In case you want to add custom menu items to the default menu item of a Flex app, here is a small snippet to get you started:
Archive for April, 2008
UML – Design by picture
Most professional software designer use or at least know UML, the unified modelling language. By means of a formal visual language, software designer describe software systems. Having it roots around 1994 at Rational Software Corporation, UML finally became 2005 an ISO/IEC standard. Today, UML 2.x is able to describe functional, structural and dynamic system properties.
In case you’d like to learn how to visualize data using Flex or AIR, check this video and see how easy it is to visualize data using DataGrid, AdvandedDataGrid and a CoverFlow component of Doug McCune.
Actually, the author of the video uses one single data source and visualized it using different data-driven components.
Duration: 11 minutes.
Just a short note, that you might wish to attend the Adobe onAIR Tour Europe, 04.06.2008 in Berlin.
This event focusses on developing with AIR. Speakers like Mike Chambers give insight into various aspects of AIR. E.g., at 11:30 Kevin Hoyt gives a hands-on talk on how to create a first application using AIR-SDK.
Let’s mention this german talk: Benjamin Dobler speaks about his RIA solution for parleys.com, a JAVA e-learning platform. His solution comes in two fashions, Flex and AIR. Benjamin enabled the Flex browser part and the AIR ‘client’ part to talk to each other. Thus, the Flex part adopts its UI and forwards certain data to the AIR part to be processed later on.
Let’s meet in Berlin!
Just a short note, that I’m going to implement a Flex interface for http://www.iTodo.de/ shortly.
Right now, iTodo is made of PHP, MySQL and the very nice xAjax library, which makes PHP-functions available through client-side JavaScript code.
While the web-interface is OK, I’d like to know, if more people are going to register with iTodo, if I provide an AIR solution.
Besides the full features Flex debugger, the trace() method is a useful way to inspect variables during debugging a Flex application: If you start a Flex application in Debug mode, trace() prints the value of the passed expression to consol.
Another way is to register a variable for permanent traceing. This way, the variable gets traced, each time it changes its value.
Based on the following TATRace component, you request tracing of a variable using a small piece of MXML. Suppose you’d like to trace a variable ‘traceableVariable’, then you just add [Bindable] in the line just before the declaration of the variable. This enables the variable to be referenced as ‘{traceableVariable}’.
Mark a variable as traceable
To trace each change of traceableVariable, add this element in your main MXML file
As always, when I give a new programming system or language a try, I implement a small project.
The project has to be small, to not waste too much time. And the project has to be non-trivial, to really figure out the potentials of the langage and runtime.
In case of Flex, I started to implement a client-side DB-viewer.
Although I know about flex for some time, I seriously evaluated Adobe’s Flex 3 software environment roughly 3 weeks ago. And, well, I fall in love. Flex 3 is definitely the most impressive web solution I’ve seen for quote some time now.

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