Flex Stuff by Gilles Guillemin

I wish I knew. Honest.

Don’t get me wrong: I do land jobs, and pretty decent ones too. Until last week I was a Senior Flex Developer for a startup in London. No less. And during the  past 15 years (give or take) I had several good others. So all my job interviews could hardly be quoted as “Epic Fails“.

But every now and then, I suffer from a very strange affliction. On a daily basis I am the reasonably smart guy. French smart guy (which says a lot one would say) but I wear glasses and that totally helps. And jokes aside, I believe I wouldn’t be here, doing what I do if I was a complete fraud and being incapable of putting 2 lines of working code together. I don’t think so.

Well, except maybe when I have a job interview… Preferably over the phone.

Even better: a technical one.

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Today, a moment of self promotion in FlexStuff.co.uk. After all, what is the point of working like crazy 7 days a week and being able to only write a short post every couple of weeks if all this hard work remains unknown? (at least on this side of the pond, those ads being designed for the US market).

As already stated here and there in this blog, I’m currently employed by a London based company named Tailgate Technologies as their lead Flash Platform programmer. And believe me, it’s no easy task to work for a start-up when the global economy has decided at the same time to go deep down the sink. And the recent news about our main competitor surely do not help either (hey, we also had our own TechCrunch article!).

Anyway, we try at Tailgate to create a new type of online ads that actually try to be (at least a little bit) helpful and informative and not just some random stroke inducing stroboscopic animations as most of online ads have turned to be nowadays. It seems sometimes that “creatives” just took Flash only for its sole name and thought that flashing was somehow its one and only function.

The result of this? Nobody seems to give a bloody crap anymore (to quote the locals ) about ads. And I’m just talking here about the most open minded, the others have already long activated some ad blocker, just to avoid what has become an annoyance.

And that’s when we arrive (drums and trumpets here, please) to save you all from boredom!

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QuickLook is definitely one of the (multiple) great tools of Leopard. It really is quite handy, but unfortunately it didn’t (so far) help me in previewing the content of two of the most useful type of files: Flex’s *.mxml and *.as files.

Still, a while back, I had investigated QuickLook plugins, and added a few functionalities like the FLV preview, or the ZIP files preview. But never got any further ever since. So, after a bit of digging, I found this very useful website.

That was good, but not good enough, so after a bit more of digging, this blog finally gave me the answer (and especially the 12th comment) at least for previewing the ActionScript files.

Remained the mxlm ones… Ok, I took my shovel again, and thanks for this article, I finally got my solution (and hopefully yours if you’re reading this).

Right. Let’s go back coding then (says the addict on a Saturday morning).

[UPDATED (25/03/2010)]

It seems at least one of the links is dead (although reachable in Google’s cache). Anyway, I had to redo the whole thing today so I thought I would spare you guys some time by sharing my home backed QLColorCode with MXML and AS files. Enjoy.

QLColorCode.qlgenerator.zip