I recently picked up a Bamboo pen tablet on Amazon.com for cheap. Clearly I’m no nataliedee, but decided to draw out my daily routine (while in #9).
If you do the math you’ll notice that 15 minutes are MIA - that’s for the snooze button. This has been a completely ridiculous blog post. Thank God for long weekends and Freedom. Happy 4th of July!
Topics covered in the presentation:
- Flash Builder IDE - New features that will save you time.
- Spark & Halo - New component & container model.
- View States - New MXML syntax.
- Effects - Animate.
- FXG - Flash XML Graphics.
- FP10 3D - Support for Z axis positioning and rotation.
- FP10 Text Engine - Flowing Text in Flash & Flex.
Resource links in the slides:
- Differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4
:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex3and4_differences.html - Download
Flash Builder:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/ - Flash Builder New Feature Videos:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/ - Adobe Flex 4 Help:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/gumbo/html/ - Flex 4 (gumbo) Language Reference:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/gumbo/langref/ - MXML 2009 Specification
:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/MXML+2009 - Enhanced States Specification:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Enhanced+States+Syntax - Introduction to Flex 4 Effects:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/flashcamp/haase/ - FXG 1.0 Specification:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/FXG+1.0+Specification - Why FXG and not SVG?
http://www.andersblog.com/archives/2008/09/flash_on_the_be.html - Text Layout Framework:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/ - Flash Player 10:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
This is the session to see if you’re interested in getting started with the Flash Builder 4 beta, now available on http://labs.adobe.com. The presentation will highlight some cool new features of the IDE, and then jump right into the goods. I may include such topics as: The Flash Player 10 Text Engine (which is awesome), Skinning components with FXG, Creating custom components, and the wonderful new syntax for States. If you have a topic you are especially interested in, please send me an email or drop me a line in the comments below!
Source and example files from the presentation are now available through the following links:
1) What you get for free with UIComponent
2) [view] Component lifecycle
3) [view step one | step two] Invalidation
I have a text version of the presentation in the works. Anyways, I hope this is helpful to you as you create your own custom Flex components!
[just an announcement ... no content]
I’ll be presenting at the next 615Flex user group meeting [details & directions] on Tuesday, 11/11. We should have a great turnout and a decent intro hands-on about creating custom Flex components by extending the UIComponent class.
Description:
1) What you get for free with UIComponent
2) Component lifecycle
3) Invalidation
Throughout) Hands on - Creating an interactive component
[View examples & source from the presentation]
If you’ve ever wanted to create a component from scratch and didn’t know where to start, start here. This isn’t going to be excessively technical - so bring your laptops, I’ll bring the beer, Vaco will bring the pizza, and we’ll have a good time. See you there!
Updated: I’m going ahead and making the rough original source available since I have less time to work on this than expected. Please let me know if this helps you on any project or at least gets you started 
One of the more popular posts on this blog is “Warping Text in Flex“. People are frequently asking for the source code and I am frequently not giving it to them (unless they say please) because it’s really really dreadful. Truly. So I have brought the project back to life as something I’m not embarrassed of.
An open sourced as-is etc version of this component will be posted shortly (preview below). The component will use a three point Bézier curve for the text path. Currently, this version uses the geometry classes from http://www.algorithmist.net/ but the released version may or may not.
Here is an early preview of the soon-to-be released TextPath component (please leave suggestions below):
(Right click to view source)
Thank you for reading - Please leave comments, suggestions etc!
I’ve started a little pet project called SpinjAS (named after the super-cool toys). It’s a super-simple and fun way for your users to move objects around, size them and rotate them when you don’t need a more precise tool like object handles. Here’s a quick demo:
(Right click to view source)
It’s just an experiment and, yes, I know it’s not an original concept. But it is (as far as I know) an original Flex implementation. The limited current feature set is quite simple: radiusMax, radiusMin, scaleMax, scaleMin.
I would love to hear what you have to say … so far I’ve had about 30% positive feedback and 70% say “ok, cool, but when would I ever use that?” What about you? Does the concept have potential with some specific added features?
To learn more about the mysimplemp3 project, click the <my:SimpleMP3 /> tab at the top of this website. The project is hosted here on Google Code where you can download the latest swc or check out the source.
Currently the only demo is my proof of concept found here. I’m looking forward to seeing the components and projects you end create with mysimplemp3. Please keep me posted - and let me know about feature requests and potential bugs! Thanks.
What's this? It looks easy!
OK. I really don't like building MP3 player components in AS3 for Flex. It's doable, sure, but tedious. In fact, I don't like it enough that I've done something about it. Now it can be fun to make an MP3 player in Flex! (not available yet, but there's a demo below).
XML:
-
<my:SimpleMP3
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id="music"
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url="http://url.com/my.mp3" />
Now, just treat it like you'd expect!
Actionscript:
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music.play();
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music.pause();
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music.stop();
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music.volume = 0..1;
Yes, there's more: scrubbing, streaming, buffering, panning left to right, auto load, auto play, auto rewind, repeat and most importantly ... states! Read more and play with a quick demo after the jump.
Continue reading 'Almost introducing <my:SimpleMP3 />'
My presentation files for Sorting, Filtering & Paginating Data in Flex are posted here. This session is a two hour hands-on in which attendees will build a Flex application from scratch [see it live]. The application demonstrates basic sorting, filtering and use of a web service that generates paginated results. In this case the web service is the Yahoo Image Search API.
The application is approximately 200 lines of code and should be comfortably completed in the two hours. If not, the source code is available by right clicking the live demo above.
