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…)

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…)

Frequency Modulation was discovered by John Chowning back in the 60s, while experimenting with vibrato. Basically in FM-Synthesis the frequency of one oscillator (carrier) is modulated by the signal of another oscillator (modulator). The great thing about FM-Synthesis is that it can produce a wide range of sounds with relatively little computing cost, cause we only need to generate 2 basic waveforms to get started. Ideal for environments like flash where you have to watch your fps carefully.

Here’s a little test. Please turn down volume first. Needs the latest Flash-Player 10 (rc of 091508).

To do FM-Synthesis in flash we could fill the (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…)

In this post I was experimenting with waveforms. Playing sounds constantly on the same pitch gets a bit boring after a while, however simply introducing random pitch isn’t too charming either. I started to twiddle (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…)