… is to not use TabNavigator at all. Use a ViewStack and RadioButtons in an HBox!
I like doing skinning work in Flex but there certainly are a few components that I often times find easier to just re-engineer than skin. Scroll bars and TabNavigators are some examples of such components. I’ve heard skinning these components has gotten much easier in Flex 4, but alas, all my projects are still being developed in Flex 3.5.
I gave a session “Introduction to Native 3D In Flash Player” at Flex Camp Wall Street this Tuesday. I’m going to do a bit more cleanup and documentation within my example code and will hopefully have all the slides & code before weeks end.
Thanks to all those who attended the event. It was a huge success!
I’ve been playing around a lot with Flash Player 10′s rotation XYZ. After doing a series of experimentation and actually implementing it into a new project, I had some doubts about Adobe’s implementation of 3D.
Experiment #1: http://blog.dcholth.com/beta/RotTester/RotTester.html
The images are laid out in a grid, with each image’s rotations (XY & Z) being set to the values of the numeric sliders at the top. As you can see, each image’s perspective looks different, because they are placed in a 3D environment with the ‘camera’ being set to a specific point. I had a heck of a time figuring out how to set that camera!
If you look at http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/DisplayObject.html#rotationX it says “Indicates the x-axis rotation of the DisplayObject instance, in degrees, from its original orientation relative to the 3D parent container.”
Flex offerers a wide range of utilities to make working with complicated components and applications simpler. One such feature is the use of States. States are often thought of as only visual or GUI related, but in they are perfect for dividing up logic. In my current project I am building a series of learning activities, and some have activities within activities… needless to say it can get complicated quickly. While breaking up the logic into separate components was one option, I didn’t want to have any risk of ‘flashes’ of GUI while pieces are refreshed, moved, or risk messing up data by passing all these pieces around.
I started to build out my activity component using states. One state for when you enter the activity, one for each of the three phases, a cleanup state and finally an exiting state. As I developed the components and created their enterState and exitState functions, as well as many functions only used while in a specific state, I realized that my component was getting to be well over a thousand lines of code and a bit unmanageable. To find the logic pertaining to the current section I was working on, I had to sift through hundreds of lines of code. I decided there had to be a better way… and there was!
I’m very excited about the MapQuest API and all the possibilities it offeres developers for creating mapping applications. I wanted to test the API and sharpen my own skills, so over the past few days I’ve been working on a Facebook geocoding application that will put any of your friends with current locations set on a Mapquest map.
It may be because I’m using a free developers license key, but I’ve noticed a few of the locations aren’t geocoding properly. For example, Roseville MN is turning up Roseville California.
I haven’t submitted the application to the Facebook library yet, but feel free to try it out and post any feedback you have either here or on the application about page.
**Update 10/24/2010: This is totally broken now **
Have I mentioned how much I like the BitmapData class? Had a request pass by desk last week asking me to create a little app to be used in a presentation. They wanted it so that when a user clicked on a button in the middle, a star would fly across the screen to a random location, twinkling while it moved, then stay on the screen until the user clicked clear. They wanted somewhere between 30 and 100 stars on the screen.
While I think flash could have handled having that many MovieClips on screen pretty easily on its own, I wanted to see if I could make it more efficient. The solution I came up with was to use two BitmapData layers, one for moving the stars on the screen and creating the ‘twinkling trails’ and the other for housing all the stars in their final resting place.
As promised, you can now download the code used for my web spinning projects. There is one fla, and four classes.
I made some modifications to Grant Skinner’s grid based proximity manager to take advantage of an IProximityDetectable interface. For a full explanation on how grid based proximity management works, check out Grant’s original post on the subject. The IProximityDetectable interface has only two methods:
Made a few small technical changes… May not be noticeable to most. In the previous example, each particle received a random Y axis based gravity. When gravity was negative, it forced the particle up, and positive gravity made it go down. I’ve also added an X axis based gravity to this example, increasing the curvature and randomness of the webs.
Made this today at work. Click and hold to spin mad crazy webs.
*Update 11/17/12 – Sorry, but the flash file no longer works on the updated site. Please see my art progressions section.
I’ve been rather neglectful of this blog. I’ve been putting my coding on hold for a bit while I painted a portrait of my father for my mothers birthday and as a mothers day gift. This is only the third portrait I’ve done, and my first in color. It was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be, artistically and emotionally. For those of you didn’t know, my father passed away last July after a four and a half year battle with mantel cell lymphoma.
It was really quite therapeutic in a way. Before doing this painting, when I thought of my father it was difficult to not to see him, even in happy memories long before he was ill, in the frail and sick state he was in when he passed. After studying a portrait of him for some 30+ hours, I think I’ve finally overcome those memories and can see him again as the happy healthy man he was for his life leading up to those final few months.
The application I wrote to display the images reads in an XML file that contains paths to the separate images in the sequence. It then has the “set percent” function to display the images and fade them in between.
