http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog Flex and Component Development Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:45:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Finding a good Caliper or measuring tool that is both cross-platform and FREE seems to be quite difficult. PixelPerfect is a good starting point but not really as useful as a real caliper. So I decided to create myself a CALIPER application for Adobe® AIR™ Project Page or directly from ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/08/20/first-application-for-adobe%c2%ae-air%e2%84%a2-caliper/ Just a quick post mostly as a reminder to myself on how to easily create Icons for your Adobe AIR applications. Once the application has finished Initializing i add a button to the main view. that calls a method called takeSnapShot( e : MouseEvent ); that writes the application out ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/08/19/creating-easy-application-icons/ Forgot to post about this but redbullracing went live last month and i was in charge of creating the flash homepage. It was a simple but interesting project, most notably the distortion effects that are applied to it. Apparently they have caused a lot of people to think their monitors ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/08/13/redbull-racing-goes-live/ They have just posted a security alert over at Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team Website regarding false links on social networking sites that tell you to download un-official versions of the flash player that have malware installed on them.. So be careful http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/08/05/flash-player-malware/ I needed to build a simple Password Strength indicator much like the ones you find on google registration pages. Using some simple RegExp ( Regualar Expressions ) it wasn't that hard. Below is a simple example that uses the class to display the security level as well as updating a HBox ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/07/31/password-strength-indicator-in-actionscript-3/ The guys over at adobe have put together some good free video's on getting started in Flex, Currently 3 whole days worth of stuff! http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/ http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/07/29/free-flex-video-training/ Ok so I was given the challenge of creating a TV style distortion effect for a project im working on. The obvious solution for this was to use a sound wave and create a distortion effect based on the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum( ); method in combination with a DisplacementMapFilter to build a ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/07/20/sound-experiments-and-distortion-effects/ I thought that I would just write a quick note on how I know which version of an application I am looking at when it has been published to the web. It's all well and good saying its revision 87 from svn but how do you know? Well a simple ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/06/24/application-version-control-in-as3/ Some time ago now I decided as a self improvement mechanism to re-write one of the Flex components from scratch so that I could get my head around the Flex Component Framework. So I set my eyes on the ColorPicker Brave or stupid you decide as this was going to ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/06/24/custom-color-picker-source/ Just a quick note to say that if your stylesheets don't seem to be applied correctly Styles in a .css file are white space sensitive so if you place text-align: left it works but if you place text-align : left it breaks the css as it thinks that the tags name ... http://www.betadesigns.co.uk/Blog/2008/06/19/css-files-are-whitespaces-sensitive/