flex

Regular readers of my site have probably noticed that I have been an inactive blogger over the past couple of months. There’s a very good reason for this. Since starting my own consultancy, I have been very busy! I think I may actually be working for the first time in my life – and having a helluva time doing it. What’s been keeping me so busy? FLEX! For the past four months I have had my head down in Flex Builder creating a revolutionary RIA (beta coming next month).

It’s my year anniversary working with Flex (save a two month stint with Ruby on Rails) and in that year I’ve learned a great deal. Most of my days are spent writing ActionScript 3 components and I must admit that I think I’m getting very good at it. So to ‘prove’ it and to share with the Flex community, I am offering my first Flex component for download!

ThumbBrowser is a knock off of a new widget found in iPhoto ’08. It is a small component that will collect all of your image thumnails into one component. When you move your mouse across the component, you get previews of all the thumbs in collection. You can view a demo here and download the source here.

Some quick notes:

• The component’s dataProvider property only accepts an array of URL’s/paths to images (I hope to add XMLList soon)
• You can set 4 styles: borderColor, borderThickness, cornerRadius, and backgroundColor
• Component dispatches only a click event. I would like to add a progress and complete event in the next release
• The full size image is downloaded, but the image is scaled so only a small representation of the images actually stays in memory (I think this is true, please correct me if I am wrong)
• I will add ASDoc style comments over the next few days, and hope to submit it to FlexLib.
• Although there is no open-source license attached to the component, please feel free to use is it as you please.
• ThumbBrowser might make a better Adobe AIR component, as loading a large collection of images over the web could take a while.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the component, and please send suggestions as to how I might be able to make ThumbBrowser better!

Enjoy!

Flex 2.0 comes with a great set of essential components for building RIA’s, but if you have the craving for more top quality components, check out flexlib.  It is an excellent open-source component library at Google Code, that contains quite a few components that could be useful in your next Flex RIA.  As you build more and more Rich Internet Applications you might find, like I admittedly did, that having access to more components could in essence expand your palate and consequently the range of things you can do with Flex. This is a terrific, comprehensive repository they have over on Google code so if you are a Flex developer you  have to take a look at.