Flex Styling without the Flex (example and source)

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, CSS, FlexAug 31st, 2009 | 4 Comments Question: What’s 2.8KB, can style any DisplayObject on the stage, and enjoys long walks on the beach? Answer: Flex styling pwned! So it’s leaked out on twitter that Ben Stucki, Ryan Campbell, Tyler Wright, and myself are working together on a new RIA component initiative. Taking a different approach than Open Flux, we are starting from scratch and building up fresh. We’re bringing together what we’ve learned from Open Flux and Stealth with the goal to release finished features and stable builds. We hope to provide something that we all can use in production. We haven’t...

High quality, high performance thumbnails in Flash

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexJul 17th, 2009 | 20 Comments Ever need a thumbnail of an image in Flash? I do, and honestly speaking, the resampling that Flash does is less than ideal. Unless you only need to resize by half or bigger. But my thumbnails usually need to be smaller. I searched for a solution and found on voq.com a promising library with some algorithms that worked quite nicely and a demo. The quality was nice, but the speed was slow. It also fiddled with the color a little bit. If I put the "easyScaling" parameter down from .5 to .25 I ended up with a nicer thumbnail but was slower to make and had more color disfiguration. You could tell what...

Would it be bad to leave behind our Flash roots?

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Flash, FlexMay 14th, 2009 | 3 Comments I am working with Tyler on Stealth, our high-performance component framework. After reading this article on performance by Arno Gourdol of Adobe I began wondering if we should leave behind our Flash roots of motion and timeline design by defaulting framerate to 0 in our Stealth-based applications. Framerate makes great sense when doing games or timeline based animations, but in applications do we need it? We can update the screen on mouse moves, roll overs, etc. with the MouseEvent.updateAfterEvent instance method. And for transitions and tweening the class could use a Timer for the duration of...

Flight Framework Highlights

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, Flex, PHPFeb 12th, 2009 | 4 Comments The Flight Framework is basically a collection of great utilities and independent tidbits that are organized to help us build our application. So I thought I'd make a call out to all the great standalone features in Flight, tell what they are, and leave it to another day to go more in depth on them. Fix for abstract classes The tiny static classes in the flight.error package allow you to ensure an abstract class is not instantiated and that abstract methods are overriden. Registry A global registry to store objects or data that anything in an application can have access too. Reflection The "Type"...

Undo/Redo for all your TextFields

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexFeb 4th, 2009 | 48 Comments I made the TextField undo component. Add this component to any Flash or Flex application and all your text components will have undo and redo. This has been open sourced and is on http://code.google.com/p/undo-textfields/. Instead of making different Flex and Flash components to use in place of the available components, I made one that adds undo to existing text components. It should work in Flash and in Flex, though I just have a Flex example to show you today. You can see that it can be container specific, though you would probably just put it on the root of your application or the stage. Type...

Undo in TextFields

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexJan 22nd, 2009 | 4 Comments I presented on creating your own undo/redo at 360 MAX unconference and a uFlash meeting. People seemed interested in knowing how to do it, but were more interested in having the code. It really should be part of Flex TextAreas and TextInputs. So I was going to code up a couple custom components that extended TextArea and TextInput (e.g. UndoableTextArea) and release them for use. However, as Tyler reminded me, that wouldn't work in Flash apps, only Flex. So I have a proposal and would like to get your feedback. If I created a component that you put on the root of your application (or any MXML component)...