Penguinspeak

Check out David Zuckermans Alpha plugin which provides quick fix support and error highlighting in Flex Builder 2 Beta 3! Get it here!

Here’s a simple example of how to add custom context menu items to your application.
It’s a little awkward on a List-based component to capture the list item where the context menu was brought up.
I’ve heard of people capturing and storing the rollOver events on the list, and you then know that the last item rolled over is the one where the context menu was brought up.
But, if your lists itemRenderer implements mx.controls.listClasses.IDropInListItemRenderer, you can get the selectedIndex from the listData without having to pay attention to rollOver events.
This example will trace the selected list items label and rowIndex, and the caption of the selected context menu item.
Because I was using an itemRenderer it got a little weird once I was trying to get the target list item. If you right-click on the actual label in the list, the events mouseTarget is UITextField, but if you right-click on the renderer itself then the events mouseTarget is the listRenderer that you want. So here’s how I check for that…

/* The user may click right on an object inside the renderer
* ... in our case it would be the label. If so, the target is the UITextField
*/
if( ! (target is listRenderer) )
{
selectedListRenderer	 	= target.parent.parent;
// otherwise they are clicking right on the renderer itself...
// ( outside of the label )
} else {
selectedListRenderer	 	= listRenderer(event.mouseTarget);
}

I haven’t tested this with any other objects in the itemRenderer. It sure ould be nice if this worked no matter what the contents of the itemRenderer are.
Click here to view the source

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Didn’t I just post about how Flex/Flash AND Ajax should be combined to make a great online experience?? Well, Google is apparently thinking about the possibilites. Check out the freshly launched Google Finance (Beta) which uses Flash for charting and a very cool scrollbar/slider widget. Ajax is used on the right to automatically scroll the news items for the dates corresponding to your date selections from the Flash widget.

[The following was created as of Flex 2, Beta 2]



In working on my Flickr app, I needed a Tree that had a couple requirements:



1) The data for the tree was not simply storable in one data-provider without a lot of work. Plus, it seemed pointless to load all that data (potentially hundreds of leaf noded under the branch nodes) to start with considering the chances of it all getting looked at were quite slim.



2) So, because of the decision made in #1, I needed to dynamically add children to the Tree as the user started opening up tree branches.



So, here’s a simplified version of what I came up with:



View the source here

Forget the comparisons between Flex vs. AJAX. It’s about Flex AND AJAX. Ely has written a bridge between the Flex Framework and AJAX which allows communication from AJAX to Flex and vice versa. It’s as simple as adding one or two lines of code to make allow the communication. This is a huge step for web developers.. and now you can use AJAX when and where it seems more appropriate or Flex when and where it seems more appropriate. All in one page! It’s called FABridge, and you can read about it on Elys blog.

Here it is!

As you may know, there were a handful of AS3 API libraries put on the Labs site. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks messing around with the Flickr API’s. So far so good. I went ahead and make a couple classes bindable, but that’s about all I had to do. I hope to post the app up here once I get to a good stopping point.

After 5 years at Adobe, then a short time at Macromedia, I’ve found myself back at Adobe. And it’s gradually starting to feel like the Adobe I know so well here in San Francisco as these companies become one.
It’s been such a blast working on Flex. I’m assuming if you’re reading this that you have an idea of what it can do. If not, go read the blogs I have linked in the right-hand column and check out some of the demos. In the meantime I’ll be posting more content on here.
Download the Beta if you haven’t already. Let us know what ya think.