God Save the Tween

I’m going to be posting an in-depth tutorial on working with Ant build scripts in Flex Builder 3. My aim is to be able to direct a Flash Developer to this tutorial and have them successfully compile an actionscript project with the help of Ant Builds by the time they’re finsihed.

Topics I’ll cover:

Note: I’m going to assume that anyone wanting to use Ant Builds to streamline their development process has a marginal knowledge of working with Actionscript Projects. As such, I’ll be staying on the topic of integrating Ant Builds into your Actionscript Projects.

1.) Installing Ant and making sure you have the latest JDT package installed

2.) Creating symbolic links via command line

3.) Creating a simple Actionscript Project

4.) Creating a build.xml file for your Project

5.) Successfully deploying an Actionscript Project using your newly aquired knowledge

At this point you may be asking yourself, “Why should I use Ant builds in my projects?” The answer to this is simple. Deployment. When creating any kind of deployment files be it xml, video, or images you probably copy those files over into your deployment directory manually. Ant Build Scripts handle this mundain task for you by flagging directories to automatically copy over their contents into your deploy directory each time you compile your project.

It sounds complicated, but by the time that final week of development rolls around the last thing you’ll want to do is copy files into your deploy directory every time a change to copy or media comes through.

More to come.

I had the fortune of having Flex Builder 3 installed on my machine today at work. Originally, I thought making the transition from Flex 2 plugin for Eclipse would be a long and laborious process, but there’s really nothing to it.

The coolest thing I found so far is the addition of the Actionscript Editor color options section in Preferences > Flex > Actionscript Editor. The process to switch the colors is pretty simple now. It takes nothing short of a miracle to learn how to change the Actionscript Editor colors in Eclipse Flex Builder 2 Plugin. That process took me way too far into the terminal than I was comfortable with, but in the end I learned how to extract and compile .jar files from the command line.

I’m starting a new project at work this week. It’s more of a side project so the timeline permits a little extra explortation on my part, which is why I’m choosing to build it in Flex 3 (I’ve only done Actionscript Projects in Flex, very little mxml, another day maybe). While I did have initial misgivings about the switch, a friend and co-worker of mine pointed out that, really, there’s no difference between how I use  Flex 2 and Flex 3 so I figure I can take a few chances and hope my project doesn’t jump the shark when it comes time to grind it out. So far so good.

I’m testing out the wordpress app on my iPhone. I spent about two hours today reviewing iPhone Dev center documentation. I’m also still trying to figure out how I’m going to write even a single line of code without OS X 10.5.

I got my hands on an iPhone 3G today after weeks of being lazy. My wife and I were out the door before 9am this morning. The guy that helped me out with the purchace didn’t really have any answers regarding the difference between the basic data plan ($30) and the enterprise data plan ($45), only that the enterprise plan was for “business people,” which is understandable. Apple takes care of the phone and AT&T takes care of the voice/data plans.

I did a little bit of research on the AT&T website tonight and I found little or no good explanations for the burning question “Do I need this to access my work email?” Seeing as I set up my email via exchange before I did any research, it brought me to the conclusion that no, I don’t need the enterprise plan to access email via Microsoft Exchange. In fact, I did some googling of the topic and found a fairly helpful post by Mike Deoff regarding the confusion and subsaquent shananagans surrounding the enterprise plan.

Mike mentions his confusion in his original post and provides updates with other bloggers’ discoveries regarding the data plan. He writes:

I found a very good explanation on Howard Forums from someone named RF9:

AT&T will not be blocking Activesync. There really is no way to do it.
The $30 iPhone 3G personal data plan is the same thing as $30 PDA personal (for all other PDAs.) And the $45 Apple business data plan is the same as the $45 PDA business data plan.

You can use Activesync on ALL AT&T data plans with windows mobile and Palm OS PDAs as of now. This includes $15 media net, $30 PDA personal, $45 PDA enterprise, $60+ laptop connect, even on all blackberry plans.

So unless AT&T or Apple concocted some way to restrict activesync based on data plan specifically for iPhone, then it won’t be restricted. Furthermore there’s no reason to.
Exchange Activesync is for personal use as much as it is for business use.

The “business” or “enterprise” data plan for $45 will be required if you’re on a corporate paid plan, or if you have a business account. They will consider those businesses and require the business data plan.

If you pay your own individual bill, you won’t be required to get the business data.

If you call AT&T, they’ll tell you “yes, you must have the $45 plan” but those people are just repeating what they were told, which is flat our wrong. It’s nothing new, they’ve been doing it to AT&T reps for years.
Maybe it’s that the people who do the training don’t understand it, or that they’re just being greedy jerks. I don’t really know.

I’ve been following this topic closely for the last two weeks and I can assure you you won’t need the business data. I also know AT&T data plans and pricing very well and for several years and just based on what I know they won’t be trying to block it.

Finally, the reason it’s so vague is for this very reason. They don’t want to come out and say “you can use exchange on personal or business” because they don’t want you to question them when they tell you you must have a $45 business plan to use exchange if you’re a business customer.
They’d rather you just assume you need it and pay for it.

So there you have it. You don’t need the enterprise plan to access company email via Microsoft Exchange. That in itself is available to all iPhone users via the $30 data plan.

The More you Know!

Finally got around to setting up God Save the Tween. I’m not sure how long the wordpress thing will last but I’ll see where it goes. My aim is to make God Save the Tween my home on the interwebs as I continue my career in Flash development. I’ll be discussing tips, gripes, and all manor of things I encounter in my day to day as a Flash/Flex dev.

In any case, welcome to God Save the Tween.