We are proud to announce that DevelopmentArc is introducing a new training program focusing on Flex 4 development.  Each training session will be a live seminar hosted online using Adobe Connect.  We will offer our seminars multiple times each month, hopefully providing a good window for anyone who is interested.  Our sessions also include unique training materials that are provided to you after each session.  These materials include the source code we demonstrate with, a PDF copy of the slides and any custom training material we are creating for each series.

I found an interesting trick with embedding fonts today while working with the Text Flow engine in Flex 4.  What I found out is that you can embed multiple fonts under the same font family name, but set the properties such as font weight or font style to different settings based on the font source you are using.  This may be an obvious thing to a lot of people, and the property name 'font-family' makes a lot more sense now, but for me it was a real 'ah-ha' moment.  By the way, this isn't just a Flex 4 thing, you can do this with Flex 3 and probably AS3 only projects (haven't tried that yet) but the issue became more apparent in Flex 4's new TLF enabled components.

The problem came about because we have a set of fonts that provide each style type in a unique OTF file, i.e. Font-Regular.otf, Font-Bold.otf, Font-Italic.otf, and Font-BoldItalic.otf.  In the past, we just embedded this with unique font-family ids (font-family: "Font-Regular") and then just bound them via CSS.  This approach becomes a significant problem when starting to work with TLF's selection management and Text Format.  We are building a simple Rich Text Editor in Flex 4 (since its not available yet in Beta 2) to allow a user to set their text to bold, italic or underline.  Simple enough, right?

We are happy to announce the release of Adobe's newest application: WorkflowLab (public Alpha release). WorkflowLab was built by DevelopmentArc for Adobe and was designed, developed and deployed in under 6 weeks.  This new AIR application allows users to view and construct project workflows to demonstrate how their products, applications, and/or technologies are built using Adobe Technologies. The tool allows user to define project tasks and assign Adobe tools and technologies to those tasks to help illustrate how Adobe's products and services assisted in completing the project. Inside of the tool Adobe has provided a core set of workflow starting points that can be used to help guide the workflow of new project or as a starting point for your own workflow. Download it here.

We are proud to announce that we are beginning work on a new book for Adobe Press that focuses on Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder and Creative Suite based projects and the development workflows these tools enable.  Our good friend, Doug Winnie (Group Project Manager at Adobe and web workflow expert), will be co-authoring the book with Aaron and myself.  As we write the book we will be making updates here on our blog about our progress and research. In the meantime, Peachpit.com asked us to guest author a weekly series on Flash Catalyst.  Our first post, Adobe Flash Catalyst: Under the Hood—Part 1 Introduction is now on their site.  Make sure to subscribe, because each Monday a new post will be available.

The newest release of DevelopmentArc Core is now available on the Google Code Repository.  This release is the first release of the library under the new Core moniker.  Previously the library was released under the Vivisecting Media Code Library, which has been now been deprecated since Core is publicly available.  All updates and new features will be added to the Core system moving forward.

From the code depot you can download a compiled SWC or a ZIP file that contains all the source and ASDoc generated files.  We have posted the ADoc files on-line so that you can easily access them if you do not download them.  Currently, we have 219 unit tests running and passing for the library, which are all available from the source tree if you wish to access them.