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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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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Making a flex button appear flat or transparent does not require any skinning – there are plenty of style options, and all we need to do is find the right setting.
This may sound trivial, since we can make any display object clickable – but since I find myself spending way too much time on this, its time to put this issue to rest.
The Flex framework button class (mx.Button) has a default skin – the halo button skin. I needed a button with no background or highlight – basically a clickable text. Simply setting the background alpha to zero seem to have no effect.
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