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. :)

Adobe Fail Catalyst

Flex developers: Have you ever tried to create a skin for Flex?

Well, you know, before Flex 4 and all that skinable bullshit it was a pain in the ass. That’s why there’s not much skins out there. But then Adobe re-invented the wheel (a little bit rounded this time) and it was cool and stuff. Not only that, Adobe created a tool, a magical tool, a “catalyst” that could pick up *anything* you draw in Illustrator or Photoshop and convert it to a fully functional Flex 4 Spark Component.

Cool, huh? It could be… if Adobe didn’t fail again. “But how Adobe have failed? I’ve used Catalyst and it runs smooth, dude!” you might say… but then, I have to reply: You didn’t use it in a more practical approach.

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Lesson Learned: Flex + FDT

It’s the first time I’m developing a real Flex 4 app. I mean, I’ve developed some stuff with Flex 3 before, but not a real fully-fledged one. The “cool” thing when you develop in a new language / platform, is the amount of time that you spend on stupid things. REALLY stupid things.

I was creating this app. It had a set of components. Everything was fun, great and stuff, until I changed the background of the Application to black. Okay, but now, every single component had this white background.

“Okay, no big deal. I’ll just set the component’s inner Group backgroundAlpha to 0 and I should be fine. Oops. Something went wrong, there’s a problem with the Group. The Group’s background is ALWAYS white!”, I thought. “Damn you Adobe!”.

I started googling all the web: “flex 4 group white background”, “flex 4 background always white”… I even tried to create a TransparentGroupSkin, to found out that Groups are not skinnable. And started to worry, ‘cause I needed Groups. I needed to use clipAndEnableScrolling. I like Groups! I just needed a gorgeous transparent background for them.

And then you find the solution, so you can feel the stupidest stupid in the world. When you create a new MXML Component in Flash Builder 4, it automatically extends Group. BUT, I was coding in FDT 4… and when you create a new MXML Class in FDT 4, by default, it extends Application. So the Group ALWAYS had a insanely gorgeous transparent background, but my component - an Application - had the default white background.

Then I changed all components, so they could extend Group and the problem was gone. Now I can spend a couple of days in something stupider.

By the way, FDT 4 still is on Milestone 3… but it just rocks.

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.