Flex and Rails: The Book is Here!

It's been a long time coming, and a lot of hard work, and it's finally happening. Flex on Rails, Building Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 3 and Rails 2 is up in final form on Safari and due to be released in paper form soon.

Daniel and I spent a lot of weekends and nights and cajoled and prodded each other for just slightly less than a year, and we're both proud of the results. I hope to hear some feedback soon so we can tell how it's being received, but we've been glad to do our part to bring these two communities together.

Setting Indeterminate Progress Bar in ListActivity

In Android it's fairly easy to set the indeterminate progress indicator of the current window spinning from an Activity while a thread is working or something. This code outlines it how to do it.

I figured it was that easy when I went to do it for a ListActivity, but it turns out there's a twist. For that feature request to work, you need to call setContentView, but ListActivities come with a default view already set, so setContentView never gets called. That means the indicator never gets requested and doesn't show up.

To get around that problem one way, just set a custom list view, as described here, and in onCreate call setContentView.

Just a quick PSA incase you thought I forgot about this blog.