updatedisplaylist.com

A while back Ely Greenfield did a session entitled Flex Roadmap, where he demonstrated some of his ideas on MVC architecture for component development. When I first saw the videos, my jaw hit the floor. Using nothing but a series of MXML tags, he skinned styled and changed the look and feel of a simple List component into an accordion and then into a weird quasi menu/drop down thing.  Ever since then, i’ve been waiting with baited breath for the next version of flex, but then reading Juan Sanchez blog at scalenine.com I’ve come to realise a big portion of my workload will be done for me.

For me one of the fun parts of working with flex, is building custom components. I love working with the three main functions, createchildren, commitproperties and updatedisplaylist. I get real joy knowing that I’ve made the component as lightweight as possible. However, I know that these new tags are going to make the framework even more optimized, and open up flex to create much more beautiful itemrenderers.

In response to Per Olsens comment about how the Charting components and AdvancedDataGrid is bound to the license of the Flex builder IDE, I actually don’t mind it to much! Just for clarification, I’ve never used the Design view to develop my application, so in all honesty I don’t really need to use flex builder 3 to develop with. I just do because its a pretty awesome IDE. As for the components, I’m quite happy to pay for them (OK my business pays for them) because at the end of the day, I do understand that adobe is a business, and it has to make money some how. They are a bargain for the price, plus you get to look at all the neat source code underneath, and marvel at how well written they are.

Ok, just spent most of the day trying to fix a wierd bug with an itemrenderer and a popups. I have a button which exists only in the state “Expanded” but does not exist in the state “Normal”. When the button is clicked, the popupmanager creates a window and the state of reverts back to “Normal”, removing the button. Here is the kicker, If I click anywhere outside the popup, the focusmanager throw an error, something about a null value.

After some investigation, It turns out that clicking the button, it first gets focus, which is then passed to the popup when it is created. However since the button has then been removed, the focusmanager somehow gets confused when you try to click back on the main application, and refocus back on the old button. I’ve tried writing a small example, but its not happening, so its probably something i’m doing with Currentstate and its sequence.

You probably won’t experience this with any app you write, but it was bugging the hell out of me!

The main reason Ive been waiting for Degrafa, is the simple fact I’m not a designer. I’m crap at deciding colours, and even worse at deciding what are nice shapes to use on a website.

With Degrafa, the allure of making pretty shapes in MXML and being able to style it via binding and other such features seems pretty tempting. Whilst playing with stateful skins in flex 3, I’ve made a nice button which has unsymmetrical corners, a radial and liner fill, and some nice transitions between the two. However, it still looks a bit clunky, once again proving that I don’t have a designers bone in my body. I will still keep trying though, because I don’t want my flex app to look as samey as the rest.

I just like to say that the Degrafa team have done an awesome job at making styling and skinning as easy as possible, even though I don’t have the talent to use it, yet!

Its Christmas day, and I’m trying to hunt a bug causing performance lag in my app….

We are having a traditional roast today. Our family decided to have beef wellington, instead of the usual turkey,  should be interesting…