The current Spark HorizontalLayout unfortunately doesn’t support baseline alignment. If I want to have, for example, a Label and a Button positioned so that their text aligns, I usualy use absolute position (nudging things up or down) or baseline constraints with BasicLayout/Canvas. But then again, I always find myself needing this feature in a HorizontalLayout and so I finally decided to tackle it on. It turns out it’s pretty easy to extend the stock Spark HorizontalLayout, not to mention using it is a breeze with the Spark layout architecture (yay Spark!). Read more…
Recently I checked in the major axis alignment update to VGroup, HGroup, VerticalLayout, HorizontalLayout. It brings parity to the Flex 4 Spark layouts relative to the MX containers HBox and VBox that are well known from previous versions of Flex (and have had those alignment options for long time now). Read more…
Customize the ItemRenderer’s “dragging” state. The drag indicator is the image that the user sees when they select and item and drag it away from the source container. By default the Spark List creates a drag indicator by duplicating all the ItemRenderers for the items being dragged. Therefore a natural way to customize the drag indicator is by customizing the ItemRenderer skin. Spark makes that easy by introducing the optional “dragging” state.
Customize the List’s optional “dropIndicator” skin part. The drop indicator is the image that the user sees as an indicator of where the dragged items are going to be inserted in the destination container. By default, the Spark List displays a horizontal/vertical line along the gap between the at the insertion point. Spark makes that easy by automatically managing the “dropIndicator” optional dynamic skin part.
Read more…
If you are playing with objects in 3D and want their projected bounds, there’s a neat flash functionality for that - Utils3D.projectVector(). However it may not be that apparent how to use it. Here I’m showing a small helper function that does the trick.
Read more…
Just a quick post to link to my layouts article on the Adobe dev connection. It uses the same FlowLayout as an example, so no surprises in that department. Check it out, comments and feedback greatly appreciated.
Tags:
A few folks have been asking for the source code of the WheelLayout. I created it as a proof-of-concept that our Spark layout APIs are sufficient for creation of 3D layouts. And just to showcase it in action, I decided to grab quickly the Flex3 Halo FlickrRIA, port it to Flex 4, and mash it up with the WheelLayout.
Just a quick note that Hans Muller has started a seriese of articles regarding Flex on his blog. His spiffy article here has some very good info about the Spark Viewports and Scrolling 
Also you can check out how little I had to do to implement scrolling support in a custom layout here.
Enjoy!
Tags:
In part one here, the FlowLayout had really basic functionality. I decided to demonstrate how to add layout properties to the custom Spark layouts and how to enable scrolling.
Read more…
I’ve been working on the Flex SDK team for more than a year now, primarily playing with the Spark layouts. One of the new Spark features is the “assignable layouts”. The stock layouts have been separated into their own classes and the containers can be assigned different layouts at run-time. This modularization allows anyone to create their own cool custom layouts and use them with any of the Spark containers.
Read more…