I needed a simple spark button with only an icon – basically a bitmap made into a button. The problem is that I have lots of these buttons, each with a different icon – and all the skin samples use hard-coded assets.
Well, the old Button class used to have an icon style (it was called skin or upSkin) so I decided to bring back the icon style so I’d be able to reuse the same skin and pass a different icon to each instance.
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Flex is often taken for granted when implementing flash/AS3 projects. However it is not mandatory to use Flex on the flash platform. Not only that, its not always the preferred solution for most RIAs.
In this post, I will cover a few alternatives to Flex while staying in the realm of Actionscript and Flash. Yes, this may sound strange from someone who makes his living using Flex, but there are situations when Flex can become a liability.
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In a recent post here, I shared my rants regarding usability of several spark components. Well, its better to act than to complain, so I decided to try and roll my own tab control.
Something happened to the Spark model on the way from the design board to the implementation of the API.
Having spent significant time with skinning tab components with Flex 4 and spark, I am having some serious thoughts regarding actually using it in future projects. It simply is too much pain to use.
Here is my problem: they said the new components will be easier to use and reduce development time, but in reality spark gives less for more code. Hell, we could do much better with the old halo skins!
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