Tooltips are a good way to provide a user with additional information for controls and Flex offers Tooltips out of the box. The default Tooltips are fine but when text gets longer than just a few words usability may suffer.

For a current project, I needed more like a balloon help in place of tooltips and therefore decided not to use Flex default tooltips.

Regarding usability of the tooltips (balloon help) I want to be able to

• Display an optional tooltip title
• Display formatted tooltip text
• Display icons
• Colorize the tooltip based on the semantic of the invoking control
• Consistent Placement
• Have all title, text, styles for the tooltips stored in a central location
• Have the tooltips work in a generic and Flex-compliant way

Flex gives you a few ways to customize tooltips from registering your custom ToolTip class to intercepting Tooltip events where you can hook up the custom tooltip. All of these approaches fall either short of the requirements I had or would add additional overhead so I simply created a custom ToolTipManager that would alter the behaviour of the default ToolTipManager.

Here’s a demo of the final result, the approch is described further down.

Since I like to have all resources centralized, the approach I followed was to (more…)

While updating the Gumbo-Components on this blog to flex 4 final I noticed that the style-property baseColor has been changed to chromeColor.

In addition to this the flag useChromeColor can be set to tell the SparkSkin to use chromeColor for colorization. For custom skins this can be set by overriding initializationComplete() in the skin.

override protected function initializationComplete():void  {
 
	useChromeColor = true;
	super.initializationComplete();
}

Internally Flex checks this flag in updateDisplayList() of a SparkSkin and uses the value in chromeColor for colorization (respecting exclusions in get colorizeExclusions()).

If you are using Gumbo-Components from this blog that use baseColor be sure to make these adjustments.

For the past couple of days I’ve had a look at creating Spark Icon Buttons. In this post I’ve created an FXG Icon Button with some transitions, leveraging pseudo selectors for states. The Icon was ‘hardcoded’ into the skin. For another Icon I would need to duplicate the skin and introduce another graphic. Not exactly generic. There are other ways to bring graphics into Spark Skins but none of them work with FXG Elements directly.

What I want is:

• work with FXG Graphic Elements for simpler manipulation and scaling
• easily export the FXG-Definitions for the icons from a tool and/or be able to change them in FB directly
• colorize the icons based on a color style-property and do this per state
• change the icons based on a style-property and do this per state
• change icons at runtime
• scaling effect on icon
• have ONE generic skin, so no duplicates for different icons are necessary

Most of the trouble with generic skins comes from the fact that there is no way to access the FXG Library-Definitions at run-time  (as far as I know) - like getting an instance of a symbol in the library, the way we had in flash. Here’s a hack but I’d rather not use it.

After some headaches I finally managed to get a solution I can live with:

Click here for a test.

You’ll find the source at the end of this post.

The solution regarding the work flow mainly comes down to (more…)

update: Check this example for a more advanced and generic approach

Here’s an example of a Spark Icon Button done in Flex 4. There are smooth transitions on the background gradient between the up and over states. From the over state to the down state the shadows are removed smoothly. Each button has a different base color.

Click here for a demo.

Apart from the new skinning architecture there are a couple of (more…)

Here’s an example of how to enhance the default Spark CheckBox. This example uses a mark for the unchecked states and one for the checked states. Some simple transitions are used to make things a little bit nicer.

The skin uses two additional properties (symbolColorChecked,  symbolColorUnchecked) for the (more…)

Changing the look of a spark component mainly comes down to customizing the skin-class, but there are situations where this might not be enough.

In a project I’m working on, we wanted to have a smooth transition when a text-input gets or loses focus. The default Spark TextInput and the associated skin-class do not have a focused state. (In Flex the FocusManager manages the focus by drawing a border around a component, but we wanted the focus on the skin itself and a transition)

One way to achieve this is to enhance the TextInput Component: (more…)

Part of the FXG 1.0 specification in Flex 4 makes it possible to define elements inside a library. The elements can then be re-used in a FXG document:

<!--Library with the definitions -->
<Library>
   <Definition name="circle">
	<s:Ellipse x="0" y="0" width="100" height="100" >
	   <s:fill>
		<s:SolidColor color="0x000000" />
	   </s:fill>
	</s:Ellipse>
   </Definition>
</Library>
 
<!-- use some instances of the definition  -->
<circle/>
<circle x="200" y="100"/>
<circle x="300" y="100" height="75" width="75" />

As of now there is no way to create these symols at runtime. For example, if you’d like to create a starfield, you would need (more…)

Here’s a simple rating component done in Flex 4 (Gumbo).

The skin uses two library definitions. One symbol for the active and one for the passive rating. The symbols are then placed in a passive and an active Group. A mask is used to show/hide the active group based on the rating. ActiveGroup/passiveGroup and mask are the required Skin-Parts.

The Component itself manages the rating and pushes this down to the mask by setting its width. The rating is exposed as a bindable property.

The following example usees the component with two different skins.

source is here (SDK 4.0.0.4932)

This post looked at creating a custom flex 4 component from scratch. The knob button defined there had a min/max-value for the range and the rotation. The user could adjust the value by pressing the knob and then dragging the mouse. Now, we would like to extend the control a bit by adding a text input-field where the value of the knob is reflected. Likewise a value can be entered into the textfield and the rotation of the knob would reflect this.

Instead of extending the knob I decided to create another control that is a composition (more…)

In this and this post I had a look at skinning components in Flex 4. Here I had a go at creating a simple custom component in Flex 4 (Gumbo) from scratch. The goal was to create a simple knob-button like those found on many softsynths.

The user clicks the button and drags the mouse to adjust the value. The advantage of a knob compared to a slider is that it needs much less screen estate and could be more intuitive in specific contexts to control a value.

click here to view the demo. Full source at the end of this post.

Creating a custom visual component in Flex 4 is similar to the procedure in Flex 3 but states and skins are handled differently (in a much better and cleaner way). Basically we need to (more…)