Flint Particle System - Cool Flex Effects

Flint Particle System is a very cool open-source library to add effects in Flash. It can be added in AS, Flash or Flex project. The site also provide many example to get started.

Flare - Flex Data Visualization and Interaction

When I'm developing my project about complex reference data nodes which have multiple levels of inheritance and connections, I only foundmark-shepherd.com SpringGraph close to my components. Then I extend that with a few modification. However, there are still some lack of features to satisfy my components.
Today, I read the The Flare Visualization Toolkit from Thomas Burleson. This kit is more organize-chart like and has a few more features I need. It's open source as well(Important!! ^_^).
Don't have time to read all code today, but I think it could be a resource of my project.

Flex DataGridColumn Percentage By Decimals

It's so surprised to find out a long waited feature in DataGrid and AdvancedDataGrid when I read this post.
Percentage of column width setting is just sit there but undocumented.
It is very simple to use ".25" instead of "25%" in the property of Width value.
But if you set columns to resizable, then it may resize wider when you resize a column.

A list resources from Flex team's blog:

Blogs from the source

Here's a fairly comprehensive list of blogs maintained by engineers on the Flex, Flash Builder, and Catalyst teams. You'll find plenty of examples, tutorials, tips and tricks, and discussion on new features available in our betas.

(in no particular order :) they're all awesome)

Flex team:

Matt Chotin's Blog

Flex Examples - numerous Flex examples

Flexophile

flexreport - a discussion of the less intuitive aspects of Flex components and applications

Pete's Blog

Daniel Koestler - AIR, Flex, Flash, and other Adobe technology

Peter deHaan - Confessions of a Flex QA

Hans Muller's Flex Blog - a technical blog about the Flex 4 (Gumbo) API (stay tuned for posts about new Flex support for scrolling and layout virtualization)

Flex Butterflies and Bugs - Flex news, workarounds for bugs and solutions for common problems, from a quality perspective

Codependent - graphics and animation with Flex and the Flash platform

Frish's blog - Flex 4 (Gumbo)

iamdeepa on flex

Flexponential - DataGroup, List, virtualization, Flex Component Kit, and more

Quietly Scheming - examples and custom components

Evtimmy - custom layouts

Alex's Flex Closet - examples and discussion of common problems, especially around memory management and item renderers

Tips and Tools of Flex - tools in the Flex SDK

Flex Spaghetti - code samples, tips, and a couple ramblings about the Flex bug database

Just Suppose - UI, Flex, and Flash

Flash Builder team:

Getting and Setting - Builder coding features like refactoring and code generation

mikemo - Builder debugger

Tim Buntel's Web Log - Flex particularly relating to the ColdFusion

Flex Thoughts - Flex charts, general IDE features and DCD (Data Centric Development) features of Builder

Marking Occurrences - Flash Builder language intelligence features such as Find References

Radhakrishna's blog

Flex Automation - Automation of Flex apps

A Flex Enthusiast!

Flex Guard - Builder DCD for LCDS and BlazeDS servers, using Profiler and Network Monitor features of Builder 4

My Take On Tech - DMV Charts and more to come on PHP workflow (DCRAD)

Exploring Flex - DCD workflow of Builder - details of the wizards that form DCD

Sujit Reddy G – The Evangelist - DCD features in Builder

The GLog (Geek bLOG) - Flash Builder, Eclipse and Java

Catalyst team:

much ado about something - Flex/AIR/Flash Catalyst

draw background for DataGrid columns

When I read Peter Ent's post about "Coloring the Background of Cells", I need to fill the column in my project, which is programmatically generated, with gradient background fill.
I didn't finish my job at the first try. After I read the post again, I found each column has to be assign a backgroundColor style before DataGrid drawColumnBackground function taking effect.
This function "drawColumnBackground" is called by drawLinesAndColumnBackgrounds function, which is called in updateDisplayList function. So I think I can update each column background by override the updateDisplayList function. I probabely need to update datagrid data as well as column background based on user action.

Reading for Custom Flex Preloader

I've read Ted's Flex 2 Preloader before I implemented a preloader class in my project.
However this class seems not working as I expected. Loading is quite glitch. I found in the code there is time interval to check status and display preloader, which slow down the process of loading animation.
After a couple of months, I retrieve this problem and found some new entries explained in detail how the preloading proceed and which class is not good to be used in preloader class.

• Flex 3 Pleloading Explained is new and has upcoming post(not posted yet) to explain the preloading in Flex;
• Custom Flex 3 Lightweight Preloader gives a very good example to build an preloader;
• Implementing A Flex 2 Custom Preloader has one Class from basic implementation of IPreloaderDisplay which is simple and detail explained.

I hope I can try to redo this preloader next week for my project.

Flex memory leaks and garbage collection

I read a series of blogs talking about memory leak and garbage collection in Flex.
It's very good resource to gain the knowledge about garbage collection in Flex.
Here is the post and following the other 4 posts from We are the heroes of Web 2.0

Quick Note: Custom Binding in Flex

Read this Custom Binding Released! from http://www.xtyler.com/, which claims light and simple.
It also support 2-way binding, which Adobe Flex should support for binding.

Input with PopUp or PopUpInput

I recently has to use a pop-up input, which behavior similar to PopUpButton. But PopUpButton name is not editable. ComboBox has the simliar thing but popup do not support UIComponent. So I create a new custom component called PopUpInput. It has the following features:

• popup can be any UIComponent;
• because of TextInput, name is editable;
• customized drop-down arrow icon;
• can extend the function to save the input text to list.

Click here for demo and source file.
However, this an alpha version of this component, some filters such as drop shadow applied on popup do not transform smoothly as same as popup itself. Also, popup does not do drop down effect when the first time is opened. Let's call it version 0.1. I will update it later as I finish my Java study.

Degrafa : Declarative Graphics Framework

The focus behind the Declarative Graphics Framework (Degrafa) is to bring the graphics classes up a level to provide a common ground between developer and designer within Flex, and enable the graphics classes to become first class citizens within the Flex framework.

Home: http://www.degrafa.com
Code: http://code.google.com/p/degrafa/
Group: http://groups.google.com/group/degrafa/

Open Source: Resize & Move Container

flex-object-handles

User resizeable container for flex components.
Official website at: http://www.rogue-development.com/objectHandles.xml

A very common UI element found in many applications are those little square handles around an on-screen object that allow you to move & resize it. I haven't been able to find anything like that pre-built in flex, so I've started a project to develop one. It behaves as a container object so you can put any other flex component inside it and get the resizeable functionality right away.

Link: the list of helpful Flex or Flash debug tools

Debugging tools collection:
Debugging AS3 with "firebug’s console" combined with "FlashTracer" will take efficiency's advantage.

the list of helpful Flex or Flash debug tools

from: Ntt.cc (http://ntt.cc/)

Link: 36 New, Cool Flex and AS3 Tools, Libraries and Components

very useful resources:

36 New, Cool Flex and AS3 Tools, Libraries and Components

By: Sean Moore (http://www.seantheflexguy.com/)

Thought by Bruce (Author of Thinking in Java)

Very good computing thoughts.
The author is Bruce Eckel who wrote "Think in Java"
ActionScript Collections and Functional Programming

Summary
Not only are basic collections (arrays and associative arrays) tightly integrated into the core language, but arrays provide some sophisticated functional programming support. This article also introduces the creation and use of shared libraries and the basics of prototypes.