Summary
Artima has published its second book, Flex 4 Fun by Chet Haase. This book covers the graphics and animation parts of Flex 4: the fun stuff! Along the way it gives many insights and tips on how to use graphics and animation to create better users experiences.
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Flex is a library for creating applications that run on the powerful Flash runtime, enabling you to build standalone or browser applications. Flex always made it easier for developers to create robust Flash applications, but Flex 4 makes it possible create applications with more richness and customization. Features in Flex 4 include access to sophisticated image processing, and skinning components with designer tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. Using design tools and Flex, you can make your applications stand out.
The book Flex 4 Fun by Chet Haase explains how to take advantage of the new features in Flex 4 that give you more access to the graphical richness of Flash. It is an advanced, hands-on guide to the side of Flex that enables rich, compelling user experiences. And if you want to see some good examples of the power and features of Flex 4, the book's many example applications are a great place to look. You can read more about the book, download a free sample chapter, and order it from here:
The author, Chet Haase, was an engineer on the Flex SDK team at Adobe Systems, Inc., during the development of Flex 4. He was responsible for Flex effects, writing the new effects infrastructure and classes for the release. Prior to his work at Adobe, he worked at Sun Microsystems for several years, and co-authored the book Filthy Rich Clients about creating rich user interfaces with the Java client platform. He currently works at Google, Inc., on the Android UI toolkit team. His entire career has been in graphics software, from the application level to APIs and libraries to drives for graphics chips. As long as it puts pixels on the screen, he's interested.
Chet filled the book with insightful tips on user interface programming and created nearly seventy examples expressly for the book to demonstrate the concepts presented in the text. You can play with those example apps here (click on "Browse the books demo applications"):
Chet also sprinkled the book with a bit more personality than the average technical book. You can get a glimpse of his style in his two latest blog posts, Flex 4 Fun: Only n left-- order soon and Book Montage, or in the free sample chapter, Graphics.
If you're in the Bay Area, Chet will be giving a talk at the Silicon Valley Flex User Group (SilvaFUG) meetings on October 12th and 14th. The book (but not Chet) will be making an appearance at the bookstore in the Adobe MAX conference Oct 23 to 27 in Los Angeles. And Chet will be giving a talk and doing a book signing at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium in November. If you can't make any of these meetings or conferences, you can get a copy here:
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