Personal & Professional Blog of T. Scot Clausing // Adobe Flex Consultant in Nashville, TN
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).
Now, just treat it like you'd expect!
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.
I'll be finishing the second half of a Cairngorm series tonight. The topic is "Commands, Responders, Delegates and the ServiceLocator - Getting data into a Cairngorm application." This should be a relatively short presentation compared to the last one
Also tonight - Andy Matthews of DealerSkins will be showing off his latest work in AIR with HTML, jQuery and BlazeDS. Hope you can make it!
"Adobe's Cairngorm MVC framework is used by Flex develpers to deliver scalable and maintainable rich internet applications. Universal Mind has created extensions to that framework to address implementation issues that can impede developers."
Read more at:
http://code.google.com/p/flexcairngorm/
I'm excited to see this! I haven't had time to try out the new extensions, but I'm looking forward to it. Thanks to all the good people at UM.
Update: New updated example in "Text on a curved path in Flex - Resurrected" - please see instead of this entry.
There was some discussion in the 615Flex Google group earlier about how to warp text in a Flex application. (If you have any valuable input or resources please leave them in the comments). I thought it would be fun to mess around with the idea, so I put together this really weak example of a text warp component.
Read on to see a little example ...
Hi. I'm Scot, an enterprise RIA architect specializing in Flex and AIR, ActionScript, and Java. I work as a consultant and designer in Nashville, TN and contribute to the Nashville Flex User Group, 615 Flex. To get in touch with me, please email tsclausing[at]gmail[dot]com.
