I'm not above bribing people to come in to a user group meeting  

The NZ Flex User Group is hosting a special live event to share exciting new information on Adobe's platform tools and technologies for building RIAs. You'll see an exclusive user group video presentation by Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive schwag and other giveaways.

Make room in your calendars for a very special Adobe Flex event.

When:        26th February

Where:       Equinox
                Annex
                Level 2
                41 Shortland Street

Register:  http://nzfug.eventbrite.com/

Or check out the user group mailing list for more details 

First the disclaimer so as to set the tone of "creative criticism" and not "whinny flex community member". I make my living from the flex framework and both enjoy (mostly) and am great full for it.

Now for the issue at hand. I have come across it a couple of times again in the last few days when extending Flex components. I have seen it again and again. And when you commonly see developers copy and pasting almost complete classes just to extend/change a small part of a component, you know somethings wrong.

I am talking about UI elements being defined as private in controls. Using a private definition on the reference to a UI object restricts my ability as a developer to extend all the hard work the Flex engineers have gone to making "extendable" components. This breaks the along the entire chain of inheritance ( which is the main technique used by flex as opposed to composition).  But with a protected definition I can extend that class and either override the correct method of the parent class and change whats happening or use event listeners. Point in case the knob in the class BoxDivider (used in a VBox etc). Its defined private, and yet I would have thought that it would be a likely case that somewhere down the line someone will want to add some functionality to it. With a visual user interface for use on the web the visual aspects are very likely to be changed/extended to some extent.

So why not move to protected as the default. This would allow a lot more extending of components in a lot more ways, while still keeping the OOP ideals of each component only aware of its own objects and being self contained.

I mention this really just to start some discussion and let the great team of developers at Adobe know of some of the frustrations I hit as a flex developer. Does anyone else hit this? or am I a 3 legged mutant.

I have foolishly devised a temporary fix for this which you can use to help when hitting this problem, while we as a community subtly prod the Flex development team at Adobe to change. It can be seen working HERE. (view source enabled and proudly built with degrafa)

P.S. Adobe Flex developers – I love your work by the way guys!

Not having an officially released iPhone in New Zealand does limit my interest in iPhone related news, and the fact that 3G enabled handsets aren't on the cards till later this year, I still couldn't understand why Adobe and Apple didn't get together to see the flash player on the iPhone.

Well all that seems to be set to change. A leak was made to gearlive.com  who apparently has good sources saying

"Well, we’ve just got word from a reliable source that Flash support is on its way to the iPhone, and it should be coming very, very soon."

This coupled with the fact that they have increased the clock speed of the CPU makes it sound plausible. 

About time! With the market penatration of the iPhone and its great (from what I have seen) usability, having the flash player on the iPhone will open a lot more possibilities to us all as flash developers.

A few weeks ago I got an interesting email from our local Pacific rim Flex bad boy Andrew Spaulding asking if I would like to become an Adobe Ambassador. Of course I loved the idea and have accepted.

Ambassador's are basically "talented and passionate community members who are external evangelists and an extension of the Adobe technical team". It involves all the stuff I have been doing anyway with helping run local FXUG meetings going to events and accepting beer as payment for helping flex dev's stuck with a problem. So not much has changed but its nice to have the things you do for the community recognised and it still means ill accept the late night emails and answer the calls for help.

Glad to be a small part of the Big Red "A" team