Saturday, October 9, 2010

Speaking of Flex...

I'll be joining Jacob Surber from Adobe this week to speak to the local Flex user group, SilvaFUG (which I think stands for "Silicon Valley Flex User Group." Or maybe it's "Silver and Fugly"). We'll be in San Francisco on Tuesday evening (the 12th) and San Jose on Thursday evening (the 14th).

The topic is "Fun with Flex Skinning." I'll start off with an overview of the visual aspects of Flex 4 (which, by bizarre coincidence, are exactly the topics covered by Flex 4 Fun. Funny how that worked out). Then I'll walk through an extended example of skinning a simple component to show how these visual elements are used to enable easy development of very custom-looking components. I promise there will be much more code than bullet-points. Jacob will then go into more detail about skinning, including possible workflows and tools for design and development of custom components.

More information about the events can be found on the SilvaFUG site.

I hope to see you there; it should be a Flex 4 Fun evening. Both times.

4 comments:

swidnikk said...

Enjoyed the talk and got a copy of the final book. I have a fun technical question... maybe you have a fun answer?

A group with two states, open and closed, walked into a bar together with two animations who ran in parallel, fade and resize. The children of the group seem to cause the resize animation to stutter during the open to closed transition. Is there a property of the animation or a beer that will loosen things up and get rid of that stutter? (I tried disableLayout but not very friendly)

swidnikk said...

Ahh, minHeight is not my friend. Works great now.

Chet Haase said...

@swidnikk: Glad you found the answer. I didn't really have any ideas for you, because problems like this totally depend on the situation (the structure of the layout, how complex the UI is, the nesting of containers, the animations being run, etc. etc.). Anyway, good that you got it working.

swidnikk said...

I know... but the first place people point their fingers is to the effects engine itself.

It'd be interesting to get some pointers on how to 'debug' transitions or someday, get more insight into how the animation is working from the debugger---but only if it could help to find stuff like the minHeight constraint faster. say break as the transition initializes, inspect what values about to tween to etc.