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

In relation to what happened this weekend I met up with Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan from the evangelism team at Adobe India. While we did not talk much about the elephant in the room, we did talk about other things that really matter.

I was very happy that Ramesh reached out to have this discussion, here is some of my take away … 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.

I sent an email to the Adobe India Community Champions mailing list about the direction of Adobe’s evangelism efforts in India, the email was originally intended for the 10 or so Community Champions, but since people from Adobe have started reacting in public without reacting on the list first, I feel its better to post my thoughts in public as well.

Here is how Adobe evangelist Harish Sivaramakrish chose to react to my thoughts on twitter, I feel that its unfortunate that this is Adobe’s reaction to genuine critique … read more

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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