Another Flex/AIR beta 3 Question

Has there been a change to the number of concurrent XML socket connections allowed in AIR beta 3. It appears to be limited to 16.

Is Flex Builder 3 Beta 2 still available?

Anybody know where I can still download Flex Builder 3 Beta 2 for the Mac? I need to downgrade for a client project :(

Genius Reading Level?

I'm not sure if this is good or bad...

Get a Cash Advance

Digg Candidates Flex App

My buddy Joe Johnston (of AIR iPhone fame) and I created a Flex dashboard to track the 2008 presidential candidates over at Digg. It was my first time using the Digg API, it's pretty slick. Check it out.

Digg Candidates Dashboard

Here's a few screen shots:

Digg Candidates Page Hacked

Saw this while checking out the digg candidates page this morning.

Set Selected Color of LinkBar

We recently needed to set the selected color of a LinkBar item. This happens automagically if you are using it with a ViewStack, we however were using an Array for our dataprovider and for whatever reason, that is not supported. Fortunately I was able to find this little function to fix the problem. It basically loops through the children of your LinkBar. If the item clicked matches the current child in the loop it sets the style to your selected color. Code is below.

private function doLinkBar(event):void{
     for(var i:int=0; i<event.target.numChildren; i++){
      var curItem = event.target.getChildAt(i);
      i==event.index ? curItem.setStyle("color", 0x2a80d5) : curItem.setStyle("color", 0x000000);
     }
   }

tabIndex in Flex Popup Windows

This morning I had what seemed like a very simple task to complete, add a tab order to a small login form in an AIR app we're building. Several hours later I still had not accomplished this. I'm the first to admit that after a year or so of managing a team and not doing much hands on development my Flex skills are a bit rusty but this was ridiculous. The login form is in a modal popup window. Turns out that was m problem. When I would hit "Tab" the focus would jump back to the fields in the main application window. To fix this I created a FocusManager instance for the login screen and then activated it when the screen loaded. Once the screen was "activated" it held the focus while I tabbed through the form fields on that screen. Happy day. The FocusManager snippet is below, it's pretty simple, only two lines.

   //grab focus for the popup window so tabIndex works.
   var fm:FocusManager = new FocusManager(this);
   fm.activate();