This post is a brief tutorial on how to use the Animated Gif Loader component that I have developed for Adobe Flex. The component is a commercial component available for purchase. You can try the component out before you buy it, however, by downloading the demo version.

Loading a gif from a URL
Using this component is as easy as using the or components that come with the Flex Framework. All you have to do is add a line to your MXML code and specify the source attribute of the component. This tells the component which file (or embedded asset, more on that later) to load.

Here’s an example line of MXML that would get inserted into your Flex app:

That’s all it takes to get a simple animated gif playing in your Flex app. And what’s sweet is that the component works exactly like the SWFLoader component, so you get access to every method and property that you would from SWFLoader (such as scaleContent and maintainAspectRatio).

Embedded assets
The component also works with embedded assets in your SWF. See this quickstart article about embedding assets using Flex. Just like you can embed still images into your Flex app and reference the embedded file, you can do the same thing with animated GIFs.

The caveat is that you must specify the mime-type of the asset as “application/octet-stream”. So the tag to load an animated GIF as an embedded asset would be like this:

or if you’re using a
P.S. Hey Brendan, how about those awesome waving flags?