Flex Component Sample: Landscape Zoomer
June 15th, 2006
[page]: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/components/landscape-zoomer/
A whole bunch of beautifully built flash content recently inspired me to think a bit about how zoom and scale could be used in useful interface patterns. As a relatively new tool for most developers, I think we’re only just starting to scratch the surface of how best to take advantage of it.
As an experiement, I tried to imagine what a component that made zoomable interfaces drop dead easy to create in flex would look like.
The result — the Landscape component — is [posted for your enjoyment here.][page].
Go take a look, then come back here with any comments and feedback.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:05 am
very useful! thanks very much!
June 16th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Ely, I simply love your components.
These actually remind us that all you demostrate here can actually be made and delivered TODAY with Flash 8 , and the only big the diference ( other than authoring methodology, there is ) would be that the Flash 8 player doesn’t render the animation as smoothly.
June 16th, 2006 at 2:10 am
I am watching you!
I like the innovation ideas in UI that you implement in Flex.
Flex UI framework is shipped with Datagrid and Tree components which are valuable for data analysts :), no doubt.
But DataGrid and Tree are not sexy, and animation effects more hurt then help when applied towards those components.
You had implemented a new bunch of components in AS3 where animation effects help! Great and new approach and let’s see what end-users will say about this innovation.
June 16th, 2006 at 6:51 am
Ely, you’re a true asset to the community.
June 16th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Thanks for the kind words, everyone.
Jay, you’re absolutely right. Most of the component’s I’ve posted could be replicated using AS2 and the features found in Flash Player 8. Flex, in my mind, makes it much easier to both build and use full featured components, but the core functionality is available in the player (there’s one or two that I think use FP9 specific features).
June 16th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Ely,
Do I get to meet you next week?
Man you are inspirational and I havn’t even got back to my components.
If you are going to be there I would love to get a minute of your time to hash some ideas I have.
Kepp it up leader, you just get us other component devs running right behind! That is what a good leader does, inspires and you are doing it to a T!~~
Peace, Mike
June 16th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Ely,
My son said you should have called the component the;
(A) graph Zoomer from Jax3 ;-) PS3 (you fly around on it, hoover)
I laughed so hard! He is only 7!
Peace, Mike
Peace, Mike
June 16th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
[...] Ely’s Landscape Zoomer [...]
June 17th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Ely, isn’t qs.utils.InstanceCache missing from the source? FlexBuilder tells me it’s missing this class.
June 19th, 2006 at 8:05 am
Whoops! I’ll update it, but in the meantime I’ve got all the source I published checked into a subversion repository that you can browse at http://www.quietlyscheming.com/svn/public/ . You can grab any missing files from there.
June 27th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Wow. Very, very smooth. Good work.
June 29th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
The Constitution application is really cool. :-) It could use a method of manually panning across the image, but that shouldn’t be too hard to add.
Is this available for modification and use? I happen to be learning Flex, and working with a grant program based on the History of the Constitution so this is really exciting.
The flickr app is works pretty well too. Overall, good work. :-)
June 29th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
note, I meant, ‘Declaration app’, but I’d like to use it for the Constitution.
July 14th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Muy buenos, gracias por compartir tus proyectos de Flex, son una buena base para aprender y desarrollarse :-)
July 26th, 2006 at 2:30 am
isnt most of this inaccessible to people.. ?
i mean getting a plugin for each website
July 27th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Hi…this looks great. I think I have downloaded all the needed files..but getting “1118: Implicit coercion of a value with static type mx.core:UIComponent to a possibly unrelated type LightSlide.” in LightTable_code.as at line 7. Any suggestion?
Thank you
July 27th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
sorry..that should be line 77:
var target:LightSlide = (targetObj as UIComponent);
July 28th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Ah, yeah, sorry about that. That line should read:
var target:LightSlide = (targetObj as LightSlide);
Not sure why the code as posted is incorrect, but I’m on sabbatical right now, so I’m trying to stay away from the computer ;)
July 28th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Thanks, Ely. No worries. Enjoy your sabbatical.
August 8th, 2006 at 10:53 am
u.mat
August 8th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Thanks… by the way your new baby is beautiful, and makes my llife much easier…
November 17th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
Great stuff! Wanted to let you know that Flickr changed the location of their API so the app doesn’t work anymore.. you can find more info on api.flickr.com
February 11th, 2007 at 10:53 am
hello
your landscape zoomer is absolutely fantastic and i like to experiment with it. however im complete greenhorn in flex and i cant figure it out, how to load your source files into flex. please can you email me short description how to do it? ill be gratefull for that. thank you…
May 10th, 2007 at 10:47 am
I’m getting an error when trying to compile this – ‘could not find source for class Hilight’, can anyone help me out?
July 16th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Hi Ely. Very useful component indeed. Have you ever experienced any redraw problems though? I’m trying to implement Landscape with some item renderers that have text in them but only some of my items get rendered and i see strange behaviour on the screen. i’ve narrowed it down to a Label component in the itemRenderer, but I can’t figure out why this would be a problem. Any ideas? (can put together a test file if you want). Thanks – phil
August 14th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Sorry to bother Ely, but would this work with latest Flex 3 Beta?
I am looking to make it touch enabled :)
August 16th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Not a web developer but I LOVE your site. My profession is trying to make complicated information easily understandable to public policy-makers (currently, for the U.S. Congress), primarily through writing and simple charts on paper. With the passive agreement of my senior managers, I’m looking for better use of visualization techniques, including using the web interactively. Your site is a wonderful window into what we COULD be doing (but aren’t). I’m not even sure where to begin convincing our graphics and communications people to support innovation. Please keep it up!
September 13th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Hey great webSite….. I got some problems with landScape with the search and stuff 1st example I got no qs.controls.BitMapTile on line 8 at lightSlide_code.as…. and I cannot run the app because of that error… do you have any idea??? I’m working on flex 3 beta thanks…. great work!!!!
January 31st, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Hi Ely:
First let me say excuse my ignorance. I am so impressed with this site and would very much like to use some of these components in my own Flex 2 projects. Again, I like this one and for the life of me cannot see how to use it. Can you send me a small flex mxml application file that calls this component? I would be eternally grateful. Keep up the good work.
Larry
February 2nd, 2008 at 7:27 am
Ely:
Thank you so very much. These missing components were just what I needed to make the landscape application work on my development machine inside Flex builder 2 on a Windows xp machine. However, I have IIS installed on this machine and when I created a test website on this machine the application page looks like it loads, that is the main screen is displayed but nothing else happens. I don’t think the Httpservice is connecting to flickr. So I thought, let me upload the application to one of my hosting accounts. Same problem, the page loads but it just sits there and does nothing. I beleived that all that was needed for the app to work was to upload the .html and .swf files. Is there something I’m missig when delpoying a flex 2 app? I want to use more of your components but this problem has gotten by me and I can’t even find any mention of this in any of the many books I have on Flex2. Any help you can provide would again be greatly apprecieated.
Thanks
Larry