flex

Excellent Flex tutorial from Adobe Platform evangelist Miti Pricope on how to combine a Flex application running in Flash Player with PayPal Express Checkout. More than a tutorial, it’s a good little object lesson on things to consider in the planning stages of creating an app, ie security, appropriate architectural solutions and planning the UI. I’ve been looking to post more pointers and tutorials like this which address the trend toward developers making money out of their skills by offering applications for e-commerce sites, especially small-scale ones often run by individuals who need cheap solutions that are easy to implement.

Here’s a Flex tip on changing default flex background colors:
When you are using a different color background to the default one in Flex, there can be a slight delay when resizing the window for the new background color to catch up. Before it catches up, the old default color is displayed. To fix this simply go into your project properties and the into the Flex compiler settings and in the ‘Additional Compiler Arguments’ add the following line:

-default-background-color #COLOR

Swapping COLOR for the code of your color. I would encourage anyone who has Flex tips no matter how obscure to let me know in the comments or by visiting the “write for us” tab in the navigation bar above.