Advanced Data Visualization for Adobe Flex & AIR

Flex and AIR on their own are great for visual appeal. Elixir is a formidable package built on top of Adobe platform of Flex and AIR for creating sophisticated, interactive user displays. New in ILOG’s large arsenal of graphics tools, Elixir can help make your rich apps richer with its collection of innovative and interactive data display components that include ready-to-use 3D charts, gauges and dials, map displays, gantt charts, organization charts, treemap charts and radar charts.

Elixir integrates seamlessly with the Adobe Flex Builder. Watch this movie on the ILOG website and you will agree. However, the package is [...] Continue Reading…

Flex Programming Tips of the Week 0807b

DataGrid with flexible row height - DataGrid is the most used component for displaying structured data. For more complex data structure inside a grid, it takes some customization to make the display look good. This example by Harry Vikatos will tell you how that could be done.

Flex 3 Component Explorer - Let’s call it the tips of all tips. Everything learning Flex starts from here. What else need I to say?

Playing Sound effect with ProgressBar - Visual and media add legs to Flex development. Once a while you need make your program known by a nice sound track. [...] Continue Reading…

MeeBone: How One Dude Learnt AS and FLex

Meebo has been a blessing to all the chatterboxes in the corporate world. Still, there might be some who miss chatting through a messenger client, unsatisfied by a large window of a web browser. MeeBone can be their simple solution.

I only say that this AIR implementation of Meebo “can be” a solution because it is a towering example of all the things that can possible be wrong in Beta versions. There is a lot more work to be done for it to appeal to those other than AIR addicts. The program starts with difficulty, sits uncomfortably (for the user) [...] Continue Reading…

Translate Personal Flash Sites

I haven’t had a chance to see RIAs in non-English languages much. When I first saw Camilo Langlade’s Flash website, I was very impressed. But unfortunately, I can barely recognize Spanish. I mechanically tried Google’s Language Tools, and by the time the translated version loaded I realized how difficult it is for search engines to translate Flash sites. Needless to say, not a single word could be translated.

The recent news of Adobe teaming up with major search engines to crawl Flash is extremely encouraging. However, it may be a while before they even attempt translation.

Most non-English websites developed using [...] Continue Reading…

Unlocked Cell Phones

Ever since carriers started locking cell phones claiming that it is necessary to subsidize the cost of the phones, there has been a lot of discontent what with consumers feeling arm-twisted. At a time when designers are coming with better and trendier phones to serve people’s tastes, locking them is erasing the definition of a SIM (Subscriber Identification Module). That a carrier might agree to unlock the phone upon request, sometime in the future, even for a fee, remains a distant dream. Unlocking cell phones on our own following hacking instructions online is not very appealing as a [...] Continue Reading…

DataGrid with flexible row height

In one project I needed to have a data grid cell present some hierarchical data and I thought I could just use a tree control as the item data renderer for that grid column.

This what I got:

As you can see if you open the trees, the data row is not adjusting and you simply cannot see the child nodes.

A special tree control had to be made and used as the data renderer, to get me to the correct result, as shown below:

The code for this customised tree control can be seen [...] Continue Reading…

Potential Threats Through Softwares

Although this hasn’t much to do with RIAs, you might find it important.

Account stealing trojans are now entering our computers through Adobe Flash Plug-ins as well. While internet users are increasingly becoming aware of security, attacks on computers are becoming ingenious and malicious by the day. One form of such attacks targets vulnerabilities in softwares.

The usual anti-virus softwares only perform scans to discover whether a system has already been compromised. They don’t notify us when a critical security vulnerability has been discovered in, say Adobe Flash Player. Potential threats do not come within their purview, though such a day might [...] Continue Reading…

Adobe or Microsoft?

RIA technologies over the past few years have been getting increasingly competitive, thereby introducing more and more features much to our delight.

Yesterday, it was announced that the increasingly popular online game Line Rider would be migrating from Flash to Silverlight. A very encouraging announcement for Silverlight. This could influence other game developers in the world.

And last week BBC dumped Microsoft for Adobe a little more. Instead of using desktop apps created by Microsoft-backed Skinkers, BBC decided to switch to in-house production using Adobe’s Flex and AIR. The previous applications “only work on Windows, are built out of a variety [...] Continue Reading…

Time-delaying Cairngorm Commands Execution

In cases where data are edited in a Flex client and subsequently have to be saved on a server, one has to manage the frequency of those server calls.

One way of doing this, is adding an extra step, for the user to save the changes made. So image you have an editable data grid, presenting some objects you want to persist on your server. User edits data but then has to press the ‘Save’ button for the changes to be saved. This way you can aggregate all your changes into one server call, instead of making a call for [...] Continue Reading…