It was funny to see how many examples of Spark Icon Buttons have shown up in the past few days. Andy mcintosh did an example here, Ben another one here, I did one myself here. While all were using a slightly different approach the motivation behind them was probably, that the Spark Button does not have an icon property compared to the Halo coutnerpart.

Out of the box there are basically three ways to get graphics into a Spark skin. (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…)

Shifting pixels in flash is relaxing. I experimented a bit with turning Type into grains and use these grains to mess around. What came out doesn’t make too much sense in terms of usability. Nevertheless someone might find it useful in a preloader to gain the attention from a user for just a few seconds more. Depending on the settings the effect generates different results:

click here to turn lovely Wembley grass into a 4th division pitch.

click here to see what happened to Lehman, Merrill, Goldman, Morgan et. al.

click here for some bubbling pixels.

The code is not too exciting. Basically it (more…)

It’s been quite a while (back in 2002, flash 5) since I did some serious work using oscillators and waveforms. I’m writing this down while trying to get back on track. The stuff described here is definitely no secret. It’s basic, but relevant to create some tunes in flash. Maybe you’ll find some of the stuff useful.

Through the introduction of the SampleDataEvent (more…)