Cool ItemRenderers Made Easy in Flex 4

January 28, 2010 By 11 Comments

Flex 4 makes a lot of things a lot easier to build. After looking at custom components and skins in my previous post, here are a couple of samples focusing on ItemRenderers, States, and Animations.

In this first example, I use the new “depth” attribute together with the new States syntax to make sure that the hovered ItemRenderer is always on top of the other ones. I also use a PostLayoutTransform to “zoom” the hovered ItemRenderer without any impact on the position of the other ItemRenderers in this TileLayout.

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Filed Under: Flex

Creating a Custom Component and Skins in Flex 4

January 22, 2010 By 22 Comments

The basic idea behind the Spark component model in Flex 4 is to entirely decouple the behavior of a component from its visual representation. You code the behavior of a component in one class and its visual representation in interchangeable MXML skin classes. This new architecture leads to lighter weight and easier to customize components.

As a simple example, I created a Spark version of the PhotoInput component I built for some of my Flex 3 samples (Salesbuilder and inSync). The PhotoInput component allows the user to take pictures using the webcam.

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Filed Under: Flex

Tampa Bay Adobe Developer Event this Thursday

January 18, 2010 By 2 Comments

I’ll be in Tampa with James Ward and Greg Wilson this week, and we thought it would be great to put together an informal event for the local Tampa bay developer community. The details below are from Greg’s original post.

When: Thursday, Jan 21 6:30pm-8:30pm
Location: Taverna Opa Tampa – Channelside – next to Splitsville – http://tavernaopatampa.com/info.html
Map: http://bit.ly/5kF4aR (Google Maps)

No slides and no presentations – just informal chat/Q&A

IMPORTANT PART –> Beer is on James, Christophe and me for the first hour! How can you resist now?!

Between the 3 of us and some of our local friends, we can answer questions on a wide variety of topics:

  • General questions about Flex, AIR, LiveCycle Data Services, BlazeDS, ColdFusion and more
  • Connecting applications built on the flash platform (Flex, AIR, etc.) to backend systems such as .NET, Java, PHP, ColdFusion, etc.
  • What’s new in LiveCycle data services 3.0
  • What’s new in ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder
  • What’s coming in Flex 4, AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1
  • Everything you wanted to know about Augmented Reality
  • How to compute the volume of a cone and other mathematical puzzles (just making sure you are still reading)
  • What’s the deal with the announcement last October about Flash and iPhone?

Filed Under: Flex