Flexperiments » Flex

FlpTree 2.0: Better, faster, open-source!

Ids — Sun, 23 May 2010 10:27:33 +0000

Today I’m releasing a new version of my Tree. Most parts are rewritten for way better performance.

This tree is a replacement for the standard flex tree, which is buggy, slow and not very customizable. With version 2.0, you have full control of the source, so you can tweak it to your needs. It has all the functionalities of the 1.4 version, but some of the stylenames have got another name to match the general stylenames of flex (eg. selectionColor), see the docs for that.
Usage:

^?View Code MXML

<tree:FlpTree
	x="100"
	y="100"
	open="_openCheck(event)"
	close="_openCheck(event)"
	width="250"
	height="400"
	openNodeOnHover="true"
	hoverDelay="150"
	dataProvider="{adata}"
	borderColor="#000000"
	borderStyle="solid"
	borderThickness="1" />

If you find a bug in the source, please leave a comment to let me know!

Here’s what you’ll need:

Have fun!

Note: This component is written for Flex 3, it’s not tested on Flex 2 nor Flex 4!

Alternative Combobox for Flex

Ids — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:47:00 +0000

The default flex combobox has keyboard navigation support, but it’s not how you’d expect keyboard support to be. For instance, if you have a list with the following items: ‘aa’, ‘ab’, ‘ba’, and you first press ‘a’, and then ‘b’, a windows combobox would select ‘ab’, whereas the flex combobox selects ‘ba’. This is because the flex combobox only checks the first letter of a list item and handles every keypress as a separate action.
The alternative combobox handles like a windows combobox and selects ‘ab’. Feel free to download and use it in your projects.

Example:

Download: ComboBox.as

A real native Alert for Flex / Air

Ids — Sun, 03 May 2009 12:26:04 +0000

When you’re working on an Air project in Flex, and you want an alert to popup, you have a problem. Air doesn’t come with an ‘aired’ version of the Flex Alert. The flex Alert is fine, as long as you work with a single windowed application. As soon as you have more than one window, the Alert of Flex becomes more or less useless. Since you’ve got more than 1 window, Flex doesn’t know which window to make the parent window, so a model alert isn’t possible anymore.
I’ve taken the code from the mx.Alert and rewritten it to an AirAlert. It works exactly as the normal alert, only now it creates a window instead of a Panel / Titlewindow.

Usage: AirAlert.show(‘Test Alert!’, ‘Test Alert!’);
(The same as a normal alert )

Notice: I didn’t copy the Alert.YES / Alert.NO stuff, so you have to use those from the Alert class.
Notice2: You’ll find no license or whatsoever, just use it as you like.

Download / View the source

Update Time! Next Up: ASDebugger 2.2

Ids — Sun, 03 May 2009 12:08:00 +0000

I’ve updated the ASDebugger. Not much news here, I only implemented an updated (less buggy) version of the FlpTree. You can download the debugger on the project page.

Update time! Starting with: FlpTree 1.3.0

Ids — Sun, 03 May 2009 10:24:20 +0000

I’ve been awful quiet on my blog lately, time to do something about it .
First off, I’m releasing version 1.3.0 of my tree component.
I’ve added a filterfunction, which behaves just like a normal filterfunction, but works recursively.
I’ve also fixed some minor bugs, some events weren’t dispatched correctly.
And last but not least, I’ve made the displayobjects in the defaultrenderer protected instead of private, so you can access them more easily when extending the defaultrenderer.

You can download the new swc from the project page, which is here. Also, a link to the docs and an example can be found on the project page

Now available: FlpTree 1.2.2

Ids — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:07:29 +0000

Just fixed the drag & drop bug. It’s now possible to drop between nodes again.

You can download the new swc from the project page, which is here. Also, a link to the docs and an example can be found on the project page

Now available: FlpTree 1.2.1

Ids — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:49:36 +0000

Finally!!!! I nailed the height bug! So, now you can finally make advantage of the variable row height! After a lot of searching, setting debug statements and all other debugging stuff, it turned out one event was called a bit too much which caused flex to seriously fuck up. Still can’t find the exact reason for it, but removing the listener did not harm the tree at all, so it was useless anyway .

You can download the new swc from the project page, which is here. Also, a link to the docs and an example can be found on the project page

Have fun!

Vote against new Flash Player security measures!

Ids — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:03:47 +0000

Not too long ago, Adobe launched Flash Player 10. Hooray, party! But not everything is well in this new flashplayer. I believe this is the first flash player which actually breaks old flash apps. This is because Adobe tightened the security with this new version even further. Now, I am aware that security is necessary for a plugin like flash. But there’s one measure I can’t figure out.

Any browse or save as dialog can only be triggered by user input (keyboard or mouse(click)). And this makes sense, you don’t want an ad to popup thousands of ‘browse’ windows. But I cannot see why this same security measure is taken for doing a multipart request. Why sould user interaction be needed to upload, say a bytearray, to the server. This bytearray could easily be generated from a bitmap(data), so no browse for file window is needed.

This error came up in an application which displays a small photo. The user can upload a photo to the server. This server is somehow not capable of resizing images, so the uploaded image is downloaded to the flash again, resized in flash and send as a bytearray to the server again.

This worked perfectly in FP < 10, but now, there has to be some interaction to do the second upload. We worked around this by having a small popup asking the user if the uploaded picture is the correct one. Works also, but it’s just a work-around, not a solution.

I talked about this issue with James Ward of Adobe, and he also didn’t see why this security has been taken. So, I’ve created a feature request in the bug system of adobe, located at https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-978. Please vote if you think this is a ridiculous security measure and should be removed!

Thanks!

3D Text with Away3d, pt.2

Ids — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:01:39 +0000

I’ve updated my 3d text component a bit, performance should now be a bit better. Furthermore, you can now choose any font you’ve installed on your system (just to prove that they are real fonts). See it in action:

Ow and by the way: right click to see the source and find out how it’s done.

The source seems to be fucked up, here’s the relevant code: http://experiments.flexperiments.nl/3dtext2/srcview/source/experiments/flexperiments/text3d/Text3dFXApp.as.html

3D Text with Away3D

Ids — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:06:27 +0000

The other day, I was playing with the away 3D engine and I discovered that you can have 3D text. It’s really cool, look at this:

Cool huh? You can change the text by altering the text in the input field (topleft corner). I’ll be tweaking this little thingy a bit further to increase the performance.