Dan McAdams has posted a quick guide to help people get up and running with the CoverFlow Flex component SWC file. This component has generated a lot of interest, which is great, but it also means that there are a lot of people who are brand new to Flex (and hence don’t know how to use SWC files or how to set up Flex projects) trying to use the component. My posts about coverflow have gotten quite a few comments from people who don’t know how to get the examples I posted working, or can’t figure out how to use the coverflow library in their own applications. Thus far I haven’t spent the time to go through a detailed step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to use a SWC library in your own projects (although google really does do wonders people…).

So thanks Dan! If anyone is having trouble with getting the coverflow library to work make sure to check out Dan’s screenshots and his tips.

Here are a few links to the Flex documentation that explain SWC files and how to use them in your projects:

• Using SWC files in your projects
• About SWC files

So a bunch of people have been posting the results of the surveys from their 360|Flex sessions. I’ve wavered on this a tiny bit, I’m just a little embarrassed, both because of the positive feedback (*blushes*), but also because I offended some people in the session. So off the bat I want to say to anyone who was actually offended by anything said in my session: I’m sorry. I gave the session the way I talk in normal life, and in normal life I guess I have a dirty mouth.

Here are the full survey results from my session.
If you weren’t at 360Flex, check out the stuff I presented.

The good stuff
Overall the comments were very positive. There were 45 responses, with an overall average rating of 4.5 (which I’m hoping is out of 5, not 10 ). 80% of people said that the session was what they expected, 80% said the slides were useful and 80% said the session was informative. So here are some of the positive responses (aww, shucks…).

The speaker had a good outline and followed it well, while also allowing community/group input.

Doug was AWESOME and funny. Loved it!

In typical fashion, Doug had a great presentation with a lot of good information. Doug is an inspiration to the whole community.

Doug brought to light components that we all can make use of in our apps – and some that are just fun. Very helpful.

The bad(ish) stuff
These are the only negative comments I received. The first one is about the discussion near the end feeling unorganized. I understand that sentiment, I felt rushed near the end when I was running out of time a bit. I love having good discussions with the audience, but I probably should have left more time devoted to that, and maybe even planned for that in my outline to make sure I had plenty of time to wrap up in a more organized way. The other three comments here are about my language. The last one’s not really that negative a comment, but the middle two sound like the writers were fairly offended.

The presentation could have been a bit more structured, as it felt like the discussion veered away from original intentions near the end of the presentation.

It caught me off guard how much the speaker cursed.

I don’t know what to say. It’s probably not a good idea to try to see how the sign language interpreters do cursed signs. That would make the deaf person uncomfortable.

This session was great for information and mentality about developing in the flex world. Doug is a little unprofessional as a developer it doesn’t bother me that much and I would definitely hear him present again because I respect his knowledge and talents but the language is a little distracting.

The funny comments
And then a lot of the comments were pretty funny. I’ve cherry picked a few choice ones here for your amusement.

I appreciate his frank, unexcessively vulgar language

jiggly moving fun

Always a great time. Never seen so many curse words done in sign, damn funny.

Fucking-A

Okay, I am just chiming in that I really wanted to go to Doug McCune’s seminar but knowing that I lack experience with OOP and want to develop that further I went to that one instead. Can’t we put Doug McCune against sucky, uninteresting topics instead. *lol*

It’s “fucking” Doug McCune

The language issue
So let’s get this out in the open: I say fuck and shit a lot. Sometimes this comes through on my blog, but even more so when I actually speak. Given the session feedback I think a lot of people find my use of language refreshing and funny (what am I? a clown?). I like to think my presentations are informal, we all just get to hang out and talk about cool stuff, so since it’s just like chilling with friends I don’t censor my language. A lot of the comments in the feedback referenced my use of language in a positive way and said how “fun” and “hilarious” the session was. I like to think we had a good time and it wasn’t dry or boring.

That said, there were obviously a few people at least who were offended and uncomfortable. So in the future I may tone it down a bit, I certainly don’t want people walking out of my presentations upset. I’m sincere when I say I apologize if you were offended.

Maybe next time I’ll start by showing a clip of Goodfellas or Casino at the beginning, then whatever I say will be tame in comparison. Or maybe I should wear one of these on my chest:

At my next session I’ll be checking IDs at the door. If you’re under 17 you have to be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

So thanks to everyone who came to my session! And super double thanks to the 45 of you who gave feedback, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside (well, most of it anyway).

P.S. To Andrew: yeah, your comment got to me Sorry I posted the survey results with your name still in there, if you got a problem with that send me an email (or better yet send Tom and John and email).

A new Flex container has been added to FlexLib, called the WindowShade. This container shows a header button above or below the content of the container. Clicking the header button opens or closes the panel. This lets you easily create expandable panels in your Flex applications. A single WindowShade container can be used on its own, or you can place a few of them in a VBox to make something similar to an Accordion, except you can have multiple children open at once (similar to Peter Ent’s stack components).

The component was contributed by Dave Glasser, of iDashboards. I initially went back and forth with Dave about the component. At first I thought this was really trying to be an accordion component with multiple open children, in which case I figured if we were going to do that component we should do it right (maybe extend Accordion). But I’ve since been won over to the usefulness of a single WindowShade container, and in my latest project I even used it – 3 times So I worked with Dave and we reworked the component a bit, and now I think it’s pretty nifty.

Here’s an example that uses LinkButtons for the headers. You can use any Button control (ie Button, LinkButton, CanvasButton).

As a side note, I also contributed a fix from Troy Gilbert that lets you use a CanvasButton in a Repeater. Thanks Troy!

James Ward already had a little writeup about Mint.com using Flex for some of their spending habit charting stuff, but what’s even cooler to me is that they’re using a few FlexLib components on the site. I got an email from Jason Putorti, a Flex dev with Mint, letting me know that he’s using the DraggableSlider component, and I took a look and also saw that they’re using the ScrollableArrowMenu. Here’s a screenshot of both the components in use:

The menu showing the list of cities there is the ScrollableArrowMenu and above that there’s the DraggableSlider that lets you select the date range you’re using for the chart. Sweet!

Was not a Flex blog at all. It was John Nack’s blog. John Nack is a Photoshop dude at Adobe. He posts frequently on tons of design topics. Sometimes he blogs about Flash experiments, sometimes typography, photography, etc etc. I’ve come across some of the most inspirational stuff by reading his blog. John posts a lot about cool data visualization stuff, which is incredibly applicable to the Flex/Flash world. His typical post includes a half dozen or so links to cool shit. I’ve never been disappointed by clicking through any of the links he posts.

I read a ton of Flex/Flash blogs. If you write about Flex and you’re on MXNA, I read your blog. But sometimes you have to get out of the Flex bubble to get your ideas. Sometimes we get too insulated, and forget that there’s a world outside of Flex. On one level or another we’re all designers and artists when it comes to making applications. Sometimes the most influential ideas come from photographs or typeface experiments and not ActionScript code samples.

In this same vein I should really start reading some of the Microsoft blogs out there. At the moment almost all the blogs I read regularly are in the Adobe sphere of influence. But that means I miss the cool shit from the other camp. Unfortunately I just don’t have the background software knowledge to make most of the MS posts interesting. If someone wanted to put together a monthly collection of MS-related blog posts that apply to RIA design or that would be interesting to Flex devs, I’d read

Anyway, thank you John for consistently posting cool shit.

So Tom and John, the guys putting on the 360|Flex conference in Atlanta in February, asked me to make a logo/badge for the conference. The conference is in Atlanta, so they wanted me to do some kind of design like a peach. But if the peach doesn’t satisfy your inner bling bling pimp, here’s a real ATL badge.

Cha-ching! I’m getting this on a t-shirt and I’m getting a bedazzler and putting rhinestones all over it. It’s gonna be hot.

If you want to use this badge on your blog or wherever, you can download a zip file here that contains the badge in various sizes. Here’s a version at 150px wide that might be good for a blog sidebar.

So I was in the SF Museum of Modern Art this afternoon and I was browsing the exhibit of work by Joseph Cornell. I was looking at a piece and suddenly realized that this looked just like the awesome website of Red Interactive.

A screenshot of the Red Interactive website:

The Joseph Cornell piece:

(Check out this particular piece or more of Cornell’s work.)

So I don’t know if the website was influenced by the artwork of Cornell or not, but it certainly has that look. And I think this is awesome. I want to be clear that I am not in any way suggesting that this is a bad thing. I’m not trying to call anyone out, I’m trying to applaud the creative use of artistic techniques. I think it’s fantastic to take influences from the art world and incorporate them into the web world. If it’s just a coincidence I think that’s awesome too.

How big of a dork am I that when I’m walking around an art museum I see websites?

Let me know what you think.

Here are a few small video clips from my 360Flex presentation. The first is my favorite moment in the presentation when I get applause for saying “God damnit, make that protected.” And the second clip is 7 minutes of the presentation where I talk about monkey patching (or “underriding”) the core Flex framework classes. I thought this was one of the cooler parts of the talk, so I decided to post the video of that section. You can get the full video (1 hour 20 minutes) of the presentation here.

The videos are licensed under Creative Commons license, so I’m supposed to do some attribution thing. They were filmed at the 360|Flex conference that was put on by John and Tom, video work done by Bryan Zug. You can get all the videos here. Cool?

Not sure if I’m the only programmer who does this, but I often use my facial hair as a visual indicator of how long I’ve been working on a project. I typically employ this technique on short projects with a lot to accomplish and little time to do it in. For example, yesterday I finished a project that was originally scheduled for about 3 full weeks. After week one we figured out that the deadline was 2 days before we thought, so we lost 2 days off the last 2 weeks, which is a fairly substantial portion of time on such a small timeframe (and don’t forget to add in labor day weekend festivities). So the shaving stopped (showering continued on a sporadic basis). Honestly, when you’re in a time crunch there simply aren’t enough seconds in the day to shave. And I like being able to look in the mirror and have a visual representation of the work I’ve been doing. An added benefit is the refreshing feeling that comes after work is done and the scruff is removed. Ahhhh, vacation time…

P.S. Yes, that’s just under two weeks of hair growth, my facial hair is pathetic, I can’t grow a real beard. You can stop making fun of me now.
P.P.S. I swear I’m going to get back to Flex related posts soon. There’s gonna be a bunch of flexlib updates coming. w00t

[UPDATE] Tink and Ben Stucki posted WAY better examples than my own. I had to share. If you’ve got anything better post a link in the comments.

Ben Stucki

Tink