Quietly Scheming

I spend a lot of time on flexcoders helping people learn how to write custom extensions to the flex charting components. And while most of the time people are able to reach their goal, there is a steep learning curve they have to ascend first. So last week, in the middle of writing a typical reponse to a charting question, I had a thought on how we might make simple charting extensions easier in the next release.

Interested? Read about it, and see some examples, over here. Take a look, come on back and let me know what you think.

One more post before I head out for Thanksgiving. Some of you have probably seen this already, but for the rest of you reading, this is a photo browsing app I wrote shortly after we released Flex 1.5. Unfortunately I don’t have the source for this one available (well, actually I do, but It’s really too ugly to be posting publicly, and it’s in AS2 anyway).

Flex 1.5 Photo Browser

This was my first attempt to show people that Flex doesn’t have to be all about grids and panels.

Worth noting:

• built in Flex 1.5
• written in Actionscript 2, for player 7
• the flex app loads all of its data from XML over HTTP.
• The XML is being served via a custom extension to wordpress that manages the albums in the wordpress database.
• the app implements deep linking. Notice as you browse around the URL changes you can copy and paste the url into another browser and jump directly to the album/photo.
• (yes, the urls are ugly, but that’s because the app was written to work with static XML files as well as the Wordpress back end. So they encode the full url of the current album and image being displayed).

I finally got the calendar source wrangled into a semi-respectable form that I’m not too embarasssed to post here. You can now download a zip file with all the source you should need to build and use the calendar (and sample app) from the calendar demo page.

A whole bunch of you have expressed interest in contributing to the project, which is great. If you’re interested, let me know (if you haven’t already), and go ahead and download the source and start playing with it. I’m planning on passing the source over to an RIAForge project in the very near future so everyone can jump in and get their hands dirty.

* Flex Interactive Calendar Component

Check it out, come on back here and leave comments below.

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for the source for the DisplayShelf and TiltingPane components I used as the basis for my MAX 2006 talk. So I’m making the components and source available for anyone to try out, download, hopefully learn from, and maybe even use in your own work.

Even if you didn’t attend my session, or missed out on MAX this year, go on over and take a look. It’s a good example of how to use the flash display object and graphics API to build rich content in flex, as well as how to take advantage of some of the core architectural concepts of the framwork and MXML to build more advanced components.

The demo, source browser, and zip file are available here. Take a look, then come back and leave me a comment, tell me what you think.

All you Flex developers seem to be abuzz about the scheduling component Adobe Consulting is going to be releasing sometime in the future, and rightfully so. In the meantime, this sample probably won’t quite fill your stomach…think of it as an appetizer rather than a main course…but you might want to try it out:

* Flex Interactive Calendar Component

Check it out, come on back here and leave comments below.