So I have the not-so-unique but incredibly exciting none the less experience of attending
FlashForward 2006 in Austin, TX. It's incredible-- a whole crowd of folks just like me: creatives, innovators, software developers, musicians, artists.. I love it.
My interest was piqued by Flex 2 by a brilliant presentor and
Flex developer Aral Balkan. I mostly appreciated that he didn't talk designer-- he spoke geek.. Real, hardcore OOP. And here's what I gathered: Flex is simply incredible. But I donna gotta no moolah, so I intend to go the cheap route: FREE Flex SDK and Edit Plus for writing MXML. We'll see how long I last like this, but I just want to get my feet wet.... that CS degree has got to be good for something :D
So I ran into a few stumbling blocks thus far, and here are my experiences and solutions:
Downloading the
Free Flex SDK:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/Click that Developer tab and select Download Flex SDK. You'll need a macromedia/adobe user/pass but registration is free (and you should already have one, right?).
Installing the Flex SDK:
http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flex/2/install.html#installingflex2sdkDownloading the free JDK 1.5:
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/Find
JDK 5.0 Update 8 and click Download. I then got
jdk-1_5_0_08-windows-i586-p.exe, "49.52 MB"
Installing JDK was a troublesome bother for me at first. I kept getting an error talking about
Invalid drive over and over! I overcame this remnant/ghost network drive by mapping my own c drive to that disconnected, phantom network drive like this:
\\MyComputerName\c$ The C: drive doesn't even need to be shared for this to work.
I hope this helps somebody....