http://www.hulstkamp.com andy hulstkamp blog about rich internet applications, flex, flash, java, webapps, web, code, experiments Sun, 30 May 2010 17:25:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2010/05/30/nicer-tooltips-and-balloon-help-for-flex-4/525 During the past year I've posted a couple of custom Gumbo (flex 4 beta) components and skins. Since they've been built on beta sdks, these components might need some adjustments to work with the Flex 4 release sdk. To save you the work of figuring out what to adjust here are the ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2010/05/08/updated-components-to-flex-4-sdk-final/506 While updating the Gumbo-Components on this blog to flex 4 final I noticed that the style-property baseColor has been changed to chromeColor. In addition to this the flag useChromeColor can be set to tell the SparkSkin to use chromeColor for colorization. For custom skins this can be set by overriding initializationComplete() ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2010/04/07/flex-4-change-basecolor-to-chromecolor-and-usechromecolortrue/496 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 ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2009/07/09/custom-popup-rating-component-in-spark-flex-4-gumbo/464 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 ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2009/06/20/advanced-fxg-spark-icon-buttons-with-one-generic-skin-in-flex4-gumbo/439 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 ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2009/06/20/getting-vector-graphics-into-spark-skins/433 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 ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2009/06/18/spark-icon-button-with-gradient-effects-and-filter-animation-colorized-by-styles-flex-4-gumbo/403 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 ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2009/06/15/working-with-huge-amount-of-data-in-flex-4-gumbo/382 Here are some notes I took while investigating and reading about Spark Containers. VerticalLayout.variableRowHeight and HorizontalLayout.variableColumnWidth properties are set to true by default. This might affect performance in a bad way, since Flex has to determine the size of each child. Setting theses properties to false in conjunction with rowHeight / ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2009/06/14/random-notes-on-datagroup-in-flex-4-gumbo/371 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 color of the ... http://www.hulstkamp.com/2009/06/13/custom-spark-checkbox-component-in-flex-4-gumbo/361