Front-end Developer, Designer and Consultant

My Flex & AIR tutorial in .NET mag

I’m really excited to have my first tutorial published in the premier web design magazine .NET issue 192 (Practical Web Design in the USA). The 4 page tutorial uses Flex and Adobe AIR to create a desktop application for uploading and viewing your movies on YouTube. All tutorial files and the finished AIR application are packaged on the CD with the magazine.

Using a few open source API’s the tutorial guides you through creating the project in Flex Builder importing the libraries and instructs on how to create a SWC for use across many projects. Moving on we cover basic Flex UI elements like lists, item renderers, view states and stacks. Finally simple skinning and styling then it guides the user through exporting the final AIR installer file.

The great thing about this tutorial is that you can build upon it in so many ways. Maybe add some Degrafa to the UI and create a great interface, or mix it up with some more web API’s. There is also some useful links, a quick guide on creating the AIR installer badge for your app and where to find more interesting AIR applications like RefreshingApps.com.

You can also download the source files for the tutorial here (ZIP 1.3MB).

I have had some great feedback from this and hopefully the .NET guys will ask me to do another tutorial soon.