July 21, 2009

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.

July 4, 2009

FlexMania

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.


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


June 21, 2009

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.


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


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

June 12, 2009

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

May 8, 2009

While working on a project yesterday I needed to convert several vectors (hundreds of them) into reusable Flex 4 visual elements that I could then use in my skins, so lets say if I have vectors of chess pieces that I would like to use in my Skin as follows …

Neat and Clean Skin code using FXG to component converter

Since I needed these in several skin files I did not want to deal with clunky Path elements which would’ve looked something like this..

Messy skin code with generated path elements

So I created a quick AIR application …. read more