What's My Title Today?

So the Spark button doesn't have the icon property... which to be honest annoys me a little, but I do understand that they want the skin to be separate from the code. Anyway, I made an icon button based on some other examples I've looked over. To see the working example with view source enabled click here .

I discovered yesterday that with the new Spark components there was no "editable" property on the ComboBox component. I realized that the Spark ComboBox is always editable by default, and with no way to turn that off I was confused. Did a little research and found that to have what would have been ComboBox editable="false" in Halo is now simply DropDownList. Two different components. I think it makes sense to have these separate.

So skinning spark buttons with images isn't the same as skinning halo (mx) buttons with images. It's a 3 part process. components.ImageButton.as package components { import spark.components.Button; [Style(name="imageSkin",type="*")] [Style(name="imageSkinDisabled",type="*")] [Style(name="imageSkinDown",type="*")] [Style(name="imageSkinOver",type="*")] public class ImageButton extends Button { public function ImageButton() { super(); } } } Script block [Embed('assets/images/btnGoUp.png')] [Bindable] public var btnGo:Class; [Embed('assets/images/btnGoOver.png')] [Bindable] public var btnGoOver:Class; [Embed('assets/images/btnGoDisabled.png')] [Bindable] public var btnGoDisabled:Class; MXML block <components:ImageButton buttonMode="true" imageSkin="{btnGo}" imageSkinDisabled="{btnGoDisabled}" imageSkinDown="{btnG...

So we have a large dashboard application built in Flex 3.5 SDK. Anyway, making it work with the Flex 4 SDK was annoying and took nearly a week. So the client doesn't want to give me the time to rewrite the UI in the new spark stuff BUT instead slowly convert it over time. So I started to try that... doesn't seem possible. Spark components don't work with the "Use Flex 3 compatibility mode" box checked. When I uncheck that box my whole project blows up and looks totally messed up. So my ultimate conclusion is that a Flex 3 Flex 4 Frankenstein is not really possible.

So for the last few weeks I have been trying to get our current Flex 3.5 SDK to the new Flex 4 SDK. Wow. Backwards compatible? Not really. After much annoyance and code changes, I finally got it working and running without run time errors. Now there are lots of things wrong visually mostly with the fonts. What I am discovering is that the CSS inheritance seems to be lost. For example, if I have a VBox that has its color style set to white, its children are not white. Not sure what is up with that. So in my Application style tag I had the font family set... but it's not picking up on all the components inside the application, which means there are lots of problems with labels being too large and not fitting properly. So now I am messing with the CSS files and the component files. So far my take on the backwards compatibility? It's barely there. I mean everything functions okay (once you get all the initial errors and warnings cleaned up) but there is going to be a lot of work vi...

I am watching a few videos on Flash Builder 4 (or Flex 4) from Adobe's site. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/ This is my first taste of the Spark components, and let me tell you, they are so much better and easier to customize. They haven't transfered all the components over to spark yet, so we'll still have to use some MX components, but they have done a lot of them already, and are continuing to work to get them all converted. I haven't tried to actually do any real work with this yet, but so far it has my vote.

So the new "Flex Builder", now called Flash Builder, is out. I have recently installed it... all was fine until I tried to use the VSS plugin. It wasn't being recgonized. Now I know you need the Java Development Tools plugin for it to work... but I couldn't find that either. They really changed the whole install new features thing in Flash Builder 4. So I hunted on Google for a while and found my solution, install it manually: http://renaun.com/blog/2010/03/31/416/ Thanks Renaun!!