Mike Orth – Booya!

Drag and drop is easy in Flex when you have basic requirements. Just setup a list with dragEnabled=”true” and you’re up and running. However, what if you need to disable dragging for only a select few items in your list? For example, if you have a list of users and you can only drag a user with a specific role, such as an admin.

The answer is pretty simple, create a custom ItemRenderer and stop the mouseDown event from propagating.

Most metadata tags in Flex have default property values. For example, the following are equivalent:

However, when using RemoteClass, even though it only has 1 possible parameter (”alias”), it still requires that you specify the property name as follows:

This is a fantastic external debugger for Flex/Flash applications. The primary thing I love is being able to change properties at run time, and being able to execute methods.

Grab it here, it’s free: Monster Debugger

For future reference, trying to remember what the property name was for the interval or step size for a slider. The property is named “snapInterval”

When doing any state transitions, you have to be sure to specify the intended target. For instance, recently I was debugging some client code to see why a fade wasn’t working. It turned out that the target was set to the parent group instead of each specific component.

In this case, you need to target pageOne and pageTwo, NOT content.

After moving from projects that religiously used FlexFormatter to one that didn’t, I realized just how nice this plugin is. If by chance you haven’t heard of it, FlexFormatter is an eclipse plugin that will format spaces, tabs, declarations, reorder properties & functions, indent, and lots more.

To install, use the update site http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite.

I added a lot of new custom Flex components to my library, MikeOrthLib. It includes a PagedDataGrid control, some handy popup base classes, and other utility components.

Check out the example application (work in progress).

Visit the project home page.

I just got back from 360|Flex conference in San Jose. I got to meet a lot of cool people, as well as put faces to several fellow Universal Mind guys. At past 360s, you had to search to find someone with a PC because it was overwhelmingly Macs, but I was surprised at the amount of PCs I saw this time. There was also a lot of focus on mobile development. Looking forward to next time.

I wanted to experiment with the new 3D features in Flex 4 Gumbo, so I made this simple rotate demo. Your mouse controls the rotation of the paw. I used the new functionality of

&

for the ‘info’ button effects and when clicking the paw. Rather than use the Rotate3D effect, I am just setting the rotation properties on MouseMove.

Click for demo

This was done for my good friends at CFBgaming.com.

Here are my slides from Flex Flash Camp along with an uber-basic example button skin that shows a quick breakdown of a Spark Skin. Great for those who haven’t had time yet to really peer into Flex 4 skins. Look for more advanced skinning topics soon.