(answers)

I see a hyphen missing on the “round trip” label in Bing! Wait, got another one, they called it “leave” instead of “Depart” and went with all lower case! “in a new window” instead of “in a separate window”, tricky move there Bing, almost snuck that one by me!

I get that a lot of travel searches probably look similar since there are a limited number of controls (dates, airports, etc) but is it really necessary to copy the exact layout down to the orange search button and the grey shading around the compare section!

Bing is already missing important features though like weekend search and flexible dates and that’s more than enough to keep me from switching.

Sorry for inconvenience, i’m updating my feed name to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/anywherestudio

see you over at the new feed!

Not sure when this happened exactly, because just a few days ago when i was trying to watch live coverage on election night and it prompted me to donwnload flip4mac.

A few minutes ago however, I just tried again and this time it asked to confirm the installation of some flash add on called something like “grid enhancement” in the same manner as when you are going through an express install.

Anyway just wanted to let people know, I think it may require flash player 10 but I’m not sure. The video quality is AWESOME though, and I’m streaming over wifi on a pretty weak university library connection. Its really nice not to have to deal with flip4mac either, I couldn’t get it to work on election night and ended up going over to msnbc which did use flash for live streaming.

Holy crap, I can’t believe I went nearly a year between posts! We’ll I’m back baby! I actually have a few drafts from a while ago about some helpful Flex stuff I learned during a recent Flex project that I’ll try to finally publish. Hopefully it’s still relevant. More to come soon though, including the long overdue source code posted for the iPhone toggle, and possibly some improvements to the ol’ toggle since I’m back on the blog train and the iPhone is big news again with the 3G release in the US today.

So after playing with my buddies iPhone the other day I realized i had the animation all wrong. So I’ve corrected that and also tried to size it closer to a normal flex button.

My current strategy for implementing the iPhoneToggle is to just use it as a skin of a normal checkbox component using the following code in the flex style declaration:

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<mx:Style>
 
    CheckBox {
    	skin: ClassReference("iPhoneToggleControl");
    }
 
</mx:Style>

Seems to be a decent approach and it has some advantages, but I’d like to be able to allow for changing colors and on/off labels through the component properties. So if I can figure out how to just extend the checkbox while using the skins exported from flash I would switch to that.

Here is my latest progress.

edit: i’ve added an over state with some texture on the switch button. for some reason i can’t get it to not show up for the selectedUp state.

edit: i just added transparent icon to substitute for the icon to get rid of it, not great looking code.

edit: source now available on the downloads page

So I read up on the Adobe Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 and exported my first custom component to Flex. I was pretty stoked to get the transition part of it working although im not sure why, I guess something about going back to the good ole timeline in flash. So now I’ve got the style and the transitions coming along, but still lots of more work to be done until it’s a bonified component. One thing I definitely want to try and get working is to be able to drag the switch from on to off instead of just clicking.

Somehow I have managed to call this component at least 4 different names in the span of two blog posts, so I’m going to try and refer to it as the iPhone Toggle Control or maybe just iPhoneToggle from here on out.

latest progress:

Just saw this post: iPhone Toggle Switch - a great new control over Ryan Guill’s blog about developing a Flex Toggle Component as seen in the iPhone settings screens. I think it’s a sweet idea and I could definitely see uses for it in different flex projects.

I’ve been reading up on some articles by Peter Ent developing Flex components from scratch tonight and my hope is to eventually implement some of the things Ryan was scheming up like different background colors, custom labels, and transitions and make this component happen.

In the mean time I did a quick skin of the checkbox component with some graphics i cropped from the web, so here it is iPhoneToggleSwitch v 0.1:

Well this blog is somewhat overdue, so I decided to do it up right with a superbadass widget ready theme, a feedburner account, and  lots of sweet plugins. I even customized the wordpress admin panel with the Tiger admin panel

The blog is going to be primarily about rich internet application development, mostly Adobe Flex, with some golf ramblings, probably some Apple related opinions and maybe even a good joke or two.

I’ve been working with flash for about 5 years and in the last year I’ve switched over to Adobe Flex. For the last six months or so I’ve spent most of my free time working on a personal venture built with Flex and I will provide more details and news once it launches.

I’m all about open source code and if I produce something worthwhile I’ll try to post the source here for all to grab. Some hardcore flash/xml fans might have heard of me for this example code I posted over at sephiroth.it on how to homebrew a flash/xml search engine http://www.sephiroth.it/file_detail.php?id=13 , and another example on using amfphp http://www.sephiroth.it/file_detail.php?id=142 . To get things started I’ll repost them in my downloads section as well. I’ve got a few ideas for some new flex code to post here I’ll try to get up soon.

I’ve been following the flash world for a while now and pop up once in a while in blog comments and forums like ultrashock. I’m looking forward to establishing more of a presence with the blog and hopefully produce something useful!