Swami Charan's Blog My personal blog…

9Dec/090

Transitions and Easing in FLEX

Here is a nice video from ADOBE TV about Transitions and Easing in FLEX...

20Oct/090

Free Flex Builder 3 for CS4 Users

As a Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Master Collection customer, you are eligible to use Adobe Flex Builder 3 at no additional cost. You will need to first download a trial version of Flex Builder 3 and then activate Standard edition using the serial number we email to you.

Flex Builder 3 serial numbers are only available to customers who have purchased a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium or Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection on or after September 15, 2009.

You need to provide your CS4 Serial Number in a request form. If your Serial number is valid and meets all the conditions, *Flex Build 3 Standard Edition Serial number will be emailed to you.

*Conditions applied
7Oct/0931

Drag-drop on non-list based controls in Flex/AIR

The List-based controls like List, DataGrid etc will have support for drag and drop. You use drag-drop on list-based contols by enabling properties like dragEnabled and dropEnabled to true. We can implement this drag-drop on non-list based controls as well. To do that we need to handle drag and drop events.

Drag-drop Events for Drag Initiator

  • mouseDown, mouseMove: mouseDown event will be dispatched when a control is selected with Mouse button down. mouseMove is dispatched when mouse moves.
  • dragStart: this event is dispatched by a list-based control when a drag operation starts. Its handled internally, no need to handle it while implementing on non-list based controls.
  • dragComplete: Dispatched when the drag completes.

If you want to implement drag-drop for any component, you must implement either mouseDown or mouseMove and optionally dragComplete event. In case of List-based controls, once dragEnabled property is set to true, Flex automatically adds event handlers for dragStart and dragComplete events.

17Sep/090

Creating Pop-Up Windows in Flex/AIR

Pop-ups are a vital part of any application. In this post, we are going to look into how a popup window can be designed in FLEX/AIR.

PopUpManager class is the one used to create new top-level windows and can be used to place above all the visible windows (making it a popUp). You can remove popUps as well using this class.

We can make these windows  modal as well.

We can create a popUp using createPopUp method.

 public static createPopUp(parent:DisplayObject, class:Class,
    modal:Boolean = false):IFlexDisplayObject

Here parent is the window over which the popup is going to appear, class is the reference to the custom MXML component which is going to act as pop-up, modal represents the Boolean value to decide on whether the popup is going to be modal or not.

16Sep/091

FileSystem Componets in Adobe AIR

Flex File system components are the ones which combine the functionality of list controls like List, Tree, DataGrid etc with File System details. Using these File System components, we can design something like File Brower for your computer with in a matter of minutes.

Here are the Flex File System components:

  • FileSystemComboBox: Shows hierarchical directories of selected directory
  • FileSystemTree: displays contents of a directory as Tree
  • FileSystemList: Shows the contents of a directory as List
  • FileSystemDataGrid: Displays file information in a grid format
  • FileSystemHistoryButton: Lets us move through the navigational history of another control
15Sep/097

Minimizing an AIR App to SystemTray

As you all know ADOBE AIR lets  to use web technologies like AJAX, Flash, Flex etc to build rich internet Application that can be run outside the browser on multiple operating systems. Using ADOBE AIR we can make our Desktop Applications rich by using technologies like Flash and Flex.

In this post, we are going to see how to minimize an AIR Application to System Tray.

Flex/AIR, by default, does not provide any functionality like minimizing to System Tray. We are going to make this happen using various AIR Functions and properties.

For this to happen, we will be catching the events like minimizing and closing the window to implement our functionlity.

11Sep/091

Implementing Drag-and-Drop in Flex/AIR – I

Drag and Drop operation is one of the mostly used actions in almost all the apps. Drap and Drop action involves actions like selecting any object and moving across the application or dragging an object in or out of one application to the other.

In Flex Apps, drag and drop involves almost all the components like dragging items from the Lists, Datagrid etc or dragging any other control onto some other control.

Flex, by default, has support for drag and drop for some list based components like List, DataGarid etc. Of course, we can create our own drag and drop behavior for remaining components like panel, containter etc.

8Sep/090

Skinning Flex/AIR Components

Skinning is like changin the look of the components. To skin Flex components, we can use either Bitmaps or swfs or programmatically we can skin.

In this post we will be looking into skinning Flex Components graphically i.e. using Bitmap images and using SWFs. Using skins we can define the whole appearance, different states of the components.

For example, we will see skinning a button now. We can give whole new look to different states of button like down, up, over etc.