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…)

I was experimenting a little with the PopUpAnchor in Spark Flex 4 and came up with a new custom component for ratings. The new component has the following characteristics:

• Show a placeholder-icon that reflects the current rating and serves as an interactive element to open the ratings
• ratings pop up for adjustment
• both the placeholder-icon and the ratings-icons will be gradually filled with color when adjustments are being made
• the icons are defined in FXG
• the icons are not defined in the skin but can be passed as a style for generic use (one skin for different icons and ratings)
• there is colorization of the icons based on styles
• smooth transitions when opening the ratings

Here’s a pseudo city-rating demo that shows variations of the component using different icons and color settings for different ratings.

You’ll find the source at the end of this post. It is (more…)

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…)

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…)

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…)