Flash tidbits, struggles, revelations, and teaching

Way back in April, I had been looking for an Eclipse plugin to format MXML and came up blank.  Today I found one (thanks to Digital Media Minute) and it works great. I just used to clean up some old code of mine, plus reformat some code I inherited from another developer.

Flex Formatter:  http://flexformatter.sourceforge.net/ Download the .jar file and place in your Flex Builder or Eclipse plugins folder and restart FB or Eclipse.  There is a pretty extensive configuration panel that you can use to modify the formatting to your standards (Window > Preferences > Flex Formatter). Additional information on the formatting options is here: http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=137421&group_id=248408. You can also import/export your settings so you can share with your team.

I’m a bit late to the party, but started really looking at Flex4 this week … FXG in particular. I looked over the few basic FXG Shapes (Rect, Ellipsis, and Line) and thought it looked pretty limited. I had used Degrafa on a few projects and really got used to the Round Rectangle Complex and the ability to set each rectangle corner with a different radius.  The FXG Rect has the ability to set corner radius, but its every corner and lacks the the control.  So… i figured with FXG the new standard for Adobe, I’d look at how hard it would be to create a custom FXG class.

Well, not too hard at all.  I started by looking at the Rect class in Flex, and then had to hunt around for simulate Cubic Beziers using the curveTo method (Thanks Senocular for that answer).

If you want to play around with it (requires Flash Player 10):Â View Source

Can anyone recommend a Flex Builder/Eclipse plugin for cleaning up and reformatting MXML within a Flex project?Â

John Grden is heading to Vegas for one of his famous two-day Papervision 3D workshops.  Check out the details here [LINK]. It’s going to be held at Alexis Park. Its walking distance from the Hard Rock. You can walk to the strip or take one of the free shuttles from the Hard Rock to the strip.  It’s going to be a blast. Maybe John will have us building a 3d casino or something?Â

Please join us for a very special Las Vegas user group and Vegas Flex joint meeting at New Horizons (map) 7:00 PM Thursday January 24th, where our presenter will be Ryan Stewart, Adobe’s Rich Internet Application Evangelist. Our topics will be the features of the upcoming releases of Flex 3 and Adobe AIR. Everyone is welcome! Please bring friends and coworkers who might be working with (or interested in working with) Adobe technologies.

Did we mention the schwag giveaway? – A copy of Adobe CS3 Design Premium and a copy of Flex 3 when it is released. Everyone in attendance will be entered into the raffle.