FlexBook

I was flipping through some random components (hah, see what I did there?) on the web and couldn’t find any page flip components that looked good and that fitted nicely within Flex.

For my surprise (and joy), I’ve found an open source solution that was better than any of those paid ones: FlexBook.

Unfortunately, Ruben is not supporting the project anymore, so I moved it to GitHub and will try to support it. I would also be glad if anyone can lend a hand. I’ve created a repository for some demos too, so stay tuned.

TiledImage

You may already know that Flash has some limitations when working with bitmaps. Flash Player 9 can only handle 2880px, width or height. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1px tall and 2881px large. It will break. Flash Player 10 extend this limit to 4000px.

But what you don’t know (yet) is that I’ve created some dumb solution to (at least visually) go beyond that limit. I break an image in tiles, like building a table with pieces of the source.

Get it and try it for yourself.

cacheAsPerformanceHang

In a recent project I’ve had to move a lot of shapes on screen and, they were vectors you know. Vectors can be REALLY SLOW.

The fastest solution was to turn cacheAsBitmap on for each object. You know, just do a displayObject.cacheAsBitmap = true; and you’re fine.

But after researching a little bit, I came across this great article, that warns you about performance issues when using cacheAsBitmap. Not worse than not using it, but way worse than manually rasterizing it.

Well, fortunately that was not my case. I’ve used cacheAsBitmap and everything went fine, but I thought you should know, you know… when coding that game that you are procrastinating on doing so. :)

DragScrollingCanvas goes Spark

I was kicking around with Spark components on this app and I needed a Scroller that the user could drag. Think of something like an image viewer, when zoomed in. Yeah, there you go.

I didn’t find anything Spark, but I found the DragScrollingCanvas, from the awesome FlexLib. So I did some really small changes and come up with DragScroller, so I could keep up with a Spark-only app.

If you need it, just grab it already.