Item renderers are commonly used in flex applications to extend the behavior and appearance of the list controls. These are quite simple and intuitive to implement, and work very well. I have found however, that in some more complex cases there is a need for interaction between the item renderer, and the component which contains the datagrid.
Getting a reference to the DataGrid component from within an item renderer is quite easy. In this case we use the owner property of the item renderer, rather than the parent property we might expect to use, and this will give us a reference to the DataGrid component.
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Just this week Parallel Imported became the first company in New Zealand to officially sell the Apple iPhone. The price of the phone is very cheap compared to what people had been expecting and this makes it a very tempting offer for a technophile like myself.
My current phone is an I-Mate K-Jam, which is a nice phone. It’s clear to me having used it for a while now however, that the people who designed this device crammed a lot of features in (WiFi, sliding keyboard, camera) but skimped on important things such as a processor powerful enough to run it all, and fixing bugs in the software.
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In Adobe Flex it is easy to make a event bubble, which means that if a DisplayObject dispatches an event, the event will be re-dispatched by each parent of the DisplayObject until it reaches the root of the application.
This behavior is really useful. One common function that I use this behavior for is handling the navigation within my applications. I attach an event listener to the singleton application instance (Application.application) for navigation events, and handle them within the main application class. This means that any control, anywhere in the application, can easily navigate to any other part of the application through one line of code ( dispatchEvent( new NavivationEvent(….) ).
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I finally got around to trying Windows Live Writer after hearing about it on the Windows Weekly podcast, and my first impression is that this is a fantastic product.
To set it up, all I had to do was tell it the URL of my blogs homepage and my username and password, and it was able to figure out what blogging software I was using, and how to interface with it. By far the best feature of this software however, is that it automatically downloaded the style sheet from my blog and applies the styles within the post editor making it true WYSIWYG! It even downloads your last 5 posts as well, so you can preview your post in context.
This post was written in Live Writer, and I think a lot of my future ones will be too. This is an example of something that would work really well as an AIR application.
Wakoopa is a site which allows you to track which software you use and see which ones you use most over time. It’s a well put together tool which confirms what you would expect about my software usage considering that I’m a Flex developer. That is, that I use Flexbuilder most followed by my browser.
The cool thing about Wakoopa is that once you have an account, anyone else can view it and see what you’re up to, which adds a nice social element. For anyone who wants to know, you can check out my full profile here. Don’t tell my boss how much time I spend just surfing the internet though ok 
This might have been around for a while, but I only learnt about it today, and I think it’s amazingly cool!
For a while now Google has had an equivalent to Google Earth called Google Moon. Now they have added ‘Street View’ to Google Moon showing images, panoramas and videos from the moon landings. This is now a fantastic resource for the moon landing space missions, with lots of interesting information about the crews and how the missions progressed etc.
When I was playing with this today, I couldn’t help think that this is a perfect example of how web applications have amazing potential as educational resources.
Update 20/11/07: Due to the large amount of interst in this post, I’ve had to replace the example with a shorter video. I found another cool one though.
Here’s the final version of my BufferingVideoDisplay component. I mentioned that I was playing around with this a while ago in a previous post but got stuck trying to get the bitrate of the loading FLV file. It turns out that there isn’t a way to get the bitrate of a FLV from within flex (not that I could find at least), so I approximate it by dividing the size of the video file by its duration.
Click on the image to view the application. Right click on the application to view the source.
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It was my birthday on Wednesday which was fun
Sarah, my beautiful better half made me a birthday cake which was a mountain of cookies. Seriously, a mountain of cookies!!! *swoon* She’s a keeper
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Here’s something I found on Digg this morning which looked pretty cool. This is a map showing the locations of my blog visitors in real time. The map is done by maps.amung.us, and is a little flash application which is very light weight, and automatically refreshes itself without refreshing the whole page.
I find things like this really interesting. It’s a pitty that I don’t get enough visitors to make this really impressive 
Item renderers are commonly used in flex applications to extend the behavior and appearance of the list controls. These are quite simple and intuitive to implement, and work very well. I have found however, that in some more complex cases there is a need for interaction between the item renderer, and the component which contains the datagrid.