On Tuesday night I’m going to be talking about Flex at the next Flash Brighton event at the Werks in Hove. It’s an informal event and most of us usually end up in the pub for a few beers afterwards. So, if you’re interested in Adobe Flex SDK and want to know what all the fuss is about then why not come along and see if I can convince you to have a go! Sign up at upcoming here.
In the presentation I’m going to look at my favorite 10 Flex features, try a little Flex Builder coding, link up to a few cool Flex RIAs and give away a demo Flex app I’ve build that brings together some of the features I’ll cover.
This might save you some time if you’re building apps with Flex 4 Beta (Gumbo). In Spark Applications there is no backgroundAlpha property within you main MXML application file. To create a transparent Flex 4 background you’ll need to do the following:
1) Create a custom application skin MXML file.
2) Set the skinClass of your application MXML to the custom skin file: you can do this in the MXML for your app – eg. skinClass=”com.mycompany.myproject.skins.MyAppSkin”.
Search for the default ApplicationSkin.mxml in the Flex 4 SDK. Duplicate this file, rename it and place it within your project source. In the new skin code I just added alpha=”0″ to the backgroundRect declaration.
That’s it 
At Flash on the Beach this year I’ve been selected as one of 20 speakers who will get the chance to present to a full house at the Brighton Dome. But there’s a catch – we’ve each got the limelight for just 3 minutes!
There’s a real mixture of talent for this session and it looks pretty evenly split between designers and developers.
I think for many of the presenters this will be their chance to showcase their most visually engaging work, as 3 minutes is such a short time frame to get anything in-depth across.
The title of my talk, however, is ActionScript to Objective-C (and everything in between) - perhaps not the sexiest title and certainly not that easy to spice up with animated visuals!
I guess my thought behind this proposed presentation was to stick to what you do best. I’m a very experienced OOP ActionScripter and I write good extendable code (even if I do say so myself!). As my OOP skills have developed over the years so has my ability to pick up new programming languages quickly. This is really the message I hope to get across at FOTB – good OOP concepts in ActionScript can be applied to many programming languages and if you’re good at OOP then the core development principles of the iPhone SDK, Objective-C and other OOP based languages will not take long to master.
Come and check out the Elevator Pitch on Tuesday September 22nd at Flash on the Beach 2009
Hopefully this quick post will be a bit of a time saver for Flex Developers developing Flex 4 SDK projects with Flash Builder or other tools…
Over the last year or 2 I’ve really got comfortable with reskinning Flex 3 applications. For me the quickest, simlest way has usually been to cut up the designer’s photoshop file and implement Scale 9 and syntax in my Flex css files – an example of a recent Flex 3 button skin looked like this:
.answerButton
{
fontSize : 44px;
fontWeight : bold;
paddingLeft : 15px;
paddingRight: 15px;upSkin : Embed(source=”assets/images/new/buttons/answerButtonUp.png”,scaleGridTop=”20″, scaleGridLeft=”19″, scaleGridRight=”145″, scaleGridBottom=”99″);
overSkin : Embed(source=”assets/images/new/buttons/answerButtonOver.png”,scaleGridTop=”20″, scaleGridLeft=”19″, scaleGridRight=”145″, scaleGridBottom=”99″);
downSkin : Embed(source=”assets/images/new/buttons/answerButtonOver.png”,scaleGridTop=”20″, scaleGridLeft=”19″, scaleGridRight=”145″, scaleGridBottom=”99″);
disabledSkin: Embed(source=”assets/images/new/buttons/answerButtonUp.png”,scaleGridTop=”20″, scaleGridLeft=”19″, scaleGridRight=”145″, scaleGridBottom=”99″);
selectedDisabledSkin: Embed(source=”assets/images/new/buttons/answerButtonUp.png”,scaleGridTop=”20″, scaleGridLeft=”19″, scaleGridRight=”145″, scaleGridBottom=”99″);}
Luckily for me the Flex 4 SDK is backwards compatible for the most part so you can still skin an mx.controls.Button component with the CSS above.
However… one of the reasons I’ve been migrating my Flex 3 project to Flex 4 is to make use of some of the skinning improvements it offers with it’s new Spark components built on top of the Flex 3 halo components.
The code above does not work on a spark.components.Button. I assumed it would… Here’s how I got the example below to work:
http://www.nickkuh.com/demos/gumbo/scale_nine/
Step 1) Create a new Flex Project in Flash Builder
Step 2) You can still customize the label colours and states but you’ll need to implement the new namespaces in CSS introduced in Flex 4 to avoid warnings and errors – see the gumbo_scale_nine.css file.
Step 3) You’ll also notice within the gumbo_scale_nine.css file that I’m pointing a custom style (‘answerButton’) to an MXML skin file in the location com.nickkuh.skins.AnswerButtonSkin.mxml. This is the file that I’ve used to custom skin the spark button component. I copied the ButtonSkin.mxml file that comes with Flex 4, stipped out a load of fills and strokes I didn’t require and add these important lines:
<s:BitmapImage left=”0″ right=”0″ top=”0″ bottom=”0″ source=”@Embed(source=’assets/answerButtonUp.png’,scaleGridTop=’20′, scaleGridLeft=’19′, scaleGridRight=’145′, scaleGridBottom=’99′)” resizeMode=”scale” includeIn=”up” />
<s:BitmapImage left=”0″ right=”0″ top=”0″ bottom=”0″ source=”@Embed(source=’assets/answerButtonOver.png’,scaleGridTop=’20′, scaleGridLeft=’19′, scaleGridRight=’145′, scaleGridBottom=’99′)” resizeMode=”scale” excludeFrom=”up” />
By default the resizeMode parameter will just tile and repeat your graphic which wasn’t the desired functionality.
So that’s it. Although it took more step to reskin than a Flex 3 component I can certainly see the benefits of the separate FXG skin file. Next step is to change that SimpleText labelElement into a RichEditableText component and enable multilines and imline images into my Spark buttons. Wish me luck!
It’s taken a while for me to discover the simple solution as to why one of my 2 UITouch objects when grabbing the allTouches set from the iPhone SDK touchesMoved event always resulted in 0,0 co-ordinates in my view…
NSSet *allTouches = [event allTouches];
Solution: you need to switch on the multipleTouchEnabled property of the view you want to get multiple touch events from!! ie:
[self.view setMultipleTouchEnabled:YES];
Hope this post helps others…