Alright designers, lets get one thing straight. I don’t like you and you don’t like me. You design components that are either a)impossible/painstakingly difficult to build or b) has more transitional effects that even make a mac snob would vomit. Dare I complain? Too bad. The client already signed off on it and they loved it. Guess what though, jokes on you! Following my typical fashion, I have made it as easy to style as you have to build it. TAKE THAT EDGY COOL GUY(or girl)!.
Unfortunately, this vicious circle doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help me. You can call me lazy and I can call you a moron but it leads us to the same spot. With this in mind, I’ve recently decided to extend the olive branch. I have sat down with one of the main designers at my job and asked “What can I do to my components that will make your job easier?”. With a warm smile, he thanked me and gave me some good tips on how I can make not just his life easier, but also make my components just that much more versatile.
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Marcel Best Practices, Flex, Opinion, Random Notes, tutorial Actionscript, Best Practices, Design, Flex
One of the great things about I love about Flex is that it is fairly close to writing a desktop application. You can, for the most part, even take a Flex application and publish it as an AIR application for your desktop. In my opinion, one thing that makes it extremely similar is the way it handles Events. Its all about the eventListeners. As we all know, it is never as easy as adding an eventListener in one spot and a eventHandler in another. Within this article, I want to discuss how to add and handle eventListeners, dispatching them, how to stop event from propagating, difference between a target and a currenttarget, and the ever important thought of when to remove events.
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Marcel Best Practices, Flex, Learn This, Opinion, Random Notes, tutorial Actionscript, Best Practices, Flex, tutorial
Whenever I am working on a Flex project, it is quite seldom that I have been able to take an out of the box component and have it do EXACTLY what I need to do (barring something like a Label). Sometimes I need to create a container component to use as an itemrenderer for a grid. However, sometimes it is not as easy as whipping up some mxml tags to layout what we need. Luckily though, there are 5 methods that every UIComponent implements* that we are able to override and manipulate our objects as we wish. These methods are createChildren, commitProperties, measure, layoutChrome and updateDisplayList. I will be giving a brief explaining of what they are and why we would override them. After that, I will be discussing the flags within UIComponent.as that call these functions and some things to watch out for when overriding these functions.
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Marcel Best Practices, Flex, tutorial Best Practices, Flex
Google Maps has proven itself to be one of the best mapping systems on the internet. We have also seen a great number of google maps mashups take place (Everything some Subway maps to where is the cheapest gas). I only felt it would be nice to have an intro on how to use the google maps API with in Flex. On that note, it has been four posts since I have done a How-To article, so this is even more fitting. Within this tutorial, I will just go over some basics on how to add and edit Markers on a map and keep track of them in a grid.
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Marcel Flex, Google Maps API, tutorial Actionscript, Flex, howto, tutorial
Whenever Flash 10 came out a few months ago, they made a pretty big change to the security model which did not allow events to send files. Everything had to be handled by human interaction (AKA: MouseEvent.CLICK). Unfortunately that means that you now have to support both Flash 9 and Flash 10 in your flex/actionscript code. You never know when someone is going to upgrade to flash 10 to use your application. The problem is that in a business environment, it’s poor taste to require a business to upgrade everyone to Flash 10 to use your software. In fact, a lot of times, that upgrade is not even an option. If you compile something in Flash 10 though, your clients are greated with a nice message of ‘You must upgrade your Flash player in order to use this’. What we need to do is maintain binary compatibility with Flash 10, however not require it.
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Marcel Flex, Random Notes, tutorial Actionscript, Flex, howto, tutorial