var b:Button = new mx.controls.Button();

In FlexBuilder, doing this would add the import at the top of your class and life would be good. In FlashBuilder, the “remove unused imports” feature will strip this import out the next time you make a change and save it. It’s driving me nuts- I love the import cleanup feature, but hate having to re-add my import every time. The alternative is to simply disable the cleanup.

I’ve created a Jira for it, but they changed its status to “community”, meaning it needs votes. If you use this feature, please vote now so we can hopefully get this fixed before Flex4 ships.

Click this obnoxiously big link to see the Jira.

Although at the level of a Flash DisplayObjectContainer, all
children are equal, in a Flex Container some children are “more
equal than others”. (George Orwell, “Animal Farm”)

Awesome

When the tab is selected, I have it shift its label up 1px (negating the downward shift), and when it’s unselected, it shifts back. For some reason I was only able to do this via actionscript- setting these properties as CSS styles did nothing. Since I’m already using a butchered copy of FlexLib, it was easy to hack this into the SuperTab’s set selected(…) function:

The example is view-source enabled, though it’s pretty messy.

If anyone knows a better fix to this problem I’d love to hear it. Insane bonus points if you can find the line of code/css in the FlexSDK that’s causing the shift.

Select a block of code, hit a keystroke or a button, and every true/false is inverted.

Inline Errors/Warnings/Exceptions

I would love to be able to hide my Problems view and simply see in-line problems. Sure, the Problems view would still be useful for tracking down problems in different files, but 95% of the time, this is what I want.

Unified Sidebar

I hate to keep loving on Xcode, but I’m a fan of their unified sidebar. Instead of Eclipse’s approach of making a different view for every possibility, Xcode, slaps them all in the sidebar, basically mimicking the functionality of most desktop mail clients. It’s much cleaner than Eclipse, and you don’t have to constantly bounce around between perspectives.

I realize the irony of a developer complaining about missing features in an open source project that has plugin functionality, but good god it’s hard to write plugins for Eclipse.

In a nutshell, file uploads in Firefox use a different session than the rest of the page/Flash/Flex.

It’s a Flash bug, so the community is powerless to submit their own fixes. The known workaround requires some nasty hacking on both sides of the transfer. Silverlight handles file uploads on all browsers fine, so it is possible.

If anyone reading this has been affected by the bug, please vote on the issues: FP-226,FP-78.

To all the people who understand component development better than me, how would you support different fonts and font sizes? The difficulty is this component is a series of TextInput’s, each manually sized to fit two characters. How would you size these individual inputs to scale properly?

Here’s the component… It starts out in an overview, but when a node is clicked, that node will maximize itself, while the other nodes minimize and dock along the top of the screen. A click on a minimized component maximizes it while minimizing the previously maximized one. Each view displays an icon to indicate whether the data inside it is valid (used for data input).

(click for example, view source enabled)

The component was eventually canned. The higher-ups thought it was miserable having to click the overview button then click on a component to switch. My assumption that the people would intuitively know to click the minimized components to quick switch was apparently wrong. I stripped it out and made it reusable to keep it from just falling through the cracks.

Caveats:

• Bottom/right padding no longer work. I’m not sure what broke during the conversion, but I don’t have time to look into it now. I don’t like how I implemented this part anyway though, so it should be readdressed.
• The integration of the different parts is definitely cludgy. I would love for people to try it and discuss how they would handle the mechanics of the component (views maximizing/minimizing, event dispatching, border metrics, etc.) Better yet, if someone wants to hack away at the code and submit changes, I’ll be happy to update the example.

A letter came today from Tom and John (360|Flex fame) with a 1GB USB flash drive full of sessions from Atlanta and Italy. They asked that I mention the conference on my blog, and give the drive away. They’re thinking that once someone gets a hold of it, they’ll have no other recourse than to sign up for 360|Flex San Jose, August 18th-20th. I agree, so I’m tossing in a few drives of my own. If you’re new to Flex or have never been to 360 Flex, I cannot recommend this conference enough. I had at least 20 “ooooh, that’s what I should have been doing” moments at 360|Flex Atlanta, and expect even more next month.

So reply to this post with an email address or website and I’ll be in touch. It’s as easy as giving your address to a complete stranger on the internet!

Edit: I’ve sent out emails for addresses. In case anyone’s wondering, you’ll get an email from dfalling@gmail.com or dfalling@flexninja.com (most likely gmail.)

This issue is well-documented, but I wanted to add help here for the next time I hit it and forget the fix…

Assuming you’ve installed the latest debug version of the Flash Player, just copy it (NPSWF32.dll at the time of this post) over from:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash
to
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins

Relaunch Firefox and debugging should work.

A fewplugins have also prevented debugging for me:

• Adblock Plus
• GreaseMonkey

If you look at the code, you’ll notice that I used an item editor and an item render… This is because using just an editor as the renderer made the grid look terrible…

With backgroundAlpha=1, the box always has the white background, whether it’s selected or not. With backgroundAlpha=0, the box never has a white background, even when it is selected.