By Guru: Flexponential

Is Flexponential your favorite writer? Why not get everything Flexponential publishes, all the tutorials, components, news, and inspiration, across all sites, delivered directly to you? Choose your method of delivery on the Gurus page.

Below are the latest articles from Flexponential. The results are culled from all sources Workflow: Flash follows.

• Checking if an element is included in the current state in Flex 4

  • Tuesday, 15 Jun 2010, 12:41 PDT (15 June 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  Checking if an element is included or excluded from the current state is a little more involved than just checking the visible property. This post demonstrates a method that returns true when the element is included in the current state. Since the new “includeIn” states syntax in Flex 4 adds the element to the DisplayList [...]

• Introducing Flex 4

  • Monday, 22 Mar 2010, 20:37 PDT (22 March 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  Flex 4 has been released. This is a major release of Flex that introduces some new features that allow you an amazing amount of flexibility and power in building killer internet applications. There are many new features in Flex 4 including: new spark component architecture new states syntax faster compiler new text capabilities improved effects advanced CSS support pixel bender support two way [...]

• Using non-embedded images in a spark BitmapImage

  • Wednesday, 17 Mar 2010, 00:37 PDT (17 March 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  The spark BitmapImage component only supports embedded images in Flex 4.0. This post shows how you can get around that limitation by loading an image via a SWFLoader and then pushing that bitmap data into the BitmapImage’s source property. Most of the time you will want to use an mx Image instead of the spark [...]

• Measuring a GraphicElement with a Stroke in a Group

  • Sunday, 14 Mar 2010, 16:37 PDT (14 March 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  How Flex treats strokes on GraphicElements can be a little tricky. This post explains how the stroke of a GraphicElement contributes to the measured size of a spark Group. First consider a plain old Rect with a red fill and no stroke inside of a Group: <s:Group id="group1"> <s:Rect id="rect1" width="50" height="50"> [...]

• Learn how to create a simple virtual layout in Flex 4

  • Saturday, 6 Mar 2010, 16:38 PST (6 March 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  This post goes over the basics of writing a very simple custom layout that supports virtualization in spark. It assumes that you have already built a custom layout that handles the real (non-virtual) case and are comfortable doing so. The main difference between a virtual and non-virtual layout is how many renderers are created. [...]

• Memory Graph to track Flash Player total memory usage

  • Sunday, 21 Feb 2010, 12:36 PST (21 February 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  Sometimes it’s nice to keep an eye on the memory of an application without involving the Flash Builder profiler. This post demonstrates a simple and lightweight component that graphs the value of the Flash Player’s System.totalMemory over time. The chart can be very useful for noticing spikes in memory that might require further investigation [...]

• Displaying the row number or index in a spark List

  • Monday, 8 Feb 2010, 12:42 PST (8 February 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  The ItemRenderer class in Flex 4 has an itemIndex property that was added after beta2. You can use this property within your item renderer to display the row number or index of an item in a spark List. The following example demonstrates a List with a custom item renderer that uses this itemIndex property. [...]

• Spark DropDownList equivalent of the HTML optgroup tag

  • Sunday, 31 Jan 2010, 12:46 PST (31 January 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  HTML’s select control included a tag called optgroup where you could group items in the drop down together and provide a heading that wasn’t selectable. This post looks at making an equivalent component in Flex 4 by extending DropDownList. Here’s an example of the HTML select control working on W3Schools. Notice that group headings [...]

• Custom focusSkin for spark components in Flex 4

  • Sunday, 24 Jan 2010, 12:46 PST (24 January 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  In spark components, the focusSkin is treated differently from the normal skin. Unlike the skin of a spark component, the focusSkin is not automatically sized or positioned by the component. Instead, it is added as the first child of the component. In addition, if the focusSkin has a property called target, target is set to [...]

• Caching images loaded from a spark item renderer

  • Sunday, 17 Jan 2010, 16:59 PST (17 January 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  I recently created a form in Flex that required using multiple DropDownLists with a custom item renderer that loads in preview images of each item. This was really easy to do initially, but I noticed a couple performance issues that bothered me. I decided to improve the performance by implementing a simple caching [...]

• Resizable TitleWindow in Flex 4

  • Sunday, 10 Jan 2010, 17:12 PST (10 January 2010)
  • By: Flexponential, Latest Adobe News by Smart Category

  The spark TitleWindow allows you to drag it around the stage through the use of a skin part called “moveArea”. By attaching mouse handlers to the moveArea, the TitleWindow can be dragged around the screen. In a similar fashion, we can add another skin part called “resizeHandle” to allow the TitleWindow to be resizable. To do [...]