It’s saturday noon and I’ve got an FDT5 Prerelease version installed (thanks again to Powerflasher). And as I’m about to do some iOS & Adobe AIR performance tests I’m in need of an app.. obviously. So, wouldn’t it be nice to directly check out the new mobile workflow in FDT? It could cost me a lot of time if it’s failing, though. However, I’m pretty sure they’ve tested it once or twice before finally releasing it on October 26! So, whatever you’re going to read from now on can be done by yourself from Wednesday on – because FDT5 will be free.
FDT5: From Scratch to Device in less than 4min
22nd October 2011 
Marvin Blase 
Posted in 
FDT 5 – The Flexible Development Toolkit
19th October 2011 Marvin Blase 
Hello everybody,
it’s been long since my last post and I do apologize for that. I’m going to tell you in detail what happened during the last months (and make sure to stay tuned as some really cool projects were realized) but for now I only got one big message for you: FDT5 is going to ship! Soon! Maybe next week already! And hell yea, it will be free for you! To be precise, Powerflasher now officially published the release date. It’s going to be October 26th!
A bit about FDT4 Color Themes
22nd February 2011 Marvin Blase 
For all you guys out there who feel like me and are somewhat sick of the default Eclipse color theme: There has been released some kind of easy-to-go plugin which lets you quickly change the theme in Eclipse and therefore FDT4 as well. Furthermore you can directly chose between some good pre-defined templates or those, which are free to download.
So, basically all you got to do is following three simple steps.
- In Eclipse go to Help → Install New Software…, and add a new site with the URL:
http://eclipse-color-theme.github.com/update. Then select this new entry and install it. - Download a template of your choice from http://www.eclipsecolorthemes.org
- In Eclipse go to Window → Preferences → General → Appereance → Color Theme and select the theme you’ve just downloaded. You have to do some fine tuning with AS3/Flex syntax highlighting but feel free to drop a comment if you do not find the setting you’re looking for. Some are a bit hidden.
Flex 4.5 Mobile Project Template for FDT 4.2
9th February 2011 Marvin Blase 
With this FDT 4.2 Project Template you can easily create a Flex Mobile application in FDT. It sets up the launch configuration, the application descriptor and the required mobile libraries. Furthermore it automatically creates a simple mobile application pattern for you. The current version is for Android only.
Using Flex 4.5 (Hero) with FDT 4.1
25th November 2010 Marvin Blase Just a quick note, which might become handy for you as well. When using Adobe's latest Flex SDK, Codename "Hero" in FDT, you need to keep in mind two things.
First of all: Download FDT 4.1 Beta, which fixed a bug concerning some NullPointerExceptions. So if you have ever come across messages like these:
JAVA:
-
java.lang.NullPointerException
-
at com.powerflasher.fdt.core.internal.launch.compile.concrete.CompilerLoaderExtensionPoint.getFactoryFor(CompilerLoaderExtensionPoint.java:68)
Go for an FDT 4.1 Beta Update!
Compile AIR to native .dmg or .exe files with ANT
16th August 2010 Marvin Blase An upcoming question in publish- & packaging AIR files is "How to convert them to a .dmg or .exe file?" Easily enough, you do not have to do anything else except using a slightly different ANT build task for it. Instead of passing:
XML:
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<arg value="${publish_dir}/${air_file}" />
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<arg value="${app_descriptor}" />
to the ADT you use:
XML:
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<arg value="-target"/>
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<arg value="native"/>
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<arg value="${publish_dir}/MyApp.dmg" />
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<arg value="${app_descriptor}" />
Add Linked Resources (as a src folder) to ANT builds
13th August 2010 Marvin Blase Here's another quick snippet to add Linked Resources to a compile process built with ANT. You know, you can link a whole directory to be a "Linked Library" in FDT, e.g. Greensock's TweenLite. Doing so means that you cannot use the -library-path argument as it only work with .swc files. Instead of this use -source-path to successfully add a whole directory to be compiled into your SWF.
XML:
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<arg value="-source-path=/Users/marvin/libs/greensock-as3" />
This way you can use it in an AIR build as well and you do not have to replace your directory based libraries with SWC files.
Using SWCs within AIR packaging with ANT
13th August 2010 Marvin Blase In addition to AIR2 and FDT4 (M3) – A detailed Walkthrough I encountered a problem when trying to use external SWCs like e.g. an assets library in your AIR package. In other words: If you're using an SWC with all your graphical stuff exported from the Flash IDE you simply rightclick it in FDT and add it to your Source path to use it in your project. This works fine in a compiled SWF but if you want to launch your project in an AIR environment it will not find the library. And I really had a look for this ("Class not found!") errors after packaging for hours but didn't find anything except an ooold AIR project by a friend of mine who used the following argument in his "Compile SWF" task:
XML:
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<arg value="-library-path=${assets_dir}/lib/assets.swc" />
Et voilá, from then on my exported AppBg asset worked flawlessly in the ADL and packaged .air file:
Actionscript:
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var back:AppBg = new AppBg();
Now we're ready to take the next step: A real AIR application with chromeless layout, asset-using and some communications..
AIR2 and FDT4 (M4) – A detailed Walkthrough with ANT
12th August 2010 Marvin Blase 
Hello,
someone might remember an older post on Beautify Code which has shown how to successfully create an AIR application certificate, publish the project and then package it to an .air file, which can be installed and run. Now here's the 2010 update, working with AIR2 and FDT4 (using an ANT-Build) and some major changes.
www.WeLoveFDT.com | An FDT Community Feed
6th August 2010 Marvin Blase Hi,
I'm very happy to announce that www.WeLoveFDT.com has just been launched!
Powerflasher just wrote the following:
Recently a new community-project has been launched which combines most of the active FDT blogs like Aiden Tailor, Matan Uberstein, Marvin Blase, Francis Varga, Alan Klement and many others. WeLoveFDT fetches their feeds, filters them for FDT related articles and teasers them on www.WeLoveFDT.com. This way it provides a continously updated summary based on everything that deals with FDT in the blogsphere, so users can quickly access related news, poke around or search for a specific topic without having to fight with Google keywords.
The idea came up as more and more great articles about FDT were published and some days after people started asking where to find this and that again and who had written it - as they remembered the topic but not the blog itself. So Marvin Blase thought of how to summarize these articles without disregarding the blogs itself but to provide a self-refreshing, community based feed. With great help of Fabian Beiner this idea was quickly realised and a first version was able to launch. The idea behind this might be transferred to other topics as well - there already popped up a request for doing the same with Robotlegs or the like.
If you are blogging about FDT from time to time feel free to sign up at their “Take part” section to enlarge the pool of which articles are gathered. The more the better!
Please take a look by yourself and follow @WeFollowFDT if you like to!
