Flash is Dead, Long Live Flash

November 22, 2010

Much has been written this year about purported problems with Flash and the coming HTML 5 wave which is going to wash away Flash. Now that much of the hysteria has subsided and some time has passed to allow us to observe further developments I’d like to offer some comments on the subject. First, I’ll [...]

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Using the Flex Component Lifecycle to Position Display Objects at Run-Time

November 20, 2010

Recently, I was working on a project in which the location of one object on the stage was based on the size of another object but the size of the latter object was not known until run-time. At first glance, this might sound like an easy problem to solve. Just add a few lines of [...]

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Problems Using Flex FXG Graphics for Tooltip Backgrounds, Part II

October 14, 2010

In the first part of this series I discussed some of the advantages of using FXG graphics and some of the obstacles that you encounter when you try to reuse them at a different size than the original. Even though FXG commands are vector-based you often get unwanted artifacts when scaling the x- and y-axes [...]

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Problems Using Flex FXG Graphics for Tooltip Backgrounds, Part I

October 9, 2010

Flex FXG graphics has several advantages over bitmap graphics, including: They are vector-based so they are relatively small in size and can be scaled without loss of fidelity (subject to some limitations; see below). Flex effects can be applied to provide for economical up/over/down/disabled state variations. By applying the changes through effects, the size reduction [...]

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Increase the Number of Workspaces that Flash Builder Remembers

October 3, 2010

I have a lot of Flash Builder workspaces so Eclipse’s default behavior of remembering only the last five workspaces has always been annoying to me. I have projects for various clients and I like to keep all of the files for each project together. I also have several Flex/ActionScript books which come with code samples. [...]

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Photoshop to Illustrator to Flex 4 FXG Workflow

September 18, 2010

With the release of CS5 Adobe introduced the FXG graphics language, a notation for describing vector graphics in MXML. Three of the Creative Suite apps, Illustrator, Flash Catalyst and Fireworks, are capable of exporting to FXG which can then be used in Flex projects. Photoshop, being primarily a raster-based editor, doesn’t support FXG. However, Photoshop [...]

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Flex 4 Cookbook Sample Code Difficult to Use

September 15, 2010

As many Flex developers know, the Flex Cookbook and ActionScript Cookbook series can be very helpful when you’re trying to quickly solve a problem. These cookbooks specialize in the type of problem that you just know has been solved many times already by other developers—just not by you. Or maybe you have but you can’t [...]

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Missing Menu Options in Flash Builder

August 30, 2010

I encountered a mystery surrounding several missing menu options in one of my Flash Builder workspaces recently. I wanted to create a new skin for a List control so I right-clicked on my skins folder and looked for the New MXML Skin option. And I looked. And I looked some more. But it wasn’t there. [...]

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Flex 4 Spark RadioButtonSkin Dissected

August 27, 2010

Right-click to View Source When I first started trying to skin a radio button I was stumped for a little while because there are so many elements in the skin. It was difficult to tell what each one did and making modifications sometimes resulted in no apparent change. In some cases, this was because I [...]

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Flex 4 Skin with ItemRenderer for a Spark List Control

August 25, 2010

This is an example of a Flex 4 skin which provides a Spark List control with a completely customized appearance. This example has a border with rounded corners, a custom background color and different colors chosen for the rollover and selected colors. A custom ItemRenderer was included in order to get the desired rollover & [...]

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