tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73266644740459818572012-01-30T10:36:11.062+02:00Flash, Flex, news, fun and more ...Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.comBlogger311100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-70514289714925725832011-07-01T12:29:00.005+03:002012-01-30T10:34:16.260+02:00

While developing a new Flex 4.5 application I needed to add a background to all the views. I was using ViewNavigatorApplication, pushing and popping views as the user navigated through the app, with slide effect in between. This made it impossible to add the background to every view, because you would see it slide as well. The best way to solve it was to create a custom application skin. I

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-46402555755848102022011-06-28T13:33:00.006+03:002011-06-28T16:13:28.829+03:00

Oh boy, time really flies. Was it really 5 years ago when I was struggling to move from the very comfortable AS2 to a shiny new language where the "usual hacks" were not working anymore?!I must admit that at the beginning I had a hard time adapting. The movieclip properties suddenly lost the preceding dash, so movie._x was not working anymore. Then came the percentage values that changed from [0.

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-2295939747096771222011-05-17T12:51:00.007+03:002011-07-01T15:46:02.560+03:00

Adobe recently released version 10.3 of the Flash Player. Amongst the cool new features there is a long expected one by the privacy control freaks: the clearing of local shared objects when clearing cookies in the browser. The idea is very nice, whenever the user clears their cookies, they actually want to remove all the session information the browser maintains.When my desktop updated to FP 10.3

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-56118299078106870222010-12-14T00:30:00.002+02:002011-07-01T15:46:36.765+03:00

I've been in the online gambling industry for a while and I noticed that it's relying more and more on the Flash Platform. The applications created by online gambling companies have large budgets and use state of the art technology. They usually have dedicated User Experience professionals who make sure the application looks and feels right to the customers. After all, the most important thing is

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-59997569787200129862010-12-03T10:02:00.004+02:002010-12-03T10:16:20.679+02:00

A few days ago I installed some new software and it changed my Firefox default search engine from Google to Yahoo. As I am used type everything I want to search in the address bar, this is what I got after misspelling flash utils proxy.Shouldn't it be obvious that it's more probable for me to type the letters in the wrong order than to type wrong letters ?! And guess what, after trying Google,

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-68567074675913669992010-10-25T18:34:00.004+03:002010-10-25T18:54:01.450+03:00

The Flex list allows you to select multiple items by setting allowMultipleSelection="true". This will allow the user to select none, some or all the elements in the list. If you need to limit the number of selected items, you basically have two options:1. Ignore the last selected element2. Remove the first selected element and add mark the last one as selected.In Flex 3 (Halo components) you can

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-37980897219632357112010-10-25T17:22:00.005+03:002010-10-25T18:33:47.143+03:00

Sometimes you may need to detect if the user has scrolled through the whole content of a text area. Let's say that only after the user scrolls to the bottom a button is enabled (like in most License Agreements). This is fairly easy to do but differ between Flex 3 and Flex 4 (Spark and Halo components).For Flex 3 we simply bind to the verticalScrollPosition and maxVerticalScrollPosition of the

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-23543844644918766802010-10-01T13:35:00.003+03:002010-10-01T16:02:19.070+03:00

Adobe recently launched a prererelease version of the Adobe Actionscript Code Coverage Plug-in for Adobe Flash Builder, a tool that helps AS and Flex developers understand what code gets executed while an application is running.What can I use it for ?The main use of the plug-in is to tell you how much of code your unit tests cover. Although it's a good practice to add a unit test coverage

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-87308116143919167082010-10-01T10:34:00.002+03:002010-10-01T10:51:16.578+03:00

The mm.cfg file is a golden mine for any Flash Platform developer. Basically it allows you to log a lot of useful information from your running apps.Recently I had problems making it work on my new Windows XP machine at work. According to the official adobe docs all I had to do was put this file in C:\Documents and Settings\Username and put whatever configurations I wanted there. But no matter

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-31449755892443804982010-09-28T11:39:00.007+03:002010-09-28T12:51:39.955+03:00

This blog post is based on creating a multiline checkbox, but it applies for radio buttons and buttons as well.It's obvious that Flex 4 is a major improvement in terms of customization capabilities for developers. I recently had to make a Spark checkbox to display multiline text. In Flex 3 it took a lot of work and the solution wasn't very flexible.In Spark it's as easy as skinning the checkbox.

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-56866418922217983582010-09-27T13:22:00.004+03:002010-09-27T13:54:48.431+03:00

There are 2 main types of data that you need to pass to item renderers. Rendered object dataThis is usually passed through the data property of the renderer which of type Object, but you can cast it to the element type that the renderer displays. Depending on the type of renderer this property might be called listData, dataGridListData or treeListData. General application dataThere might be cases

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-57366288878815640442010-09-27T10:36:00.006+03:002010-09-27T12:45:11.834+03:00

Flex 4 changes the way we use and customize item renderers for both spark and halo compononets.Components that use item renderersFlex 4 comes with a new implementation of the List component (Spark) and a brand new component called DataGroup. Both of them use the new spark ItemRenderer. The main difference between the 2 is that DataGroup is optimized for performance, doesn't hold selection and

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-65232911633651559842010-04-14T16:02:00.010+03:002010-06-02T10:11:51.067+03:00

I got to play with the new Photoshop CS5 and I have to say it's absolutely brilliant. Although I am not very good at using it, I easily removed the wedding rings off of 4 women with my skills :).Ring 1 - Close-upFor this I had to carefully select around the ring, including the shadow on the left side. The edges can be pretty rought, you don't need the exact shape of the ring in the selection.

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-60097037588813541512010-01-28T00:16:00.002+02:002010-01-28T00:33:22.150+02:00

I've been writing some Javascript code recently and I was amazed of how dumb it sometimes is.Fail #1While working with a simple algorithm I've had the incredible idea of using indexOf to check if a string value is found in an Array. You can imagine my face when I realized that IE(6,7,8) doesn't support Array.indexOf (it does for String, however). You can find a decent workaround here : http://

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-10168694691035623682009-12-22T00:05:00.002+02:002009-12-22T00:13:45.526+02:00

A very interesting thing I noticed a while ago is the behavior of SharedObjects when the data in them is an object as well. The idea is that when you add any Object to the data field of a SharedObject instance this is not cloned and is passed by reference. So from then on, any changes to the Object will be reflected in the SharedObject data.If you want to prevent this behaviour it's best that you

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-59465388087369669352009-10-30T16:34:00.005+02:002009-11-27T20:13:11.361+02:00

My friend Iacob showed me an interesting livedocs comment on the Performing Object Introspection page. It seems that if you try to change values while you are in a for loop, everything kind of gets messed up.For example take the following code :For instance:Codevar obj : Object = {};obj.a = "x";obj.b = "y";obj.c = "z";for(var key:String in obj){ obj[key] = obj[key]+"x"; trace(key+"="+

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-61702944312019212212009-10-30T12:47:00.004+02:002010-09-29T12:03:01.288+03:00

I got this error while trying to export a release build for an AIR application (with icons) in Flex Builder. The problem was pretty clear, it was missing the 32 pixels icon that I specified in the -app.xml file, but there was no mention of the 16,48 and 128 versions which meant that they were ok.So first I tried to re-export the 32 pixels version hoping that the first one was corrupt. Still no

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-23970833892096126042009-09-22T17:54:00.003+03:002009-09-22T17:58:53.143+03:00

We just discovered a slight problem with the flashlog feature of the Flash Player. In order to be able to see traces from the flash players to the log file you are instructed to put the following lines in your mm.cfg file :ErrorReportingEnable=1TraceOutputFileEnable=1This works fine, you see all your debug info, but DON'T leave it like that. Once you're done debugging, switch them back to 0. My

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-30939640893894676592009-08-14T16:42:00.005+03:002009-10-30T10:42:43.943+02:00

If you know PHP and want to learn Flex, you can read Mihai Corlan's Flex for PHP developers . It's not a book, but I must say it's more than a blog post.In case you don't know, Mihai is an Adobe Evangelist.Note: The book is now available in Romania as well : Flex pentru programatorii PHP

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-50619921844234037042009-07-03T15:11:00.004+03:002009-07-03T17:56:56.270+03:00

Recently my Firebug stopped working. I googled for any problems between my Firefox version 3.0.11 and Firebug 1.3.3, but I only found a few topics which didn't fix my problem. After a few attempts I realized there are a few reasons for why this might happen. My problem was the 3rd case.Case 1 Incompatible FB version or other add on.You need to check if some other add on is not interfering with FB

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-24766975191878498452009-06-22T11:40:00.004+03:002010-09-29T12:05:56.598+03:00

First I wanted to call this post HTTPService is evil. And you will soon find out why.I wanted to implement an Adobe AIR RESTful client and for this I needed to make remote service calls using PUT and DELETE HTTP methods. According to the ActionScript documentation (livedocs) it's possible for AIR apps to use these let's say eccentric methods. And being used to the HTTPService I tried using it to

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-6292013112409434562009-06-19T18:05:00.005+03:002009-06-19T18:24:13.167+03:00

I searched all over the internet for this and I didn't find a good tutorial so I decided to write one myself.The goal is to filter some entries from a table (based on a criteria) and to generate a result table that doesn't contain all the columns from the source.So here's the table. I hope the data is intuitive.So the goal is to select the name and the city of the users that we've done business

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-60281776211669319802009-05-05T14:04:00.007+03:002009-05-06T10:14:29.607+03:00

After posting a few Flex examples on blogs and websites I realized that if you have more than 10-20 lines of code the examples are pretty difficult to read. So I decided to create a tool that can color (highlight) the code very similar to Flex Builder (but you can style it however you want). You don't need to add any external files or something like that to your site. Just paste your source code

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-11851734522128695902009-04-12T17:38:00.033+03:002009-05-04T10:56:48.919+03:00

In case you didn't know you can have multiple ArrayCollection with the same array as source. When you add to any of the collections or to the array, all the other collections will contain the new item. However, if you use databinding on the collection the events are not triggered when you add the item to another collection. Because of that you need to manually refresh each ArrayCollection.You can

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-26330656359314218532009-04-01T10:27:00.002+03:002009-04-01T11:28:36.333+03:00

In case you don't already know Pixel Bender is the newest thing from Adobe for runtime image processing. The great thing about it is that it runs on the GPU, thus performing faster and leaving the CPU for other stuff. I've never been a math fan, so my examples are very basic, just a grayscale filter and an overlay. I got some inspiration from Miti's examples. Once I got to know how the filter

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-50830921829856696472009-03-23T11:51:00.001+02:002009-04-01T11:29:22.634+03:00

I'm proud to announce that Transylvania Flex Group was launched. The group is based in Cluj, but addresses to Flex coders from the whole region.Feel free to join even if you are from other countries as the main language of the group is English.

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-68983210147128338562009-03-17T14:55:00.001+02:002009-04-01T11:29:41.074+03:00

Last weekend I've attended my first Flex Camp. Thanks to the 3 evanghelists on the scene I found out about a few Adobe Platform features that I didn't know about.One of them is that you can compile C (and virtually any other language) into a .swf movie file or into a .swc library. (Yeah, I know ... coool). You need to use Alchemy, an Adobe Labs research project. You can see a cool example on

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-40430498467529073662008-12-16T18:03:00.001+02:002009-04-01T11:30:04.849+03:00

SmartFox is a Flex/AIR opensource web browser.The changes for this version include :-loading .swf files now works (removed the transparency of the window due to a framework limitation)-code is now signedYou can get the air file here :http://smartfox.googlecode.com/files/WebBrowser1.1.airOr the source files here :http://smartfox.googlecode.com/files/WebBrowserCode1.1.zipThe google code project

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-72134905045795395122008-10-24T12:22:00.013+03:002009-05-04T10:58:50.891+03:00

Recently I've been playing with Flex's LocalConnection on the AIR platform. I wanted this AIR application to be able to exchange messages with a web application that runs in the browser. Because of this, I could never know the exact domains of these 2 files and they could never be in the same domain.So I read the documantation, but I did it somewhat between the lines and of course I got the Error

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-87501697706120797842008-10-23T16:34:00.001+03:002009-04-01T11:30:43.084+03:00

SmartFox is an open source Flex/AIR web browser. It is just intended to be a demo on how to use the HTML component and the similar classes from the AIR framework.The key features are :*History management (back/forward)*Typed in addresses saving (they are saved from one instance to another)*Visual effects for different window effectsI will probably add a new version soon with some new features. If

Spy 6http://www.blogger.com/profile/01875471998688704457noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7326664474045981857.post-28325603465030864392008-09-19T13:22:00.005+03:002010-09-28T12:40:21.941+03:00

It seems Flex 3 controls don't allow their text labels to be multiline. For some reason this feature wasn't implemented.Thanks to Alex's Multiline buttons example I created a custom class to that extend the CheckBox to allow more than one line of text.Codepackage packageName{import flash.text.TextLineMetrics;import mx.controls.CheckBox;public class MultilineCheckbox extends CheckBox{public var

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