Quick list of themes

fb-zenburnish – http://www.noiseandheat.com/blog/
Dark theme for Flash Builder 4 – http://www.likidu.com/blog/
The Typography of My Flash Builder – http://kevinsuttle.com/

After testing them for a while I’m currently using fb-zenburnish.

Installing a theme

First download the file, and unzip if necessary. You should have an .epf file. Now go to the Flash Builder, and from the File menu select Import->Other. (you might want to backup your current settings before importing the new ones, just choose Export instead of Import and it should be a straight forward process)

Than choose Preferences from the General node and click Next.

Than just browse for the epf file and click Finish.

Your brand new color scheme should be set.

Styling a Flex 4 Button

The Flex 4 skinning model is different from the one used in Flex 3, to keep the introduction short, let’s just say it’s now much easier to create programmatic skins, and you can do it with newly introduced MXML tags. If you ever used Degrafa to skin your components it’s should be fairly familiar, if not please check the example code. The basic usage is straight forward – you need to create a mxml file and you can start putting the new tags to design the skin.

Let’s start with the shadow behind the button, as you can see on the picture above it has 3 parts – a gradient fill, a stroke and an inner shadow, and all of them thrown on a shape of a rounded rectangle. Let’s translate this to graphic tags. First of we need that rounded rectangle, so we define a Rectangle with the corner radius using the new tags:

That’s how easy it is to create shapes using the new syntax. Next we need to define a fill, which according to the Photoshop design is a linear gradient starting from color 0x0f2835 and ending with color 0×153445. We also need an inner drop shadow on it, so let’s add it. We also need a stroke above all this, so we need to add another rectangle which will not have the drop shadow on it, and will define that gradient stroke, just like the design. A few minutes later we have:

It’s not the shortest listing, but remember that I’m only copying the settings from the design. The final flash result looks like this:

It’s almost a easy to create the rest of the design, take a look a the working button with some Flex magic thrown in to get nice transitions between states (viewsource enabled), and after the jump, I’ll quickly point to different parts of the design which are used in the ButtonSkin.mxml

Result

What makes a skin – looking at ButtonSkin.mxml

First of you should define a component for which the skin is designed.

Next you need to define all the states which are defined by the host component (you can check this info on livedocs) which is done in this code:

After that’s done you also need to put the parts of the skin that the host components assumes your skin will have (this is called skinning contract and I’ll write a post about it when I have some time). In the case of Button we need to display a single string (the button label as stated in livedocs) we’re going to use a Label for that and give it an id of labelDisplay according to the contract.

Than we can start putting in the graphics, using the same tags we used while creating the shadow. The only additions is that the values of the gradients change depending on the state, thanks to the new state syntax in Flex 4 it’s much more readable – there’s a different color when the button is in an over state (color.over) and a different one when the button is in the down state (color.down)

To add the smooth color fades between states we also define a bunch of transitions which work on our gradient entries.

Feel free to download the source code and play with it, hopefully it will be a good starting point.

Download source code.

translates to:

So what you need to do is create a ChannelSet, put a channel inside (in this case AMFChannel) and set its uri to the one you would usually put as endpoint uri in the config file.
Once you do that you can start using your RemoteObjects without the services_config.

Of course you should add the rest of the things you usually put inside a remote object. For people who would like an example:

Calling functions

Let’s create a simple function which will accept any number of parameters.

But that’s something everybody knew how to do. The interesting thing is that in Actionscript 3.0 there is a class called Function which also has it’s own methods defined, and all the functions are instances of that class. Most of the methods are inherited from Object but there are two defined for it, which are used to achieve a similar thing – calling the function, this are apply() and call(). The first parameter of both functions is almost always ignored [1].

The definition of call – call(thisArg:*, ...args):* shows that it also takes any number of parameters, than it uses them as arguments, so, as the first parameter is ignored – sum.call(null,0,1,2) is the same as sum(0,1,2).
The problem with calling functions like this is that you actually need to know how many parameters you’re going to use.

Luckily apply() has an array as a second parameter. Which means you can call a function, and pass any number of parameters as an Array. Quick sample of achieving the exact same functionality as before using apply.

Which is much more flexible.

arguments variable

One more thing which is worth knowing is that inside functions you can access the arguments variable. It’s holds all the variables passed to the function, with the limitation that it doesn’t work when using the ...arg notation in the function definition. So this will not work:

function sum(...arg):int
{
      trace (arguments);
      // throws an error
      [...]
}

But it will work with functions without the ...arg in the definition, for example this prints out both strings:

Apart from that this variable also holds the reference to the currently executing function in the arguments.callee property. Things like this come in handy sometimes.

Sample

Using all the tools described (callee, arguments, apply) we can build a quick sample, a class that records the calls to it’s functions in an easy way, and is able to replay them when needed.

CallRecorder.as

Sample execution:

Not a great piece of software but hopefully interesting.
———————————–
[1] The only case it’s not ignored which I could find is when using anonymous functions.
LiveDocs on Function class
LiveDocs on arguments class

1020: Method marked override must override another method.

After starring at it for a while with utter confusion, I’ve started to investigate what might be the problem. Turns out I was adding skin parts to a spark Group, and the documentation states:

To improve performance and minimize application size,
the Group container cannot be skinned.
If you want to apply a skin, use the SkinnableContainer instead.

Which is exactly what I needed to do. Too bad there was no hint about it in the error string.

To try it out you really just need to go to the download page, get one of the versions (I’ve tested the command line one on windows and it works very good), generete a ruleset file using the web tool (link on the same page), and that analize the output XML file (you can use the simple web tool which is also provided on the download page).

I’ve put both the jar files and the ruleset (called pmd.xml) in “F:/Flex SDK/Tools/FlexPMD/” so the command to run it for me looks like this:

java -Xmx256m -jar “F:/Flex SDK/Tools/FlexPMD/flex-pmd-command-line-1.0.RC3.jar” -s “F:/THE/DIRECTORY/WHICH/TO/ANALIZE/” -o . -r “F:/Flex SDK/Tools/FlexPMD/pmd.xml”

It might be good to point out that you don’t need to analize the whole project but can also run the tool on any directory in it, which generates files which are easier to read, especially if you’re just starting to clean a big application.

For the geolocation to work you need to have some javascript code in your page, the library injects the code into the DOM so that you don’t need to do it manually, for those of you who are interested how to do it here’s a cookbook post.

The project is hosted on Google Code  here, where you can also find a detailed documentation. Below you can find a sample application.

A simplest example I could think off:

As you can see the whole configuration consists of adding the library and setting the applicationID, it’s usually the same as your main class name (eg. if you create an application as App.mxml, the applicationID should be set to “App”). This is needed so that javascript in the DOM of the page can call your application with the results.

The lastResult implements the IPosition interface:

Sample (view source enabled): link