For those of you that joined in on the online Flex seminar, thanks for attending! For those of you who missed the seminar, the meeting was recorded. Altogether there’s about 1 hour and 30 minutes of introductory Flex material.
(more…)
This is a little late in coming, as for whatever reason it never occurred to me to actually post this little tidbit, but I’ll be presenting an online Flex seminar today at 3 PM Eastern for anybody that’s interested. The content will be completely introductory, so if you’re already knowledgeable about Flex, then this may not be the best seminar for you. If Flex is news to you, then check it out - there’s still time to register online.
(more…)
Flex has great support for drag-and-drop functionality. But what happens when you’re not interested in drag-and-drop, but rather drag-and-resize? Take an application like the Restaurant Finder where highlighting a section of a map is key to filtering the displayed data. Rather than dragging a fixed size rectangle around the map, I wondered if it would be possible to let the end user resize the rectangle to get a more refined view of the available restaurants? It turns out that by using a combination of events and by tracking mouse movements it is possible to achieve this functionality.
(more…)
Another example from the customer request list - linked combo boxes. The goal from an information perspective is generally to allow the end-user to drill down into data that is related. Similar in fashion to the needs of a multi-step process, save each step is a single combo box. The first combo box is populated automatically. Based on the selection made, subsequent combo boxes change the values available in their lists.
(more…)
I got a customer request yesterday for a Flex example that allows one portion of the UI to be expanded or collapsed at runtime, and in which the surrounding components adjust accordingly to fit the new space made or removed by the change. The good news is that with the Flex layout managers, this type of functionality is easy to create. The bad news is that the customer couldn’t find an existing code sample for this functionality, so I figured it would be worth posting.
(more…)
A question came across an internal email list the other day about how to get font metrics from within a Flex application. Flex is ultimately Flash content, and the Flash Player has some ability to determine and provide your application with basic font metrics. In Flash this is generally accomplished by using the TextField.getTextFormat() and TextFormat.getTextExtent() methods. In Flex however the Label class, or similar class, is used to display text, not the raw TextField class itself. How then does one determine and display content using font metrics in Flex?
(more…)
For those of you who enjoy reading over human interface guidelines (HIG), I recently found a set published for the Gnome desktop environment. The HALO components used by Flex have their own implied guidelines, but nothing formally documented. For example, the default font is Verdana 10 point, horizontal gap space is 8 pixels, and application margins are 24 pixels. Of course Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Java all have their own as well.
(more…)
I haven’t read any official reports, and can’t make any scientific claims, but one might imagine that the most common resolution for 2005 will be to lose weight. If that’s a goal you have, you might want to check out SportBrain.
(more…)