browse the internet, with the stable Flash 9 Player Plugin installed, and a second one to debug/run Flex projects with the Flash 10 Player Plugin.

To find the suitable Flash 10 Player Plugin installer for your favorite web browser, go to "FLEX_SDK\runtimes\player\10" and then browse the folder that matches your OS ("win" for Windows for exemple). The idea here is to install the Flash 10 Player Plugin for the web browser that is used by Flex Builder 3 to debug/run your projects. This default web browser can be changed in Flex Builder 3 in the "Window\Preferences...\General\Web Browser" configuration menu.

5. Configure Flex Builder 3

Now we have to configure Flex Builder 3 in order to be able to use this very SDK. Launch Flex Builder 3 and then go to "Window\Preferences...". You should have this window :

You should have the first two lines only at first. Then you click on "Add...", and browse into your drive to select the FLEX_SDK directory. If you select the right path, Flex Builder should be able to retrieve the SDK name all by itself. Then click on the "OK" button. It is better to keep your old Flex 3 SDK as the default SDK fpr compatibility purposes.

The Flash 10 enabled SDKs are messing up with Flex Builder 3 auto-completion, so you might want to have the new ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference which provides information on the syntax and usage of the new APIs. Just create the "FLEX_SDK\doc" directory and extract the ZIP archive in it.

Because Flex Builder will not fully recognize this new Flex SDK, it might erase some of your "import" directives that seam to be wrong (but that are not...). It happens a lot especially when you use the "flash" package. To avoid this, you might want to uncheck "Keep imports organized" in the "Window\Preferences...\Flex\Editors\ActionScript Code" configuration panel. I know automated imports organizing is a great feature, but "import" directives vanishing all by themselves is a real mess and it does areally happend a lot. Thus, do not forget to re-enable this great feature when the Flex SDK will be fully integrated and functional.

6. Create a new Flex project

Now that the new SDK is available in Flex Builder 3, create a new Flex project. In the project properties (right click on the project in the Flex Navigator tab then "Properties") go to "Flex Compiler".  Check "Use a specific SDK" and select the SDK you just installed ("Flex 4" in my case), then check "Require Flash Player version" and set the value to 10.0.0.

7. Update the Flash Player detection system

As the Flash 10 player is still a beta, the version number is not well recognized by the Flash Plugin detection system. You have to edit the HTML template that is used to generate the HTML document where your SWF is going to be embed. In the directory of your Flex project, go to "html-template" and open the file "AC_OETags.js" with a text editor. Replace the whole "GetSwfVer" function with this one :

function GetSwfVer()
{
  // NS/Opera version >= 3 check for Flash plugin in plugin array
  var flashVer = -1;
 
  if (navigator.plugins != null && navigator.plugins.length > 0)
  {
    if (navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash 2.0"] || navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash"])
    {
      var swVer2 = navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash 2.0"] ? " 2.0" : "";
      var flashDescription = navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash" + swVer2].description;
      var descArray = flashDescription.split(" ");
      var tempArrayMajor = descArray[2].split(".");
      var versionMajor = tempArrayMajor[0];
      var versionMinor = tempArrayMajor[1];
      var versionRevision = descArray[3];
 
      if (versionRevision == "")
      {
        versionRevision = descArray[4];
      }
      if (versionRevision[0] == "d")
      {
        versionRevision = versionRevision.substring(1);
      }
      else if (versionRevision[0] == "b")
      {
        versionRevision = versionRevision.substring(1);
      }
      else if (versionRevision[0] == "r")
      {
        versionRevision = versionRevision.substring(1);
        if (versionRevision.indexOf("d") > 0)
        {
          versionRevision = versionRevision.substring(0, versionRevision.indexOf("d"));
        }
      }
      var flashVer = versionMajor + "." + versionMinor + "." + versionRevision;
    }
  }
  // MSN/WebTV 2.6 supports Flash 4
  else if (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("webtv/2.6") != -1)
    flashVer = 4;
  // WebTV 2.5 supports Flash 3
  else if (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("webtv/2.5") != -1)
    flashVer = 3;
  // older WebTV supports Flash 2
  else if (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("webtv") != -1)
    flashVer = 2;
  else if (isIE && isWin && !isOpera)
  {
    flashVer = ControlVersion();
  }
  return flashVer;
}

8. The end...

And... that's it ! You should now be able to debug/compile your Flex project using your brand new Flex SDK with the new Flash 10 Beta features !