Adventures of a Flex developer

Today I went abseiling for the lilly foundation.  If I'm honest I've never been so scared as I don't like heights.  Any how if I also created a poster to help advertise it myself:





If you are feeling generous you can still donate here

The Metro UI seems to be used in more and more places of late.  Originally I only saw it in the Zune software but its now part of the Windows mobile 7 and the up coming Windows 8 release.  I personally really like it.  Any how I've created a few skins and released this demo Air app. Feel free to take the code and skins and make your own apps metro themed





You can download and run the app here (it does very little apart from look pretty)

Or you can download the source code here

Enjoy

Had a little doodle in photoshop.  If you ever wanted where cloud computers come from:

Nothing to exciting but I notice I had a bug in my egg timer app. Unfortunately for me i wrote the app using Flash Builder burrito, and I've since moved the final version. So updated/rewrote the app and gave it a little face lift. The android version has been updated however the playbook version wont be updated until Flash builder 4.5.1 so i'm not writting more beta code :-/

One of the Application types available in Flash builder 4.5 is the TabbedViewNavigatorApplication.  Its a pretty simple but useful starting point which gives you, your navigation for free by creating a button bar at the bottom of the application.

As seen here:

 

   /**  
    * @private  
    */  
   override protected function createChildren():void  
   {  
     tabbedNavigator = new TabbedViewNavigator();  
     tabbedNavigator.id = "tabbedNavigator";  
     addChild(tabbedNavigator);  
           tabbedNavigator.addEventListener(FlexEvent.UPDATE_COMPLETE,onChange);  
   }  
   /**  
    * @private   
    */   
   override protected function measure():void  
   {      
     super.measure();  
     measuredWidth = tabbedNavigator.getPreferredBoundsWidth();  
     measuredHeight = tabbedNavigator.getPreferredBoundsHeight();  
   }  
      /**  
       * @private  
       */  
      override protected function layoutContents(unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number):void  
      {  
           super.layoutContents(unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight);  
           tabbedNavigator.setLayoutBoundsSize(unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight);  
           tabbedNavigator.setLayoutBoundsPosition(0,0);  
      }  
      private function reDrawTB():void  
      {  
           tabbedNavigator.y = tabbedNavigator.tabBar.height;  
           tabbedNavigator.tabBar.y = -tabbedNavigator.tabBar.height;            
      }  

The playbook version of Bottle Rocket Dash got approved last night. The best thing about writing an application in Adobe air is I can release it on multi-platforms with very little effort.

You can download the app here

Flex builder 4.5 makes it pretty simple to persist data within an app.

Air provides the ability to create a SQL lite database, which could be useful for various uses in an application.

In the following example we use the db to score a number and date time stamp.  Bit like a high score table.

The example is pretty simple and all the important logic is handled with in a few functions. The init function is called on load, which then calls two more functions. createdb and updatelistresult. The Create db function checks if the database exists. If not it simply creates a new database.

The update list result function runs a simple command and uses the result as the data provider for the list.


You can download the apk here and the source here

                protected function init(event:FlexEvent):void {  
                     createDb();  
                     updateListResults();  
                }  
                private function createDb():void {  
                     sqlConnection = new SQLConnection();  
                     sqlConnection.open(File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath("hs.db"));  
                     var stmt:SQLStatement = new SQLStatement();  
                     stmt.sqlConnection = sqlConnection;  
                     stmt.text = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS highscore (highscoreid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, score INTEGER, date DATE)";                      
                     stmt.execute();  
                }                 
                private function updateListResults():void {  
                     var sqlStatement:SQLStatement = new SQLStatement();  
                     sqlStatement.sqlConnection = sqlConnection;  
                     sqlStatement.text = "SELECT * FROM highscore ORDER BY score DESC";  
                     sqlStatement.execute();  
                     var result:SQLResult = sqlStatement.getResult();  
                     listData.source = result.data;  
                }  
                private function addRecord():void {  
                     if(Number(num.text) is Number) {  
                          var sqlStatement:SQLStatement = new SQLStatement();  
                          sqlStatement.sqlConnection = sqlConnection;  
                          sqlStatement.text =  
                               "INSERT INTO highscore (score, date) " +  
                               "VALUES (:score, :date)";  
                          sqlStatement.parameters[":score"] = num.text;  
                          sqlStatement.parameters[":date"] = new Date();  
                          sqlStatement.execute();  
                          updateListResults();  
                     }  
                }