Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Flex 2 Custom Preloader and Flash Integration

I still see a lot of people using the default preloader for Flex in their Flex 2 applications (including me). However, it's possible to customize the loading screen before your Flex app appears. Ted Patrick has a post with some nice examples of using gif, png or even swf files as a preloader:

Flex 2 Preloaders

Ted's examples just use simple graphics and animation, however you can integrate Flash into Flex to create a really nice preloader. You can also integrate Flash throughout your Flex application for consistency (or for added pizzazz). Jesse Randall Warden has a good article on this as well as a nice example on the third page of his article:

Integrating a Flash Interface into Flex 2

Monday, March 05, 2007

Blog posts to remember

Rather than taking up space in my crowded bookmarks folder, I thought I'd just blog these two posts and reference them from here.

Sean Moore has posted an Actionscript 2.0 to Actionscript 3.0 migration cheatsheet which I may find very useful in the near future. He's also got a lot of other cheatsheets on his site. If you haven't gotten a chance to check them out I recommend you do.

Actionscript Migration Cheatsheet

Also, Alex Ulhmann has updated his distortion effects component. I made some modifications to the first version of his component to create a iTunes-type image scroller in Flex (sorry, it's not online... yet). I'm looking forward to seeing what he's done to improve it and what new things I can do with it.

Distortion Effects