MAX 2008 videos have been posted on Adobe TV.
In a recent blog post I listed my favorites and ones I suggest you watch.
It doesn’t appear that all the sessions are available yet. Here is one I recommend you check out if you are interested in Catalyst.
Brenden Meutzner the manager of the Austin Flex Users Group, posted about this almost a year ago when the group was starting up, but I figured I would send another note out encouraging people in the Austin, Texas area to look into these monthly meetings if you are in the Austin area and didn’t know about this yet. I am the co-manager so I could possibly answer any questions you have as well.
Just email me if you would like.
For more information and to be notified of meeting times check out the site Austin Flex Users Group
The last meeting was great, with several presentations from members and lots of good schwag that was handed out. Including 3 large $1000+ plus software packages from Adobe. Thanks Adobe!
I wanted to explore some of the cool skinning features in the upcoming release of Flex 4 as well as trying out some of the new effects classes such as FxAnimateColor. In this sample I will show what is involved with skinning the application background.
New components in Flex 4 that are skinable with this new model are designated with the prefix “Fx”, for example FxApplication,FxButton, etc.
These components can have their default skins overriden by implementing your own skin class. Some skins such as FxScrollbar can have all it’s parts skinned and display or just pieces depending on the result you want. The pieces that make up a Skin are called SkinParts.
You can tell the Skin class via Metadata which type component it is used for. By using the HostComponent Metadata tag in your Skin class.
<Skin xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009"> <Metadata> [HostComponent("mx.components.FxApplication")] </Metadata> . . . </Skin>
Flex 4 component skins contain SkinParts that are defined by the host component. Some of these skin parts need to be implemented by the Skin in order for Component to work properly.
For example the FxApplication skin requires the SkinPart “contentGroup”, this is a required SkinPart for the FxApplication to function properly. If this is not specified any content added to the application will not show up and if you run in debug mode you will get an exception. Some SkinParts are required while others are not.
<Group id="contentGroup" left="0" right="0" top="0" bottom="0"/>
The example and source below show some samples of different types of backgrounds, standard, gradiented, animated, and ellipse with a radial gradient.
You can also switch the skin at runtime by simply setting the “skin” style.
this.setStyle("skinClass", GradientBackgroundSkin );