Adobe Flash, Flex and Air
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…
The objective:
The screen grab below is taken from a Flex application I’m building. This page of the app comprises of 2 VBoxes inside an HBox. The 2 VBoxes need to size to 100% of the height of the HBox container. The user can edit any of the text fields. When the user edits the body text of the left column, if they use up all the vertical space of that left VBox then I’d like the VBox containing the title and the boy text to create scroll bars, not to resize it’s parent VBox. Simple right?
Not so simple… Here’s a snippet of the code:
<mx:VBox width=”50%” height=”100%” styleName=”whiteContainer”>
<mx:Box direction=”vertical” width=”100%” height=”100%” styleName=”scrollableContentWithText” >
<mx:HBox width=”100%” verticalAlign=”middle”>
<mx:Image source=”assets/images/book74x42.png” width=”74″ height=”42″ />
<controls:AdvancedTextArea id=”title1″ multiline=”false” textModify=”captialize” styleName=”whiteContainerHeader” condenseWhite=”true” width=”100%” prompt=”{resourceManager.getString(‘resources’,'ENTER_TEXT_PROMPT’).toUpperCase()}” />
</mx:HBox>
<controls:AdvancedTextArea id=”body1″ styleName=”blueOnWhiteText” condenseWhite=”true” width=”100%” prompt=”{resourceManager.getString(‘resources’,'ENTER_TEXT_PROMPT’)}” />
</mx:Box>
</mx:VBox>
And here are the results when that body text gets too deep for the VBox:
So the whole parent HBox ended up getting stretched. Not the results I expected.
The solution as it turns out is pretty straight forward. The VBox containing the left column needs it’s minHeight and minWidth properties set to 0! The reason is that with containers using percentage based sizing flex sets the min height and min width properties to the cumulative width and height of the container’s children components. So in my example as the editable text component gets deeper/taller this automatically increases the minHeight property of it’s parent container.
So by explicitly setting the parent container’s minHeight and minWidth to 0:
<mx:VBox width=”50%” height=”100%” styleName=”whiteContainer”>
<mx:Box direction=”vertical” width=”100%” height=”100%” minHeight=”0″ minWidth=”0″ styleName=”scrollableContentWithText” >
<mx:HBox width=”100%” verticalAlign=”middle”>
<mx:Image source=”assets/images/book74x42.png” width=”74″ height=”42″ />
<controls:AdvancedTextArea id=”title1″ multiline=”false” textModify=”captialize” styleName=”whiteContainerHeader” condenseWhite=”true” width=”100%” prompt=”{resourceManager.getString(‘resources’,'ENTER_TEXT_PROMPT’).toUpperCase()}” />
</mx:HBox>
<controls:AdvancedTextArea id=”body1″ styleName=”blueOnWhiteText” condenseWhite=”true” width=”100%” prompt=”{resourceManager.getString(‘resources’,'ENTER_TEXT_PROMPT’)}” />
</mx:Box>
</mx:VBox>
… I ended up with the desired result:
There are a number of useful Flex techniques I use in the Flex Apps I develop all the time and I thought that some of these might be useful for others. So here’s the first… How to replace that nasty default Flex preloader with your own Flash animated version. Here’s the result (I just downloaded a free preloader animation from the web and applied it to this tutorial:
http://www.nickkuh.com/demos/custom_preloader/
Flex source files can be downloaded from here:
http://www.nickkuh.com/demos/custom_preloader/srcview/CustomPreloader.zip
How it works:
Inside the main application MXML you can specify a custom preloader class for your application to use:
<mx:Application xmlns:mx=”http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml”
layout=”vertical”
backgroundColor=”#000000″
backgroundGradientAlphas=”[0.0,0.0]“
paddingTop=”30″
applicationComplete=”init()”
preloader=”com.nickkuh.preload.Preloader” viewSourceURL=”srcview/index.html”>
So you’ll see I’m pointing the preloader to my com.nickkuh.preload.Preloader class. This class extends the default Flex DownloadProgressBar class: mx.preloaders.DownloadProgressBar. The Flex Framework passes the application it’s loading to preloader setter method which I’m overriding:
override public function set preloader(value:Sprite):void{
value.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, progressEventHandler, false, 0, true);
value.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeEventHandler, false, 0, true);
value.addEventListener(FlexEvent.INIT_PROGRESS, initProgressEventHandler, false, 0, true);
value.addEventListener(FlexEvent.INIT_COMPLETE, initCompleteEventHandler, false, 0, true);
}
So my custom Preloader class is now able to listen to the application preloading events – halfway there…
In the constructor for the Preloader class I’m creating an instance of another custom class which deals with displaying the Flash loading animation and adding this instance to the stage:
progressBar = new ProgressBar;
this.addChild(progressBar);
The Preloader class listens to the instance of the com.nickkuh.preload.ProgressBar class for the custom event ProgressBar.FADE_OUT_COMPLETE. Only when that event is fired will the Preloader class in turn fire an Event.COMPLETE event which the Flex app listens for before it displays the loaded application and fires the applicationComplete event. So this set-up enables the custom ProgressBar to control when the Flex app changes the view from preloader to application.
The custom ProgressBar class extends Flex’s Loader class and loads in the flash loading animation. I’ve set this up so that the ProgressBar checks for the path to the preloader.swf via FlashVars:
var url:String;
if (this.stage.loaderInfo.parameters.hasOwnProperty(“preloaderURL”))
{
url = this.stage.loaderInfo.parameters.preloaderURL;
}
else
{
url = “preloader.swf”;
}
var urlRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest(url)
this.load(urlRequest);
You’ll find the fla for the preloader in the source files in a folder called ‘design’. The fla actually includes a couple of methods on frame one:
stop();
function setProgress(n:Number)
{}
function set ready(b:Boolean)
{
if (b) gotoAndPlay(2);
}
The custom ProgressBar class calls these methods with progress updates and sets the ready setter to true when the Flex App has finished loading. If you’re loading animation is a progress bar or needs to give percentage feedback then you can customise the setProgress(n:Number) function – n will be between 0 and 1 – 1 for fully loaded.
In my fla once the preload completes it then plays a few more frames before fading out. This animation could be changed to you requirements.
Once the internal fade out complete the fla fires off an “animationComplete” event which the ProgressBar is listening out for. At this point the closeScreen method of ProgressBar handles the event and ProgressBar fades itself out. Once complete it in turn fires the FADE_OUT_COMPLETE event which causes the main Flex app to close the preloader and display your Flex App.
Yes, it’s a bit time consuming to make a simple preloader but I now use this set-up over and over again. Feel free to do the same!
This morning I downloaded and installed the new Flex 3.3 SDK recently released by Adobe. Thanks for the post Ted.
I prefer to load Flex SDK as a runtime shared library but soon found that this was generating a couple of runtime errors when my projects were initialising:
Error #2034: An invalid digest was supplied.
Failed to load RSL framework_3.2.0.3958.swz
Failing over to RSL framework_3.2.0.3958.swf
Flex Error #1001: Digest mismatch with RSL http://myurl/framework_3.2.0.3958.swf. Redeploy the matching RSL or relink your application with the matching library.
Via the project properties I’d set the flex framework to be loaded as a runtime shared library ok and chosen the option to deploy the RSL swf. Flex Builder was deploying the swf, I guess by compiling it from the new SDK source but the error I believe relates to the generated RSLs don’t have the required validation compiled into them.
The solution:
You can just grab the verified RSLs that are included in the new SDK download which you’ll find via the following path:
[Flex SDK folder]/frameworks/rsls/framework_3.3.0.4852.swf
[Flex SDK folder]/frameworks/rsls/framework_3.3.0.4852.swz
Copy those files into your html-template folder and then be sure to specify the relative paths to those 2 RSLs via the [Your Project] > Properties > Flex Build Path > Library Path > Flex 3.3 > framework.swc > RSL URL
Hope that saves you some time with that error 
CluedUp is a popular subscription-based site for the Telegraph Newspaper. A skinned Flex 3 application that implements AMF remote data services, advanced skinning and modules.
This was a project I worked during my role as Lead Flex Developer for London agency World Archipelago.
We launched the Crosswords and Sudoko site CluedUp for the Daily Telegraph in the last quarter of 2008 – I built the Flex Crosswords and Sudoku Applications/Modules. Behind the scenes it’s one of my best structured projects to date and uses the following technologies/approaches:
- Adobe Flex 3
- PureMVC MutliCore (Pipes)
- AMFPHP Remoting (for loading, saving and submitting user crossword data)