Kevin Hoyt

Over the holiday season I’ve had a lot of opportunity to play with various ideas that have been running through my head of late. One of these, inspired by my wife and six-month old, was a text string dynamically wrapped around the perimeter of a circle. I did some looking on the web, and while there’s a good deal of references to “circle math” with ActionScript, I was unable to find anything in the way of working with text and a circle. Here’s a rough-in of my solution.
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One of the projects I am working on requires recording the start date/time and end date/time during which a specific task was performed. You might have picked this up given my previous post about a clock component in Flex. I still owe you that component, and I am kicking around a few ideas. In the meantime I thought I would deal with date/time using an already common UI - Microsoft Outlook.
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Inspired by Matt Chotin’s recent guest post, I decided to take a moment to document file upload using a Flex application deployed in Central leveraging a Java application server. The biggest challenge is that there’s a lot of moving parts, but the implementation is actually quite easy. Let’s take a look at the Java servlet, the Flex application and the Central hooks. And as always, at the end there’s a Captivate demo, of course!
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This one is from the category of “Just Because I Could” - a Hex Editor, written in Flex and deployed in Central (to allow for file IO). An editor of this nature can potentially represent a ton of data. The image file shown here weighs in at about 433 KB; it results in around 27,000 rows of hex data! Despite the obvious overhead, I’m eager to continue to add a few features as I have some future uses for portions of this application.
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Okay, this one’s coming at you straight from the customer request files! Last week I had a customer ask for an example showing Tree control manipulation based off RemoteObject calls. The customer asked for an example where node data would be appended dynamically as data was returned. They were displaying hierarchical data specific to their business, so I went for the next best thing - system file data.
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I’ve seen the occasional request for a clock component in Flex, and I’m wondering what some of the requirements might be. Are we talking an analog clock or more along the lines of a text field approach? The Windows system clock shows both in a fairly simple fashion - is this adequate? Just the analog clock? Just the masked text field? Since there are numerous analog clocks done in Flash throughout the community, I suspect the requirement is for the later of the two. If you have a need or interest in seeing a component of this nature, let me know by posting in the comments with your particular requirements. The more specific the better.

I recently found myself entranced with way OS X dialog boxes appear and disappear out of the top of the window to which they belong. Becoming fixed on the UI, as is often the case, I found myself compelled to see if I could duplicate the effect using Macromedia Flex. The basics didn’t turn out to be that hard.
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