Archive for category ‘Flex’

I just found this and thought it was pretty nice to have. It’s a list of all of the available styles for all of the Flex components. It’s not a guide. You can always use intellisense or the Design view to style the components visually. You can even use the Flex Style Explorer which does the same thing. I just thought it was a nice reference.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Flex Style Explorer. I use it almost on a daily basic. But I’ve now run across more explorers. The first is the Flex Filter Explorer. I think the biggest issue I have with this one is it only shows the MXML code and not the Actionscript code. The next and final explorer is the Flex Primitive Explorer. This one does primitive shapes using the Graphics class.

I just realized TweenMax has been updated. Sort of anyway. First of all, if you haven’t heard of TweenMax, go read about it. It’s an amazing Actionscript library that allows you to tween things in Flash or Flex. Big deal, Adobe has classes like that build in. Wrong! This is a hell of a lot faster. Plus as an added bonus it does bezier tweening which is amazing. Back on track. TweenMax now has an optional utilities class which would allow for code hinting and strict data typing. Like I said, it is an optional class.

Here is an example of the original way:

import gs.TweenLite;
import gs.easing.*;
TweenLite.to(my_mc, 2, {x:300, y:100, ease:Elastic.easeOut, onComplete:myFunction});

And now the new/optional way to do it:

import gs.TweenLite;
import gs.utils.tween.TweenLiteVars;
import gs.easing.*;
var v:TweenLiteVars = new TweenLiteVars();
	v.addProps(x, 300, false, y, 100, true);
	v.ease = Elastic.easeOut;
	v.onComplete = myFunction;
TweenLite.to(my_mc, 2, v);

This is probably old news for everyone. EverythingFlex has a great, free SWC library for AIR called everythingflexairlib.swc. It includes ContextWindow, AlertWindow, NativeAlertWindow, SuperWindow, ConnectionManager, and UpdateManager classes. I won’t go into explaining what each one does. You really have to see for yourself. They are amazing. There is even source code for each one to get you started.

A couple weeks ago I was looking for a quick customization to the default tweens in Flex. Basically I didn’t want the Bounce to bounce as much as it was. I don’t know math well enough to make it do what I wanted so I just went with second best. Yesterday I was surfing around and I found exactly what I needed. It’s called Custom Easing Function Explorer. Which of course linked off to the Adobe docs on the same subject. Funny how I couldn’t find that when I actually needed it.

I’ve always been a big fan of Tweener. Even when it was called MC Tween I thought it was one of the best tween managers for Flash. Yesterday I found something that might compete with Tweener. It’s called TweenMax. There are three version of TweenMax. TweenLite (3k) does the basic tweens. The same as Tweener really. TweenFilterLite (6k) does what TweenLite does, plus it tweens the filters like Blur, Glow, Bevel, ColorMatrix, and DropShadow and also tweens saturation, hue, brightness, contrast, threshold, and colorization. Then there is TweenMax (8k) which includes everything the other two do a few extra things. One of the best things about it is it can do bezier tweening! How cool is that! If you go to the Family Comparison you can see the list of things each one has or doesn’t have and even see demos of them compared to other tween managers.