Adobe has just released (Mar 30) its Preview 3 build of Squiggly, a spell checking engine for Flex 3 or Flex 4 text controls. I was very interested in using Squiggly in some of my projects so I was fast to jump on this and give it a try.

Squiggly is very easy to use! All you have to do is copy the .swc's into your projects libs directory, copy the 'dictionaries' directory into your src directory of your project and you are ready to use Squiggly.

The easiest way for me to use Squiggly was to create new classes that extend the TextInput and TextArea controls and enable/disable the spell checking on focus change. This gives it the "check as you type" functionality.

I did run into a bit of trouble after I moved my demo to my server and tried pulling it up. I was getting this error:

Error #2044: Unhandled ioError:. text=Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: http://labs.dcfusion.com/flex/Squiggly/dictionaries/en_US/en_US.aff

What this means is my IIS (7.5) web server didn't know how to handle the .aff extension. I also had the same issue when trying to pull up the en_US.dic file. The en_US.aff and en_US.dic files are basically dictionary files that the .swc's use in order to evaluate the text properly. So I had to add new mime types for these extensions. So, in summary, I added a total of 2 new mime types:

File name extension: .aff
MIME type: text/plain

File name extension: .dic
MIME type: text/plain

Here is my demo (click inside the TextInput or TextArea controls to activate, then right-click on the red squiggly lines):

Download the source to this demo here!

Special thanks to Brian Rinaldi and his Spell checking in Flex with Squiggly - Part 1 blog post to help get me started!

Lee Brimelow just released a new video titled "Two Minute Flex 4 Application" where he builds a Twitter search app using the new data features (specifically the XML wizard) in under 2 minutes using Flash Builder 4.

I decided to recreate it and all went as exptected, but mine took 3 minutes! :-) You can test out the app below and watch the video at the link above.

While installing both Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder I ran into an issue that had me wondering what I did wrong. Here is the setup I was going for: Flash Builder 4 Premium Standalone with ColdFusion Builder Eclipse Plug-in installed into the Flash Builder install. This was all done on Windows 7 64-bit.

Step 1. Install Flash Builder 4 Premium Standalone. Everything went great! No issue with this install, as you can see.

Step 2. Install ColdFusion Builder Eclipse Plug-in into the Flash Builder install. The install went well, as expected. The problem was when I launched Flash Builder, I could not find the ColdFusion Builder perspective.

After uninstalling ColdFusion Builder and re-installing with the same results, I tried one last thing. I fired up Flash Builder by right-clicking and "Run as administrator" and I could finally bring up the ColdFusion Builder perspective just fine!

And the results...

Hope this info helps!

Adobe has released Flash Player 10 (Astro) on the Adobe Labs site. Go check it out!

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Astro

For more information, see the Flash Player 10 technology page at

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

And here is a link on how to compile for Flash Player 10 in Flex 3

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Targeting+Flash+Player+10+Beta+with+Flex+SDK+3.0.x

You can download the Flash Player 10 beta from here

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Ted Patrick has created a new site that deals with the hidden API's of Flash, Flex, Flash Player, and Apollo.

Check it out when you can...

http://api.onflex.org/