// Playground of Jens Krause
Do you remember the very old school global function called asfunction? It was used to call custom ActionScript methods clicking an HTML link. The definition in HTML was something like this: < a href='asfunction:myFunction' >my link< /a > .
In Flex 3 is it pretty painful to extend a custom container component for adding children to it using MXML. The following example will throw an error like this: Error: Multiple sets of visual children have been specified for this component (base component definition and derived component definition).
Flex 4 is Rock ‘n’ Roll! However, Flex 4 is still beta and it can’t be perfect right now. Today one of the most missing feature for me is using the ApplicationUpdaterUI of the Adobe AIR Update Framework in Flex 4. This bug is already documented. (BTW: Please vote here to fix this issue! )
Anyway, I can’t wait for the final release of Flex 4, so I decided to build a custom ApplicationUpdaterUI component based on the new Spark skinning architecture. The custom ApplicationUpdaterUI is built on the top of the current version of Adobes AIR Update Framework and most of the current features are available (e.g. auto check, localization etc.) The component is full skinnable using it as an external window (as before) or as an embedded view component in an application (without the need of a popup window).
WSSkinStatesTester is a handy tool to test visually all states of any skin classes in Flex 4 (Gumbo).
For skinning Flex 4 components you have a lot of great options. One way is using a custom skin class, which extends a Skin or a SparkSkin class and defines all needed style properties by itself.
Imagine a custom button skin, which is more complex than the standard Spark ButtonSkin. It declares additional gradients, rectangles, transitions etc. If you code all needed values for any style properties within this skin class, you may have to create another button skin class for using only one or two different style properties. Doing this, the amount of skin classes can be increased rapidly!
Few weeks ago Thibault Imbert published an optimized version of Adobes JPGEncoder. And it rocks! However, if you may have very big-size bitmaps it takes too much time to encode images. For example: A bitmap with a size of 2000px x 1500px takes 22 sec. (BTW: Adobes version 30 sec.!!)
Today I came across to a post by Manfred Weber, which points to a discussion at Adobes Alchemy forum. There you will find a great solution published by metalbot for encoding JPEGs using Alchemy. It’s based on a C library for JPEG image compression by IJG and it’s pretty fast (2,7 sec. for 2000 px x 1500px ) !!! Check out the example:
ThunderBolt AS3, which is a lightweight logger extension for Flex 3-4, AIR and Flash 9-10 applications, has been updated to version 2.2.
Check out the new features:
First of all thanks Adobe for sponsoring a Thawte certificate after adding ThunderBolt AS3 Console to the new Adobe Marketplace!
If you will ever certificate an existing AIR app with a new certificate, such as a Thawte certificate, you have to migrate it.
Few weeks ago Cliff Hall announced the release of PureMVC Objective-C Port by Brian Knorr. Brian also provided a very helpful demo called “Employee Admin“.
To dive into the Objective-C port of PureMVC as quick as possible I have built a another demo. It’s a pretty simple RSS reader for iPhone or iPod touch, which grabs a feed of a blog and shows the latest 10 entries in detail.
[UPDATE 02/11/09] flexughh app is available on iTunes store! All links has been updated. Get it for free 
It’s done! My first iPhone app is uploaded to Apple’s app store. It’s an app for the Flex UG in Hamburg / Germany, called “flexughh”. Because I’m very excited about all the enthusiastic flexughh-members I decided to offer this app for free including its full source code written in Objective-C as open source!
Today I will present the new flexughh app at our flexughh-Meeting. If you don’t have the chance to attend it, here are some screen shots.