Last week I got some Illustrator files from the designer on our team, which I had to convert into Flex 4 skins. When we had planned this, we thought this would be easy … the designer makes the skins in Illustrator, we export FXG directly from Illustrator or we import them into Catalyst, do some tweaking and then export to get FXG that we can use in SparkSkins .. unfortunately it wasn’t that simple, I’m documenting some of the gotchas and workarounds I learned for anyone else who may run into the same situation.

Most of the problems we had were related to gradients, here are some snapshots …

1. The first strip is original graphic created in Illustrator
2. The second strip FXG Exported from Illustrator
3. The third strip is original Illustrator file imported into Catalyst and then FXG exported from Catalyst

Clearly, all of them are different. read more

Flex 4 does not have an EllipticalArc primitive yet, but I needed one today .. thankfully Degrafa already has an EllipticalArc Class, I translated that to work with Flex 4.

EllipticalArc is a FilledElement so it can have a Fill and a Stroke just like other FilledElements Rect, Ellipse etc.

View Example

View Source

I haven’t yet implemented some of the layout related functionality that other primitives like Rect, Ellipse etc implement … but it seems to work fine with basic layouts, which is what I needed for now. The class is hosted on Google code under the Apache 2.0 License, just in case someone wants to improve it.

Thank you to the Degrafa team for sharing their amazing work that saves me loads of time every now and then.

FlexMania is a Brazilian online event organized by Igor Costa. The event is focused on the Flash Platform and has a great collection of Flash/Flex/AIR related talks.

Although, most of the talks are in portuguese, there are some interesting english sessions as well like Laura Arguello on Mate Framework, Stephen Downs (a.k.a Tink) on Efflex and Iiley Chen on AsWing

I will also be presenting in english, my talk is “A Flex 4 Component’s Lifecycle” on Monday, July 6th at 15:30 GMT.

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RECORDING: Here’s the 1hr long Adobe Connect recording of the talk from FlexMania

SLIDES AND CODE: The slides and code from the talk can be found here

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I gave a talk this Friday on the lifecycle of a component in Flex 4. The talk went into the details of how the flash player works, why a component needs a lifecycle and the various stages of a components life.

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UPDATE: I gave the same talk at FlexMania .. Here’s the 1hr long Adobe Connect recording
 

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Here are the slides and experimental code from the talk …

Here’s the code we played with to understand how frame rates work in the flash player … read more

I’ll be presenting a talk on Flex 4 Component Lifecycle at the next Bangalore Flex User Group Meeting on 19th. read more