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…)

Here’s a little example of a ToggleButtonSkin that uses some effects to create a subtle chrome-impression when the button is selected.

The gradient is calculated from the backgroundColor-Style of the host component. Then in selected state some Tint and Animate effects are applied to the Strokes that make up the border.

Click here for the example. Needs flash player 10 (beta).

Here’s the source for the (more…)

Yet another byproduct of a drawPath() test. Think those little creatures look neat, so I posted them here. Click here. Needs Flash 10 (beta rc1).

Today I had a closer look at the new skinning architecture of Gumbo. Here’s a little example that uses a couple of custom slider components. This custom component extends the standard gumbo VSlider by composition and integrates custom skins. click here to see example. Needs flash player 10 (beta rc1).

The Gumbo VSlider expects (more…)

The past few days I was digging a bit into Gumbo (flex 4 beta). I was happy to see that flex 4 will take a lightweight approach regarding components. Components are stripped down to their most basic behavior and there’s now a clean separation between model, controller and view.

This, in combination with an enhanced state architecture and the newly integrated graphics tag library FXG, makes it a snap to create a custom look and feel in flex (especially when CS4 export or thermo integration will be ready)

Here is a little example of a GUI done in Gumbo (flex 4 beta) to wrap up my sound experiments done earlier.

click here. Needs the latest Flash-Player 10 (rc of 091508).

The GUI for the player is straight forward. It uses some FXG-Elements to (more…)