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…)

When working with huge amounts of data on DataGroup, SkinnableDataContainer and all its Subclasses you will notice degradation in performance. Manipulating Data becomes slower, the UI on the Groups become less responsive, startup suffers, footprint is huge.  By default, Felx 4 creates an ItemRenderer for each data-item resulting in this overhead. (more…)

Here are some notes I took while investigating and reading about Spark Containers. (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…)

Great to see that Flash sound is gaining some momentum. Check the cool stuff over at Akaneko.