Using Your Own Custom Metadata in AS3

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlexMar 15th, 2008 | 12 Comments Flex 3 gives us a great new feature, custom metadata tags. Now, I know you could actually use custom metadata in Flex 2, but you would have to add "-keep-as3-metadata MyTag" to every single project that utilized these custom tags. In Flex 3, if you add "-keep-as3-metadata MyTag" to a library (using compc to compile a SWC or a Flex Builder Library project), then EVERY project that uses that SWC will automatically keep the "MyTag" metadata tags. This allows custom libraries that utilize these tags for development. Would be cool to create a library to hook up listeners so you can create listeners...

Flight Stealth, a Flex Component Alternative

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlexFeb 7th, 2008 | 8 Comments The first question you probably have after seeing the title of this post is "why would you make an alternative to Flex?" Or perhaps, "how could you even think of competing with Flex?" Honestly, we aren't trying to compete. This will be open source. And alternatives are always nice to have. We could talk about how difficult it can be to extend the Flex components, how limited the styling is, or how Flex makes complicated things easy and easy things complicated, but the fact of the matter is we just thought building an alternative would be fun. Now, that being said, I think we're going to have a...

Flex or the Server, What’s Your Focus?

Posted by Jacob Wright in FlexJan 26th, 2008 | 3 Comments I've been thinking deeply about how applications are architected. Tyler and I put together a MVC framework which we've been reluctant to release because he's not sure if it's quite right or if it's different enough from other frameworks, and because I don't have time to put it up and document it. So we've been brainstorming on how it might be better. I've decided that there are two main focuses when designing a Flex application, and it results in two different kinds of frameworks. There is Flex-focused applications and server-focused applications. The difference between these two applications is...

Flex WISHED It Supported CSS

Posted by Jacob Wright in CSS, FlexJan 17th, 2008 | 8 Comments I was reading a post about the Top 10 Flex Misconceptions and read in the 2nd section that "Flex also uses CSS for styling of components / applications." I know since day one Adobe has listed CSS styling as a feature of Flex. But anyone who has used CSS to style a web page knows that Flex does not support CSS. It supports, well, SS. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Flex is missing the "Cascading" part of it. CSS is all about using a style sheet to describe the "presentation of the document" (World Wide Web Consortium CSS1). Because of the limited amount of the CSS standard that Flex supports,...

AIR Project Tracker (timer, task-list)

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Flex, GeneralJan 12th, 2008 | 29 Comments I wrote a project timer awhile ago. After I had done that (in Flash 8) I needed a task list that could be split up by client and project, so I combined the old time and a new task list into what I called creatively the Project Tracker. I've been using it since Apollo preview release. I just added a new feature for myself that rounds the times to the nearest half-hour or hour if desired (since that's how my company bills clients), and I thought that I'd share it. It allows you to keep track of time spent on tasks, project, and clients as well as let's you check off any of them when complete. You...

Making Your Model Bindable in Flex

Posted by Jacob Wright in FlexJan 10th, 2008 | 2 Comments I decided to write on a beginner topic today, so if you know everything there is to know about binding then you may want to pass. When writing a Flex application I always write "model" objects which represent the data and business logic of my application. These would be the User objects, the ShoppingCart object, or the Document objects (see MVC). The MXML components will bind to these object's data, and as such, I need to make sure that they will dispatch the correct events for binding to occur. There are really two main practices to keep in mind. The first is to put the [Bindable] tag at the top...