flIRC – First Steps in Flash 8.5 and Flex

THIS IS OUT OF DATE. CHECK THE NEWER VERSION HERE

I started working on my Flash IRC Client (flIRC) some time before Flash 8.5 was released. Now two days later I want to show you the first demo of my little project and experiment. You can see a very early version here.

Ther is still a lot of work to do but you can already join channels and talk. Private messages to other users are not supported yet like a lot of events like JOIN/PART/KICK/MODE etc. Please remember Flash 8.5 is now only two days old and I never used this Flex stuff before.

The application:
I am using Flex2. This is not an AS3 only project so I have got my code in theese mxml files which is a little bit confusing at the beginning but you will like it because you can be very fast. I do not care about application states, I do not care about initializing components and all this stuff. It is very easy to use. Even the alignment of the elements can be done by Flex.

Connection:
As I wrote one day ago there is a problem with the security model of Flash. The workaround is quiet simple and has nothing to do with Flash directly. I installed a proxy on my shell and just forward every connection to irc.quakenet.org. The only problem is that the connections are not client-side only.

Macromedia should handle a socket request like using the camera. A simple dialog box would make life easier.

Other problems:
The TextArea seems to be very buggy. I wont blame Macromedia for this because it is only an Alpha. But one problem is very annoying. If you use htmlText and add a lot of text very fast (while-loop for example) then the TextArea won’t display all the text you appended to it.
The workaround is using a simple flash.util.Timer and an Array where all messages get stored. On every tick one message gets added.

Most IRC clients do not support UTF-8 encoding. The socket got a writeUTFBytes() function but all the special german characters look wrong on other clients. The solution here was using a simple byte array which gets filled by a string. Most of the communication is now located in an own class called IRCSocket.

Using textarea.vPosition = textarea.maxVPosition; worked for me in Flash 8. This does not seem to work in 8.5 so currently the text wont scroll.

Links:

• Macromedia Labs
• flIRC

THIS IS OUT OF DATE. CHECK THE NEWER VERSION HERE

THIS IS OUT OF DATE. CHECK THE NEWER VERSION HERE I started working on my Flash IRC Client (flIRC) some time before Flash 8.5 was released. Now two days later I want to show you the first demo of my little project and experiment. You can see a very early version here. Ther is still a lot of work to do but you can already join channels and talk. Private messages to other users are not supported yet like a lot of events like JOIN/PART/KICK/MODE etc. Please remember Flash 8.5 is now only two days old and I never used this Flex stuff before. The application: I am using Flex2. This is not an AS3 only project so I have got my code in theese mxml files which is a little bit confusing at the beginning but you will like it because you can be very fast. I do not care about application states, I do not care about initializing components and all this stuff. It is very easy to use. Even the alignment of the elements can be done by Flex. Connection: As I wrote one day ago there is a problem with the security model of Flash. The workaround is quiet simple and has nothing to do with Flash directly. I installed a proxy on my shell and just forward every connection to irc.quakenet.org. The only problem is that the connections are not client-side only. Macromedia should handle a socket request like using the camera. A simple dialog box would make life easier. Other problems: The TextArea seems to be very buggy. I wont blame Macromedia for this because it is only an Alpha. But one problem is very annoying. If you use htmlText and add a lot of text very fast (while-loop for example) then the TextArea won't display all the text you appended to it. The workaround is using a simple flash.util.Timer and an Array where all messages get stored. On every tick one message gets added. Most IRC clients do not support UTF-8 encoding. The socket got a writeUTFBytes() function but all the special german characters look wrong on other clients. The solution here was using a simple byte array which gets filled by a string. Most of the communication is now located in an own class called IRCSocket. Using textarea.vPosition = textarea.maxVPosition; worked for me in Flash 8. This does not seem to work in 8.5 so currently the text wont scroll. Links: Macromedia Labs flIRC THIS IS OUT OF DATE. CHECK THE NEWER VERSION HERE