At the last LFPUG I did a presentation on Flex 4 where I went through what I thought were the fundamental changes, and they showed some custom stuff I’d been working on. The plan was to then do a post on each slide explaining in a little more detail (which is still the plan), but there’s a few posts that talk about Navigators in Flex 4, and for anyone who visits this blog often you’ll be well aware of how much I use navigators.

With this in mind I thought I start posting some examples and open sourcing the code I’ve been working on, so today I thought I’d start with DataNavigators.

There are 3 components to talk about here. They all support virtualLayouts as long as the layout supports it. In building these I’ve ask a lot or questions of what others expected and try to implement the re-usability that is inherent in the spark framework.

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DataNavigator

You can think of this to much like a DataGroup with 2 exceptions…

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SkinnableDataNavigator

You can think of this much like a SkinnableDataGroup, with 3 exceptions…

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BorderDataNavigator

BorderDataNavigator extends SkinnableDataNavigator adding a border, in the same way as BorderContainer extends SkinnableContainer.

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Here’s an example of the 3 of them in action using itemRenderers:

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Massive thanks to Dennis Ippel and Adam Chappell for their presentations last month. As usual you can find the videos, presentations and source files in the presentations section.

First up this month will be Mathieu Gosselin with a session on ‘Efficient Programming Practices’, and following him will be me with some examples of the new features in Flex 4.

London Flash Platform User Group 25th February 2010 (25/02/2010)

Sponsored by flash scope.

Also don’t forget Richard Lord will doing presentation about frameworks presenting down at FLUG tonight, and Iain Lobb will be doing a session on “Creating Successful Flash Games” at London Flash Developers and Designers Meetup Group this Thursday.

Spoilt for choice!

We built this component some time ago for use on a gaming/gambling site.

We required a way to alert the user that something important was going on in one of their games, but we didn’t want to use a popup, blocking the user from their current interaction. This was because the user may have been in the process of doing something important or timed.

Each game sat inside its own view component, and these were then housed in the AlertTabNavigator. It enabled use to show when a view required attention, without getting in the way.

Here’s a couple of examples. The first shows how dispatching an event from one of the children on the AlertTabNavigator updates the tab to show its alert styles, or resort back to its standard non alert styles. Selecting an alerted tab, always dismisses the alert.

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Recently good friend Adam Robertson spent some time upgrading all my WordPress blogs to try and help combat the masses of spam and crap that were being hidden in the pages.

Many thanks Adam!

It’s been a while since I posted any tunes here, so here’s a recent studio mix by Kryptic Minds.

Kryptic Minds Studio Mix (11.05.2009)

Mix and blend for the weekend!

Back when CS3 was released I was incorrectly sent a Windows version. Since then I’ve wanted to change it to Mac OS X which has been extremely frustrating and time consuming. Below is a rundown of the contact I had with Adobe, but the most frustrating thing was the correspondence from Adobe was extremely robot like. I constantly asked where I should file a complaint, but Adobe never address questions sent to them, instead ignoring what was written to them and responding in how they seen fit.

28/04/2008
First contact with Adobe to get a cross platform conversion.

01/05/2008
I was asked to prove where I had got the copy of Flash CS3 was from.

05/05/2008
I sent proof that I’d got the copy of Flash CS3 direct from Adobe.

05/05/2008
Adobe responded asking me to sign and send back a Letter of Software Destruction.

07/05/2008
Adobe chased me up for the above (obviously my postman doesn’t wear a rocket pack).

08/05/2008
Adobe confirms they had received the above letter and the case had been escalated. They would get back to me.

13/05/2008
Adobe conformed approval of the cross platform request, and ask me to contact them to make payment for shipping costs. I phoned them to make this payment.

11/06/2008
Adobe confirmed that the company credit card had been declined and advised I contact the bank to allow the charge from Adobe.

At this point I gave up. We were busy, needed another copy of Flash, and just installed an older version I had hanging around. I knew the company credit card was fine, as I used it on a daily basis, the bank said Adobe hadn’t tried to take any payment, and Adobe said the card was declined.

21/10/2008
I decided to have another crack and changing the platform.

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UPDATE: Apparently this is a hoax (see comments)

Persy one this.

It has been brought to attention that the government wish to consider it a legal requirement in the new tax year to introduce laws insisting anyone applying or re-applying for an entertainment license must have a noise control device fitted to the venue. This will be the final NAIL for ALL entertainment in the UK as the level at which these devices CUT you off is dreadfully low and damaging.

PLEASE DO NOT INTRODUCE THIS LAW, WE LOVE LIVE MUSIC!

There’s a day left to sign the petition so if your a UK resident, please go the sign petition now! Don’t let them take away our bass!!!!!

No Noise Control Petition